board meeting next wednesday

Regular Meeting; Wednesday,
February 21, 2007, 4:00 PM John Milne Community Board Room, 6400 Uptown Blvd NE

this will be your first look at the john milne community board room. even the name is decietful; exactly when and how will the community ever use this room? the public is not even encouraged to attend school board meetings there.

the first meeting in the room will take place before aps’ rigo chavez, director of "communications", "communicates" the cost of the new board room, or the identity of the person(s) responsible for the decision to squander the public trust and treasure on an unnecessary renovated boardroom.

is it possible, even in the aps, for a million dollars to be spent without being able to be identify those responsible for the decision to spend it?

the community room is a glaring symbol of an administration riddled with incompetence and corruption. the stonewalling that hides the truth from stakeholders is an even more glaring illustration of the willingness of the leadership to withhold the truth in order to dodge accountability for their mis, mal, and non-feasance.

the closest thing the public has been offered by way of a justification of the extravagance, is that "it was expensive to make the board room handicap accessible, and to add bathrooms."

that explanation is a red herring. it is an effort to distract attention from the fact that there was no need for another boardroom in the first place.

every high school in the city has handicap accessible facilities enough to support board meetings. their refusal to even consider rotating evening meetings among high schools betrays their very real disinterest in listening to the concerns of stakeholders.

the building in which the board room sits, is itself a manifestation of deceit. years ago, when taxpayers were “sold” the building, they were assured that the leadership of the aps would occupy only a fraction of the building and other paying tenants would share the burden of paying for the extraordinarily expensive building.

the truth is that every privileged administrator in the aps now occupies a cozy newly renovated office in aps’ “community” office building in the heights. the lesser privileged in the aps continue to make do with 30 year old student desks and “less fancy” bathrooms.

when asked recently, on talk radio, to justify spending eighty thousand dollars on luxurious new furniture for board members, the leadership of the aps lied to the radio audience.

beth everitt sits atop an administration that holds students accountable for ethical misconduct. were everitt and the rest of the leadership accountable to the standard to which they hold students accountable; she would be held accountable for deliberately misleading stakeholders.

but neither she, nor any other administrator or board member, is accountable to the student standard of conduct, because they removed from their own code of conduct the words;

in no case shall the standard of conduct for an adult be lower than the standard for students.

in fact, none of them is honestly accountable to any standard of conduct at all.

none of this has been investigated or reported upon by the journal or the trib.

how can that be explained except by a conspiracy of the journal, the trib, and the leadership of the aps to cover up their ethics and accountability scandal?