Journal readers remain in the dark about APS' dark side

If you're paying attention to the coverage of APS Supt. Luis Valentino's texting blunder, you're seeing a great deal of attention paid to his poor spelling and grammar, and to his lack of command of social networking skills.

It is a deliberate misdirection; just like when Valentino suggests the problem isn't what he wrote or who he sent it to, but rather that Don Moya chose to make the whole thing public.

They want you to not pay attention to the content of the text and of Luis Valentino's character.

There is a dark side of the leadership of the APS.
Valentino has apparently joined in.  It explains his reticence to step up as the senior-most administrative role model of student standards of conduct.

The board's steadfast refusal to talk openly and honestly about their own ethics and standards points to their own unwillingness or inability to step up as role models.

Former School Board Member Kathy Korte has recently written about the dark side in frank comments she has made on line and in the comments* on the websites of local TV and the Journal.

*update; this post now includes a link to a future post wherein the comments she posted are more completely addressed.

The dark side is dark for a reason.

In the dark, they ignore ethics.
In the dark, they ignore the law.

In the dark, they do whatever they want to do; comfortable in their confidence that litigation and legal weaselry will insulate them from any consequences, even in the unlikely event their incompetence and corruption come to light despite the efforts of their friends in the media.

The leadership of the APS has had more than a century to fine tune their ethics, standards and their accountability to those standards and ethics.  They should now be, as clear and unequivocal as they will ever be.  Accountability should be as swift and as certain as it will ever be.

By their own free admission, the APS Board of Education is, after more than a hundred years, utterly unaccountable even to their own Code of Ethics.

The truth is, their ethics and standards are not high enough.  Moreover, even if they were, it wouldn't make any difference.  They are not, by any due process, actually, honestly accountable to any standards of conduct, not even the law*.

*They buy their way out of trouble using operational dollars to fund litigation and legal weaselry to allow them to sign admissions of no "guilt" in expensive settlements.

Their record is there; you just haven't seen it.

You haven't seen it for two reasons;

1. they hide it very hard.  They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiding the findings of investigations of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators. and
 
2. the press, who you would expect to be exposing the truth, are actually part of the cover up.

By "the press" I mean Journal Editor in Chief Kent Walz.

Substitute for his name, the name of any of the news directors at any of Paula Maes' NM Broadcasters Assoc affiliate stations.

They have all agreed to ignore the ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS.  They have agreed to ignore the dark side.

FOG hero Brooks.

Walz and former APS school board member Marty Esquivel actually went so far in their effort to maintain the cover up, they bamboozled the NM FOG into giving former APS Supt. Winston Brooks their transparency award while the three of them were hiding the truth about a cover up of state and federal felony criminal misconduct.





The dark side of APS is right now, underwriting a nonviable defense of Esquivel's ego to the tune of $750K.   They intend to spend another $250K in search of a settlement where Marty Esquivel gets to "admit no guilt" in violating my Constitutionally protected human rights.


The Journal has gone so far as to publish a letter to the editors suggesting that Valentino resign.  They have yet to write an editorial; they have yet to take a stand on whether powerful politicians and public servants should be actually and honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence within their public service.

Due in no small part I think, to the fact the Journal has a dark side of their own; it is one of the accouterments of power; you get to live beyond the law.

When Winston Brooks tweeted his way into the hall of shame, link, it wasn't three days before everybody from the Governor on down had weighed in on the record.  Then School Board President Marty Esquivel had shared his opinion on TV within two, link.

Within two days the APS board had demanded an apology from Brooks.

A week later, not only has the board failed to step up, they even cancelled a meeting this morning where they could have done just that.

I expect they are just waiting for it all to go away.
That's worked for them in the past; no reason to think it might work for them now.

School Bond Issue election six months away.




photos Mark Bralley