Saturday, October 12, 2019

Are APS school board members and senior administrators honestly accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence?

Or are they really spending millions dollars on cost-is-no-object legal defenses that render them unaccountable even to the law?

Are they honestly accountable as the senior most role models of the standards of conduct that they establish and enforce upon students?

Or did they abdicate en masse one night when they voted unanimously to remove the role modeling clause from their own standards of conduct? It had read; in no case shall the standards of conduct for an adult be lower than the standards of conduct for students.

The leadership of the APS cannot deny; they have heard the questions.

They spent the better part of a million tax dollars in one recent lawsuit alone, in an effort to not be asked the questions in public ever again. The dollars they spent came from the “operational fund”. They were dollars that could, would and should have been spent in classrooms.

Instead, they were spent on litigation and legal weaselry. The result; school board members and senior administrators were allowed to “admit no guilt” in the face of their abundant guilt.

The decisions the school board makes, about how many operational dollars will be spent on litigation, are made in meetings in secret. By their own deliberate decision, no recordings of the meetings are made. By their own deliberate decision, there is no oversight in the meetings. Subordinate oversight is not oversight. It is oxymoronic.

They squander so much money on litigation and legal weaselry, United Educators (the district’s insurer) charges the district higher insurance premiums (paid from the operational fund) than comparable school districts.

The leadership of the APS does not want to answer questions about ethics, standards and accountability. What compels their reticence?
  • Except that they really cannot point to high enough standards of conduct and competence?

  • Except that they cannot point to due processes by which they can be held actually, honest to God accountable to any standards of conduct at all; even the law.
The Albuquerque Journal has made a deliberate decision.

The Journal will not investigate and report upon ethics, standards and accountability in the leadership of the APS. Not even in the face of mill levy, bond issue, and school board member elections.

Not to report that there is a scandal;and
not to report that there is not.

Questions about ethics, standards and accountability in the leadership of the APS, will not be asked by the Journal.

Nor will they be asked by any of the so called “investigative reporters” of the NM Broadcasters Assoc.

Coincidentally, the NM BA’s President and CEO is a former APS school board president. During most times relevant, she was sharing by marriage, in the discharge from the large bore pipeline from the operational fund into select local law firm coffers.

Somebody else is going to have to ask these questions.

Everybody else is going to have to ask these questions.

Show up at upcoming public forums. Ask questions.
Keeping asking until they answer.

Do it for the children.

No comments: