Will the Journal cover the APS School Board election?

I submit; if you search Journal archives, you will find a profound lack of coverage of APS School Board elections.  In particular, there is a profound lack of coverage of the issues of ethics, standards and accountability for senior administrators and school board members.

I have run for the board twice. Part of the reason I run, is an effort to get the truth on the table for open and honest public discussion.  I expect that a bonafide candidate should be able to count on the press, the Journal, to get out an absolutely legitimate message.

The messages is; there is an ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS.

By which I mean; the standards of conduct and competence that apply to senior administrators and school board members are either or both of inadequate and practically unenforceable.

That allegation is founded or it is not.
It makes a difference whether it is founded.

If it is founded, there is public corruption and incompetence in the leadership of the APS.
It makes a difference if there is.

There is no better foundation for this allegation than the public record.  The public record includes meaningful standards of conduct and competence, or it does not.  The record demonstrates honest and actual accountability to those standards, or it does not.

The public record of the leadership of the APS includes involvement in felony criminal misconduct and cover up.  The senior administration and school board are hiding the public records of public corruption and incompetence in the leadership of their publicly funded private police force.

Tax dollars ostensibly destined to educate nearly 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters, are being used instead to underwrite cost is no object "legal" efforts to hide those and others from public knowledge.


As an example; there are findings of investigations of allegations of criminal and civil misconduct involving senior administrators and school board members.  A few such, are the investigations conducted subsequent to the 2006-7 scandal in the leadership of APS' publicly funded private police force, link.  Investigations like the Caswell Reports I and II.

Those findings are public records of the spending of public resources and the wielding of public power.  Yet they are being hidden.  The "how" of the hiding involves spending without any real oversight on legal weaselry in an effort to hide the records in the personal best interests of the members of the leadership of the APS.  The "why do you need to hide the ethically redacted truth" never gets answered.


Proof;

APS police report to Brad Winter

ask APS Interim Supt Brad Winter, why the district will not produce the ethically redacted findings of all investigations into allegations of felony criminal misconduct involving the leadership of the APS police force and other senior administrators.

Not "how" they are able to hide them, but rather
"why" to they need to.

This where the Journal is supposed to come in.  You have to wonder, why not?

The democracy needs to know the truth about the spending of public resources and power.  The press is obliged to inform it.  The press enjoys Constitutional protection of their efforts to inform it, because it is so important that they do inform it.

The Journal is obliged to inform it.
KRQE, KOAT, and KOB TV are obliged to inform it.

Through two school board elections and a number of mill levy and bond issue elections, the Journal has steadfastly refused to tell interest and stakeholders the truth about the corruption in the leadership of the APS Police force, senior administration, and school board.

The APS School Board is right now, spending untold hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-viable litigation in order to not produce ethically redacted public records of their public service.

This not just the problems in the leadership of their police force.
It is every finding of every investigation and audit they could ever hide.

According to the school board's own code of ethics, link. a code they frankly admit is absolutely unenforceable; the board is required to;

1.  Make the education and well-being of students 
the basis for all decision making.

On what basis are the education and well-being of students served by hiding the truth about senior administrative and executive misconduct?

Why are they hiding the ethically redacted truth about the public interests and their public service?

Why won't the APS credentialed media ask Brad Winter "why?"  Why won't they ask school board enforcer Mary Esquivel, why?

Except that they are all in cahoots, they are all complicit.




photo Mark Bralley