SAA recently announced that its High School Principal, Mrs. Ellenor Paul-O’Neil, decided to resign her position effective July 30, 2021, due to “family responsibilities.” We have reproduced below Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s message to SAA Staff. Eyes On SAA acknowledges Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s service and leadership at SAA and sincerely wishes her and her family all health, happiness, success, and God’s blessings.
We will not jump to conclusions about what “resigning for family responsibilities” really means in this situation, but that reason sounds very familiar to us and is perhaps the most frequently cited explanation for the disproportionately high rate of disappearing personnel at SAA both historically and in the recent past. But ask anyone in SDA conference, union, or division education departments for the comparative empirical data on faculty and staff turnover and you will learn how much of a revolving door SAA has been in recent history. This is not normal, folks - except for us in the SAA community where it’s just another summer. For this seasonal turnover we thank SAA’s Secret Executive School Board, the one unchanging and common denominator over the past generation or so at this institution.
So, did Mrs. Paul-O’Neil need to leave for “greater unity within the administrative team” too, the reason given to Judie Rosa? Or was Mrs. Paul-O’Neil as disturbed as the “144,000” who signed the Judie Rosa Petition, read the writing on the wall and decided to leave what many consider the clown show at SAA under the current head principal and Secret School Board? Or did she prefer to resign rather than answer parents’ questions at the SAA Constituency Meeting back in June (and subsequently) about the underhanded implementation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) (attributed to Mrs. Paul-O'Neil by multiple parents) in the high school? Whatever the reasons, add yet one more highly visible and important administrative figure to the disproportionately long list of administrators, teachers, and counselors leaving SAA in the past few months.
We note that this development is not totally surprising considering Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s absence from SAA for a large porton of the 2021 spring semester due to family medical leave. See our blog post of May 19th here: SAA Administration Operating at 1/3 Capacity? We have heard from a source that this leave request was legitimate due to the illness of an immediate relative, for which we have the greatest sympathy and pray for their healing.
While Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s reasons for taking FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) were her own personal business, we noted in our May 19th blog post that SAA apparently did not give any official notice to high school students or their parents that their principal was not on duty during at least the latter part of the school year. Shouldn’t school administration have promptly communicated this to the school community? Yes of course they should have, but they did not - and for what we conclude were institutional image and optics (the harder they try to pose, the worse the resulting image develops). You may remember that Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s medical absence coincided with the unexplained absence of former Elementary Principal Judie Rosa, about whom SAA also failed to effectively (i.e. accurately, honestly, or transparently) communicate for 35 days - in the midst of the 4th quarter of classes. SAA was not in a rush to tell its community that there was only 1 administrator left in the building to “watch the store”, not to mention the one with the least tenure, experience, face-recognition, and familiarity with families at the school.
In contrast to keeping Mrs. Paul-O’Neil’s school-year medical leave hush-hush, and keeping us all in the dark about Judie Rosa’s absence, and failing to mention one word to us about the SAA Constituency Meeting, and heaven knows what more information we deserve to know but have no clue about, we observe this time around that SAA Head Principal Bowerman did actually notify the school community promptly. Read her message here: Thank you, Mrs. Bowerman.
Eyes On SAA would not be true to its founding principles if we did not raise the following questions regarding Mrs. Paul-O’Neil that some of our readers had posed prior to her resignation:
Did you direct the Freshman English teacher, Mrs. Laura Steinert, to inconspicuously use Critical Race Theory (CRT) contained in some 50 pages of So You Want to Talk About Race? authored by Ijeoma Oluo?
Is it true that in a private video-conference you told certain parents concerned about critical race theory (CRT) being used in the high school that it would “absolutely not” pause or stop?
In that private video-conference did you berate and lambast certain parents as “racist” on account of their “white” skin color and their concern over CRT?
Did you tell those concerned parents that if they did not like this CRT material that they could leave the school?
Did Mrs. Bowerman remain silent and fail to intervene as you spoke so disrespectfully and abusively to these parents during this private video-conference?
Were you ever questioned by the Chesapeake Conference about such behavior, and did you admit to it or deny it?
Does the high school intend to continue implementing CRT in its curriculum?
What did you mean at the high school graduation when you admonished the graduates to “stay woke”?
To Mrs. Ellenor Paul-O’Neil: Please feel free to tell us your side of the story here at Eyes On SAA. We will publish your unedited response on this Blog without first asking permission of Head Principal Bowerman, Secret Board Chair Noble, Chesapeake Conference Education Superintendent Walker, or anyone else you used to answer to in the chain of command at SAA. We are asking you directly because we do our best to reliably source our blog posts; not gaslight our readers with preening, polished, corporate dodge-ball evasive messages like the ones coming from the school power-players. Again, Eyes On SAA acknowledges your service to SAA and we sincerely wish you and your family all health, happiness, success, and God’s blessings.
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