So Cobb school Superintendent Fred Sanderson is fed up with his job and may quit early. Considering the number of Cobb County residents who are fed up with the job he is doing, I guess it is understandable. The difference is, we have been fed up for a long time now.

When Sanderson was first hired, he had a chance to attain a sort of greatness. Coming in on the heels of the despised Superintendent Joe Redden, he was looked upon as a healer and a unifying force.

This writer, severely critical of Redden, welcomed Sanderson's hiring and so stated, in this newspaper, enumerating several goals the new superintendent had set, and expressing confidence that he would attain them.

Intimating "all goods things would come to we who had waited" turned out to be one of my more miserable failures at prognostication.

One of the legacies of Redden was the Carver Governance Model, which puts attainment of the end, paramount to everything, including accountability.

While being tutored by John Carver, the plan's author, (at the staggering sum of $1,000 per hour), Redden, with no opposition, took total control of the school district and ran it like a dictatorship. Allegedly, that crackpot scheme went when Redden left.

Don't you believe it. The Carver Governance Plan is alive and well, if not in name, certainly in practice, and comfortably ensconced in the Cobb County School System.

With the power it brought, it corrupted what could have been a great healing power. Access by the public to the superintendent's office and even by elected members of the board has continued to diminish, almost to the point of extinction. It has been observed, "It's like talking to a wall."

An air of fear and intimidation appears to permeate the school system. Those who dare to speak out about problems, or disagree with Freddie's Force, are summarily dealt with harshly and callously.

We, the voters, did not do our jobs either. Instead of strong elected officials, we handed Sanderson a board lacking the courage to bring the superintendent's office back under its control. We elected lap dogs, when the job clearly called for attack dogs. The result is that Sanderson will be leaving the job in disgrace, and leaving the Cobb School District in virtual shambles.

Morale is at what is probably an all-time low. We just finished with massive layoffs of teachers and others. As it turns out, the layoff was twice the size it should have been. They fired a thousand people one week and rehired more than half of them the next week.

Class sizes are unmanageable. School children, it has been reported, are sitting on the floors of classrooms because class sizes are far too large for the facilities. Many parents are up in arms over this situation and are letting Sanderson know, in writing, that he had better get the problem resolved at once.

The Transportation Department has recently been the scene of employee unrest and grand jury investigations. Earlier, the discontinuance of an inordinately large number of bus routes caused turmoil, not only because it was kept a secret until the last possible minute with no public input being solicited, but because it subjected young children to unnecessary peril due to the areas in which they were forced to walk, in the dark morning hours.

With the help of his Feckless Five robots on the school board, he has elevated secrecy and backdoor shenanigans to a new height, even to the point of keeping the members of the school board in the dark, causing them no end of embarrassment. But, since they aided and abetted him in doing it to the stakeholders, it is difficult to muster any sympathy for them when he does it to them.

All in all, Sanderson has missed the boat, failing miserably to live up to the promises made and the goals defined in the beginning of his tenure. He sold out a chance to make some real improvement in the quality of education in Cobb County schools. Instead, his term will be remembered for the drama, the comedy and tragedy, all very entertaining, but accomplishing nothing. But, hey, who cares? We have artificial turf in the football stadiums.

Sorry, Fred. That dog just won't hunt. Goodbye, and don't let the door hit you in the backside on your way out.

Pete Borden is a mason in east Cobb.