APS students are dying and Brooks is in hiding.

In this morning's Journal, "Heroin Stalks City Teens", link.

There is an "epidemic" of heroin abuse in APS high schools; 9 of 13 city high schools have full time drug counselors.

An APS parent, who buried his daughter this month, said;

She had been enrolled at La Cueva High School, but it wasn't suitable for her recovery.
"She didn't feel comfortable there, with the whole drug culture there. It's out of control.

One of APS premier high schools has an "out of control drug culture" and the leadership of the APS hasn't said a word about it (show me the letter from APS leadership to La Cueva parents, letting them know the risks their children are facing at LCHS, and I will be happy to retract that statement).

There is a solution. The solution is not immediately apparent because we have not yet created it. The people who will come up with the solution haven't, yet, because they still don't know the problem exists. Or at least, they didn't until the story in today's paper.

A recent audit of the APS by the Council of the Great City Schools, revealed that APS administrators "routinely falsify" crime statistics to protect their reputations.

The leadership of the APS has a Modus Operandi; a way of doing things.

1. Step one is cover up the problem in order to avoid any due unpleasantness.
2. Step two, is trying to solve the problem without anyone finding out that there is a problem.

Typically, the approach is unsuccessful; ask any teacher how well the leadership of the APS has handled the problem of "chronically disruptive" students. In there effort to cover up the problem, they have failed even to take the first step of writing a discipline philosophy.

APS Supt Winston Brooks
has an obligation to be candid,
forthright and honest with
stakeholders about this problem
and about others.

He will not of course;

it's just not the way he rolls.



photo Mark Bralley