Journal editors a day late and a dollar short ...

In the Journal this morning, link, the editors express their concern over a lame duck school board inflating APS Supt Winston Brooks' golden parachute by extending his contract again and in meetings behind closed doors.

No one but the board seems to know how they intend to perform their evaluation.

Where is the PowerPoint presentation of the Superintendent's Evaluation Process?

Where is the APS highly paid Executive Director of Communications Monica Armenta and her Communications Department?

Are they so busy working on their next school Calendar, they can't put together a little presentation on how the process works?

How many more times do they intend to meet in secret?  Do they intend to continue to refuse to make recordings of the meetings, should a judge want to watch them? From whom will they take input? under what circumstances?  Do teachers have input?

The editors posit;

"These are just a few of the questions likely to be addressed in coming weeks."

Likely?  Why is it likely?  Have theses kinds of questions ever been asked before?  Not by the Journal, they haven't.

As a bona fide candidate in two school board elections, I did everything I could to get the Journal to investigate and report upon the standards and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.  I asked them to ask important questions; questions like;

• Why, are the findings of at least three investigations into felony criminal misconduct by senior APS administrators being hidden from public knowledge and in violation of the NM IPRA?
• Why has no agency of law enforcement, other than APS' own publicly funded private police force, ever investigated the corruption and incompetence in the leadership of the APS Police force?
• Why hasn't evidence of felony criminal misconduct not been turned over to the District Attorney's Office?

They steadfastly refused, and steadfastly refuse still, to ask the inconvenient questions of their cronies in the leadership of the APS.

Why are we to expect the Journal to start asking inconvenient questions now?

Don't forget that it was Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz who teamed up with School Board enforcer Marty Esquivel, to give Winston Brooks a NM FOG hero of transparency award while all three knew the Caswell Report was, and is, being hidden from public knowledge and in blatant disregard of the NM IPRA.


And credit where credit is due;

• the editors printed School Board Member and berserk-er Kathy Korte's expressed belief that the broadcast news and Journal aren't giving stakeholders "a 360 degree view."
• they asked; "... how fair is it to expect the public to trust decisions made behind closed APS doors?
• they conceded "the majority of the tax-paying, voting public simply can’t attend every school board meeting and does rely on news coverage to make informed decisions,
• they drew attention to the fact that voters are "... being exposed to information from the well-financed APS public relations machine, and most importantly,
• they openly aver; "the election should be a referendum on the superintendent, this group of board members, and direction in which they have taken the district.

Talk is cheap.



 
Armenta photo Mark Bralley
Korte photo from her Facebook
Walz, ched macquigg