2016 APS School Bond Issue & Mill Levy election; "too big to fail"?

You may or may not be aware that election day, February 2nd,
is also Groundhog Day, wikilink. The
ancients called it Candlemas day.

From Scotland, the poem:

If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
There'll be two winters in the year.

According to lore, if the sun is out
February 2nd, the little rodent, aka;
woodchuck or whistlepig, will see
his or her shadow and return to its
cozy den for six weeks more sleep.

What, you may wonder, do the election and the holiday
have to do with each other?  The answer is;

the outcomes of both ride on
whether the sun is shining on that day. 

Sunshine can be interpreted literally, as the whistlepig may.
It also an oft used metaphor for transparency; as in
"sunshine" laws.  The NM Open Meeting Act reads;

Sunshine laws generally require that public business be conducted in full public view, that the actions of public bodies be taken openly, and that the deliberations of public bodies be open to the public.

If the sun is out on February 2nd, and by that I mean, if;

voters know the whole truth about the standards and 
accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS, 

they may well turn down both the mill levy and the bond issues, with calamitous results.

The leadership of the Journal and the Kabal of NMBA affiliate stations have decided that the results would be so calamitous in fact, that they will avoid them by standing between voters and the sun; literally and quite deliberately.

Consider that standards and accountability are the two most essential elements in protecting the public interests in the public schools.  If standards are too low, if standards are unenforceable, the public interests are unprotected from incompetence and corruption.  High standards and honest accountability correlate directly to the quality of the stewardship that the leadership of the APS can provide for taxpayers, their trust and for their treasure.

If the school board and senior administration

• have high enough standards of conduct and competence, and if

• school board member and senior administrators are actually and honestly accountable to those standards by due process,

don't you suppose you would have heard about it?  Don't you suppose you could find them if you went looking for them?

Don't you suppose the high standards and honest to God
accountability would be posted somewhere on their award winning website?

Don't you suppose that the editors and news directors would be reporting on it?

Of course they would.  But they aren't.  Quite the opposite; they're up to their eyeballs in a cover up of an ethics, standards and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.

Consider for example, that Kent Walz, Iain Munro, Michelle Donaldson and Mary Lynn Roper know full well, that the school board's own Code of Ethics is by their own free admission, utterly unenforceable, and yet, not one of them is willing to tell voters that truth.

The truth might piss off voters, and the nearly $600M shot in the arm for the local economy is too important to leave up to pissed off voters.

While one can understand I suppose, their motives; it's hard to get around the fact that as "the press", they have a rather sacred obligation to inform the democracy and let the people decide which is more calamitous;

• the failure of a bond issue or 

• enabling the ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the leadership of the APS to go on unknown and unabated.

Walz and Roper photos Mark Bralley
Munro photo no credit, Donaldson photo KOB