Albuquerque Public Schools Superintendent Beth Everitt.

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The last time I wrote about the shenanigans at Albuquerque Public Schools, I referred to the superintendent as Queen Elizabeth Everitt.

It seemed applicable, given Everitt's aloof, almost superior style that, to her detriment, may very well have hidden good intentions or a heartfelt duty to APS.

One reader, who declared she and her husband were former educators (not teachers — educators), called to say she found the queen reference offensive and inappropriate.

She apparently knew Everitt better than I. Of course.

But most readers, especially those who struggle like me to understand the idiocy of APS hierarchy, got the queen thing well enough.

Everitt's was an icy regime, making news only when some fresh controversy floated to the oily APS surface. Everitt could then be expected to wave it all aside with her genteel petulance and then . . . stone-faced silence, as if none of what troubled the common man troubled her.

But in the postmortem hours after Everitt, queenly or otherwise, announced on July 9 that she will not seek an extension of her contract, school leaders would like the rest of us to know that this is no time to toss confetti.

Instead, they were quick to shower Everitt with so many kisses for the job she has done that it almost seemed we were talking about two different people: one, the dedicated caregiver and, the other, an ice queen out of touch with reality and out of touch with us.

Board member Robert Lucero believes the former is the real Everitt.

"It's the best I've ever seen," he said of her tenure.

"We were blessed to have her," senior board member Mary Lee Martin said (less than a week after she had praised Everitt for not being the type to take the easy way out by quitting). "Her best quality is she makes good decisions for the right reasons."

Say what?

Both Martin and Lucero said they believed Everitt's negative reputation in the community was based largely upon a lack of knowing who she is and what she does.

"Unless you worked with her you didn't know how much she put her heart and soul into this," Lucero said.

No, most of us don't know that heart, that soul. But whose fault is that?

What we knew, what we saw in those rare moments when she deigned to speak publicly was a brittle, weary woman with puppy dog eyes and clenched jaw who cast vapid, inexplicable mandates from her crony-infested Uptown Boulevard ivory tower, then disappeared into the morass of bureaucracy she helped create.

Under Everitt's command, we were forced to slog this spring through grade-gate, Gilbert Lovato-gate and principal shuffle-gate, all while our children seemed to be learning less and less.

Instead of stepping up, Everitt distanced herself from us by adding more costly layers of bureaucratic mouthpieces — including the new $105,000-a-year Monica Armenta as communications specialist and the $113,000-a-year Tom Garrity before her — to do her bidding.

We have lived for four years under the Everitt administration, waiting for something good to happen. And it hasn't.

How could we know that Everitt? She may have been as wonderful as the school leaders say, but how could we know that?

Now begins the search for a new superintendent. Whoever is chosen to take Everitt's place must do better. He or she must learn to connect more, not just with the Board of Education members who approve his or her paycheck, but with the rest of us who make his or her paycheck possible.

Not everyone is adept at public speaking or exuding personality, certainly. But those who do great things, expect great things — well, their message gets across, and without the help of expensive public relations folk.

A good superintendent reaches out, not just to the folks in the ivory tower on Uptown Boulevard but to the parents, the teachers, the students who depend on that superintendent to make the right decisions.

I am not celebrating Everitt's decision to abdicate, but I am celebrating the chance to start again with someone new, someone less royal and more loyal, someone we can know better than Everitt and someone who wants to know us.