Positive changes may come out of this fiasco, but Grant teachers still don't like being the poster children for them. Spin control includes a press conference planned by the school's collaborative decision-making committee to show what's right with Grant.
"The vast majority of our students feel that school is a safe place to be, but that's not the way it came across on Channel 7," Voit says. "We feel Mr. Kovaleski wasn't interested in really providing an accurate depiction of what life is like here."
Brett Amole
Stephen Macartney (left) and Mason Voit teach at Grant Middle School.
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Paper work: Last year's joint operating agreement allowed the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News to merge their business divisions, and the papers did so energetically, slashing their workforces via early-retirement offers, buyouts and attrition. Ever since, I've been hearing anecdotal narratives about problems involving subscriptions and delivery, some of which have been as tangled as any Robert Ludlum novel. But the tale that hit closest to home was the one that took place at my home.
Here's the Reader's Digest version -- and believe me, it's considerably shorter than the real thing.
In November, my wife paid the annual rate to retain our subscription to the Post. Around the same time, she had one of her associates at the school where she works do the same in order to continue getting the News. But in early December, newspapers stopped being delivered to the school -- and when an inquiry was made, the school's envoy was told that no payment had been received, resulting in the subscription's termination. Furthermore, the paper's employee said the school would have to fax a copy of a cancelled check as proof of the earlier payment before the News would start arriving again. The school did so at its own expense.
Next, we received notice that our home subscription had lapsed, and when my wife called to find out what was going on, she was told that -- surprise! -- no payment had been received, and delivery would be snuffed unless we faxed a copy of our cancelled check. My wife did so, then called a couple of weeks later to find out if all was well. She was told that everything had been sorted out at both our home and her school, whose original check had accidentally been shipped to the advertising department. Delivery at the school was supposed to pick up again the first week of January.
Except it didn't -- and the Post stopped coming to our home, too. To make matters worse, my wife was told that the only way to put things right would be to re-fax copies of both checks, since the previous faxes had apparently vanished into the system, never to be seen again. She did so under protest, and then was told after several hours and numerous irritating phone calls that both situations had finally been fixed.
How isolated are these incidents? Very, insists Jim Nolan, spokesman for the Denver Newspaper Agency. "As you know, we were operating off of two separate circulation billing systems -- one for the Post and one for the News," he says. "We're in the process even now of continuing to blend those systems together, and that's a complex proposition. In addition, the process requires a fair amount of manual intervention, and when instances are pointed out or we find them on our own, we're doing our best to fix them. But as a percentage of all the transactions we engage in every day, the amount of errors are few and far between."
That would be a lot more reassuring if, a few weeks back, I hadn't gotten a phone call telling me that our subscription was about to expire because no payment had been received.
