Open letter to "the media"

Is it really alright with you that the leadership of the APS  insist
that you go stand in the corner if you want to record them
in any manner with any device during a public meeting?

Media Etiquette
Members of the media are welcome at public meetings of the Board of Education.

Members of the media and media equipment shall be required to video and photograph from a designated media representative area of the room in which the Board of Education Meeting is being held.

Media representatives shall cooperate with district staff regarding placement of equipment, photography and video requirements or be subject to removal from the meeting

Is it really alright with you that, if you stop to protest some ridiculous restriction of your free exercise of your Constitutionally protected human right to be "the press", you will be arrested (denied your liberty by people wearing badges) by members of a publicly funded, private police force - accountable directly to, and only to, the school board and senior administration?

Is it really alright with you that if you want to file a complaint over some ruling or removal, there is no due process for your complaint? ... not by APS and not even in the courts where APS holds the insurmountable advantage of an unlimited budget, legal weaselry and no real oversight over their spending?

Is it really alright with you that, when you ask them a legitimate question about the public interests or their public service, they are not actually accountable to any standards of conduct that require them to respond candidly, forthrightly and honestly?  This, in spite of the fact; they are the senior-most role models of standards of conduct, APS' student standards of conduct, that require just that and in just those words?

APS PIO Armenta

Is it really alright with you that PIOs offer you the truth as it has been spun in the interests of the people they work under, as opposed the people they work for?

It is really alright that they won't produce even "legally" much less ethically redacted copies of public records of investigations into felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators in their police force, the cover up, and the cover up of the cover up?

It shouldn't be.

It really, really, really shouldn't be.




photo Mark Bralley
the kind of photo you can't get from the corner