Wednesday, February 24, 2010

APS Audit Committee continues to deny due process to hundreds of complainants.

APS' Audit Committee is meeting tonight, link. Missing from the agenda, due process for more than 200 complaints that have been filed against administrators and others.

APS provides a whistleblower hot line, SilentWhistle, upon which complaints of ethical and criminal misconduct can be filed against APS administrators or other employees.

In so far as the administration investigates complaints made against the administration, there is a need for oversight by an impartial third party. In the APS, the oversight is supposedly provided by the executive branch; the School Board. They are supposed to review and approve of the handling of every single complaint.

APS School Board Policy reads;

B. 07 Board Committees...
"The Audit Committee reviews and recommends approval of ... any whistleblower complaints".
Yet the Audit Committee has not reviewed or approved the handling of even a single complaint.

Despite the specific and explicit obligation to review whistle blower complaints, Audit Committee Chair David Robbins steadfastly refuses to put them on his agenda.

He will not put whistleblower complaint review on the agenda because there are at least two complaints that he does not want to see the light of day. They are my complaints that APS Supt Winston Brooks has behaved unethically by refusing to step up to honest accountability as a role model of the APS Student Standards of Conduct, and that he (or someone acting in his stead) improperly closed that complaint without due process.

Though Robbins has clearly betrayed the trust placed in him by the voters who supported him, he won't discuss his decision to continue to deny due process to the complaints.

The only justification he will offer; "we haven't violated federal law".

Again, the obvious motivation for his refusal to do what he is required to do, the inability to summon the character and the courage necessary to hold himself, and Brooks, honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence.

When asked to point to another reason, he can't.

Instead he points to my motivation for filing the complaint, link, despite the fact my motivation simply does not play in the affording due process to legitimate complaints.

The only things that play are character and courage in the leadership of the APS.

And both are in short supply.




photo Mark Bralley

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