rimand from the superintendent and was expecting to receive an official
written one.
While awaiting this reprimand, Ms. Valletta became proactive, establish-
ing new procedures for all rentals. These would now be handled out of her
office. Her secretary would serve as contact person and review the rentals.
She and her secretary prepared new rental documents, including a school-
required sign-off sheet in which the representative of the renting organiza-
tion signed that they were made aware of all the regulations, fees, and so
forth. Sometimes, as in the anecdote related later, Ms. Valletta was ordered
to accept a group by a district administrator. In this case, any violation of
regulations would be the district’s responsibility, not the school’s.
Ms. Valletta was ready to respond to the expected reprimand with a
plan to ensure there would be no future problems. By a strange twist of
fate, the expected letter never came.
Ms. Mauve, the assistant principal who had been removed from the
school, was assigned to the superintendent’s office pending the outcome
of a disciplinary hearing. Rather than let her sit in the office doing nothing
and knowing that she had an excellent reputation as an administrator, the
superintendent’s assistant gave her a job: reviewing all the rental agree-
ments coming in from the entire superintendency to prevent the superin-
tendent from signing off on any other questionable rentals.
This was letting a bull loose in the china closet. As part of her job,
Ms. Mauve had access to the records of all other rentals in the super-
intendency. She found many other schools that had rented to the same
organization that had put her in the hot seat. When her hearing came, all
charges were tossed and she was returned to the school. (About two years
later, the regulation was changed to allow religious rites as long as they
took place outside of school hours.) After Ms. Mauve was returned to the
school, she resumed those previous duties that she had performed well,
but not the handling of school rentals.
Admittedly, the next anecdote is a little off the topic of letting people
do their job. However it serves as a follow-up on the space rental story
and also illustrates that while a school must follow every regulation to the
letter, those who write the regulations often ignore them.
One of the renters of school space was the United Federation of Teach-
ers (UFT), the New York City teachers’ union. At the time, their offices
were a few blocks from the school, so it was convenient for them to rent
Let Your People Fly 73