Maestas' defense leaves much to be desired

Like a shoplifter caught with a purse full of pilfered
merchandise and whose only explanations are;

• I have bought merchandise here before, and

• merchandise has been purchased at other stores, too

• And, I'm not going to answer any more questions

APS School Board Vice President Analee Maestas' future looks bleak.

Analee Maestas is one of seven of the senior-most role models in the entire APS.  At the moment, she is one of the worst.

Nearly everybody has done or will do something sometime in their life, they regret.  They will do something that doesn't reflect well on their reputation as a role model.

At that point, they will have two choices;

1. sidestep the consequences of their misconduct, or
2. embrace them.

There is something to be said for a role model who having failed to summon the character and courage to do the right thing, will then admit;

I did the wrong thing.  I regret it, and I will accept the consequences of my failure to do the right thing.

The nearly 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters in Albuquerque public schools deserve good role models.  I would go so far as to argue they have a right to good role models; if not of making good choices, then of the character and courage it takes to accept the consequences of making bad choices.

If we really want students to grow into adults who embrace character and courage and honor, someone is going to have to show them what they look like.

It starts with the school board holding themselves actually and honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence;

• giving them the moral authority to expect the same from their superintendent,

• giving him or her the moral authority to expect the same from their subordinates,

• giving them the moral authority to expect the same from adults in classrooms and schools,

• giving them the moral authority to expect the same from their students.

and ends before it begins; the APS board of education never stepped up in the first place!  The APS school board created a code of ethics for themselves, and by their own free admission; by their own deliberate choice, it is was and remains utterly unenforceable; they provide no mechanism for, nor any venue in which a complaint against them can be filed.

They expect students to model and promote honest accountability to a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethics; the Pillars of Character Counts!, and hold themselves barely accountable even to the law; the lowest standards of conduct acceptable to civilized human beings.

And they are only accountable to the law, when unlimited spending in meetings in secret, without real oversight, on cost-is-no-object legal defenses fails to except them from its reach.

They get away with it, and will continue to get away with it, in no small part, because of the aid and abet they receive from the Journal and the "K"abal of Paula Maes' NM Broadcasters Assoc affiliate stations.

Kent Walz (the Journal), Iain Munro (KRQE), Michelle Donaldson, (KOB TV) and Mary Lynn Roper (KOAT) are complicit in the cover up of an ethics, standards and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.

Walz' and Ropers' photos Mark Bralley
Donaldson's and Munro's; their sites