What does APS Supt Valentino know about ethics, standards and accountability (in the APS)?

If the APS is to reach its potential in educating nearly 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters, there must be in place;

• high enough standards of conduct and competence, and

• actual, honest accountability to those standards; accountability even for the most powerful and even against their will.

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APS Supt Luis Valentino does not know that the standards of conduct and competence that apply to APS school board members and senior administrators are mediocre at best and largely unenforceable*.

*For example, and by their own admission,  the APS School Board Code of Ethics is utterly unenforceable.

He does not know that students are expected to model and promote accountability to a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethical conduct.  Nor that they have been for more than two decades; nor that the expectation has been repeatedly articulated in the APS Student Behavior Handbook;

Students are expected to model and promote the Pillars of Character Counts! link.

Side note;

Anyone who would like to debate whether the Pillars should or should not be APS student standards of conduct is 21 years too late to participate in that debate.  The simple fact is; the Pillars are the standards of conduct that the board establishes and enforces upon students and will be until the board meets in public and votes otherwise.

Valentino doesn't know that in 2005 or 2006, the board grew uncomfortable with the expectation that they, as the senior most executive role models of student standards of conduct . were actually accountable to those higher standards of conduct.  And that as a result, the board voted to remove the role modeling clause from their own standards of conduct.  It used to read;

In no case shall the standards of conduct for an adult
be lower than the standards of conduct for students. 

The effect of their unanimous, morally corrupt and cowardly vote was that they are no longer accountable as "role models" of ethical standards of conduct and by their reasoning; no longer accountable to the higher standards they refuse to model and promote. 

They are accountable now only to the law; the standards of conduct that all higher standards are higher than.  Were that not bad enough, the board spends, without oversight, operational dollars by the hundreds of thousands on legal weaselry in order to escape accountability even to the law.

Valentino doesn't know that a recent audit of the APS revealed a culture of fear of retaliation against whistle blowers.  He doesn't know that there is no due process for complaints filed against school board members and senior administrators.

He doesn't know.  Yet.

It will be explained to him during public forums two minutes at a time, until he recognizes that he has parachuted into an ethics, standards and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS and demonstrates by his response whether he intends to right the wrong or join in the cover up.

Will he identify high standards and establish honest accountability to them?

It begins with an independent, impartial examination and review of ethics, standards and accountability in the APS; the findings of which will be surrendered to public knowledge.