It is our pleasure to welcome you, Heath Morrison, to our wonderful community.

Now that your salary as new superintendent of schools has been negotiated, it is time to talk about your benefits package, which we think you will find is superior.

For the first nine to 12 months of your employment, everyone in town will be gracious and fawning. We will listen to your ideas with eyes asparkle and jaws a-droop. We will tell you again and again how thrilled we are to have a smart cookie like you.

We will find magic money in the budget to carry out your clever initiatives. We will compare your leadership abilities to those of Gandhi. We will surprise you with ice cream on Fridays.

At the 13-month mark, we will recognize you’re getting weary of vast adoration. We will then start a program we call “gracious wondering.” For a time, not exceeding two years, we will wonder about the progress our school system is making.

In the latter part of this phase, we will hold mock tribunals and invite you to testify about why things are the way they are. Our former superintendents have all found this to be a time of introspection and personal growth.

This will be facilitated by our supportive and caring school board. You have met them by now and know what a wise and harmonious group they are.

At the four-year mark, you will become fully vested in the executive incentive package called “unrelenting demonization.” Your annual performance review will be a glorious spectacle of pursed lips, sour faces and slowly shaken heads.

Around town, your name will be synonymous with epic fail. Parents and teachers will be united in the notion that Something Must Be Done.

In year five, we will celebrate the nadir of your career. You will be considered personally responsible for unsatisfactory test scores (no matter what they are, they will be unsatisfactory), every breach of classroom discipline and whatever clunkers are drafted by the Bobcats.

At this juncture, you will be hired by another district and slink out of town. For both of us, the cycle will begin anew.

It will, in short, be just like the reign of any schools superintendent anywhere.

We cannot tell you how excited we are to have you aboard. We have felt an emotional void since our last superintendent mysteriously vanished.

We look forward to you providing a service to our community that we think you’ll find is absolutely critical.