By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Some prestigious-sounding jobs aren’t quite as fun as they sound.

Being the White House Press Secretary during a president’s second term, for instance.

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Or managing the Chicago Cubs.

Serving as the head of Florida’s second-largest school district falls into this category, too.

Case in point: An arbitrator recently ruled that Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie has no power to alter his district’s school day schedule without consent from the local teachers union, reports the Miami Herald.

The arbitrator’s ruling overturns Runcie’s decision last summer to place all of Broward’s 29 high schools on a seven-period class schedule. A dozen of those schools had been using a block schedule, which consists of four 90-minute classes per semester, the Herald reports.

Runcie made the switch to seven-period schedules in order to create scheduling flexibility and lower class sizes – which are a matter of financial life or death for Florida school districts.

In 2002, Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment that sets strict class sizes limits on state schools and imposes stiff penalties on those that fail to meet them.

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And that’s exactly what’s happened to Broward County schools. The chronically cash-starved district had to pay $8.5 million in penalties to the state for violating class size requirements during the 2011-12 school year, reports Examiner.com.

Muncie was determined not to waste precious financial resources like that again, and decided that a seven-period class schedule for high school students would help solve the problem – which it did.

More than 87 percent of Broward’s classes met the state requirements in the recently completed school year, the Herald reports.

But now that the seven-period schedule has been repealed, many schools will return to a block schedule.

The return to block scheduling might result higher class sizes and more state penalties, but the local teachers union doesn’t care. Union members prefer that schedule because it doesn’t require as much work as a seven-class schedule does.

But don’t expect the Broward Teachers Union to say that aloud. The union’s official position is that teachers must be allowed to “to have a say in which schedules are the best for students.”

Uh huh.

Regardless, the fact remains that union leaders – not the superintendent – get to make important decisions about school operations.

Between dealing with a powerful (and uncooperative) teachers union and heavy-handed state mandates, it can’t be a whole lot of fun serving as superintendent of Broward County schools.

We’re not sure if Runcie has any interest in baseball, but he may want to see if the Cubs are hiring. They may lose a lot of games, but a least their manager actually gets to call the shots.