In the Journal this morning, link, we find APS Assistant Supt. for Human Resources Karen Rudys isn't going to take lying down, School Board President Don Duran's defamation of she and her department. She has hired Sam Bregman to defend her.
The school board is meeting in secret this afternoon to decide what they are going to do about all the trouble their new supt. has created, and to decide how to spin it all to the people whose trust and treasure they have squandered.
Duran has been insisting that HR was responsible for the snafu and might continue to argue in secret, that it was. And, by logical extension, was Karen Rudys.
It looks like Don Duran is looking for a scapegoat; Rudys and Bregman should be there to defend her interests.
The people should be there too, and for precisely the same reason.
We know the people will be barred from the room; will Karen Rudys and her
lawyer Sam Bregman be barred as well?
Duran is under fire over the appearances of conflicts of interest and
impropriety created when Supt. Valentino made Duran's daughter his Associate Supt. of Middle Schools.
A few years ago, Sam Bregman spoke on behalf of another embattled APS administrator, Police Chief Gil Lovato.
Lovato and Bregman claimed
(justifiably);
when the truth is known
there won't be a single
senior APS administrator
left standing.
Though a statement like that could be chalked up to Bregman braggadocio, it happened to be true.
It is true still.
There is not one single member of the leadership of the APS who is not corrupt and or incompetent, or who does not have guilty knowledge of those who are.
It is time for an honest independent audit of the administration of the APS. Even against their will. Especially against their will.
The terms of public service are the prerogative of the people, not of their servants.
The next school board meeting with a public forum is a week from Wednesday and in their castle keep at 6400 Uptown Blvd.
People say “somebody should do something” when what they really mean is; somebody else should do something. Much has been written about whether now is the time to stand up;
All that is necessary for the rot in the leadership of the APS to prevail, is for good people to do nothing. (derived)
The right time to do the right thing is always right now
You pick a side when you don't pick a side.
You say something when you say nothing.
Your silence gives consent
You get what you tolerate.
If not you then who, ...
and so on.
If you want there to be honest to God accountability to meaningful standards of conduct and competence in politics and public service in the APS, sooner or later you're going to have to show up somewhere and do something.
Historically, torch and pitchfork gatherings have seen some success in toppling tyrannies and could now.
Sacrifice is the currency of commitment.
If your commitment to repairing the APS isn’t worth a trip to a school board meeting, how important to you is it?
Show up one week from Wednesday.
There is no equivalent gesture.
photos Mark Bralley
An online petition, link, has been created. It begins;
Due to the total lack of trust that parents,teachers, and the general public have for Superintendent Dr. Luis Valentino as Albuquerque Public Schools Superintendent we ask that the school board begin the process of termination. ...The petition has 90 signatures in less than one day.
My conjecture based on the abject absence of candor, forthrightness and honesty from the board and their superintendent;
APS Deputy Supt. Jason Martinez was not told to resign or be fired over his failure to submit to a background check.
Martinez was told to resign or be fired over what the background check will reveal.
the background check will not be done.Stake and interest holders will never know the truth about
And if it is done, the findings will be hidden behind
a nearly impenetrable wall of unlimited spending,
without (real) oversight on lawyers and legal weaselry.
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| aps image |
Actor, comedian and School Board Member Steven Michael Quezada became last night, the only school board member to speak out on the ongoing brouhaha over Supt. Luis Valentino's inadvertent public revelation of APS' dark side.
The other six board members are in such solid accord that;
he, the board, and their eloquence of lawyersI reminded him, link; there is no private in public service.
will be the ones who decide what parts of the elephant
stake and interest holders will be allowed to see.
This is the day the leadership of the APS and the leadership of the local "media" parted ways.
Journal Editor in Chief Kent Walz and his counterparts at local NM Broadcasters Assoc affiliate stations, have been part of a decades long cover up of APS' dark side.
He today. and they in short order, will abandon APS' sinking ship.
He and Paula Maes' cohort in local TV news, have relentlessly refused to investigate and report upon the ethics, standards and accountability crisis and scandal in the leadership of the APS.
He and they have helped cover up a cover up of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators.
Upon APS Supt. Luis Valentino's blunder and the expose in more reliable press like NM Political Report, link, the local "press" found themselves in a foxhole too foul to share. Walz' has taken, the rest will take, the only way out; tell the truth and let the board's chips fall where they may.
Today, not only an editorial they can never take back, link, but an adjacent page, full of on point letters to the editor.
The leadership of the APS would appear to be alone in a hole.
Co-incidentally;
serendipitously,
there is a school board meeting today at 5.
It's one the rare times when you can just walk right into their castle keep, wikilink, at 6400 Uptown Blvd. without first getting permission from the leadership of the APS and the chief of their publicly funded private police force.
photos Mark Bralley
When there is a scandal of any kind going on, and the APS Board of Education needs to find out what is really going on, they hire lawyers and private investigators to gather information and evidence. By hiring lawyers and private investigators, they are able to exploit weakness in the Inspection of Public Records Act.
They have on more than one occasion, despite the glaring appearance of conflicts of interest and impropriety, used their own police force to investigate state and federal felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators and school board members and maintain control over those findings.
So it's a fair question;
Who is investigating the Valentino, Martinez, Moya affair? Who is doing a forensic examination and review of the facts and evidence? Who is going to find out if something untoward was underway?More importantly,
To whom will the findings belong?
Journal, link, comes this morning with more of the same on the latest brouhaha involving an APS superintendent. Valentino, who will meet with the "media" but will not meet with the press, had the Journal print (t)his dodge;
“It’s unfortunate that a personnel issue has been forced into the headlines on these first days of school when our focus should be on our students,” he wrote.and parry
“Though we’re a public entity, we must respect the legal and privacy rights of our employees, which limits the amount of information we can share with the media.”Valentino is being disingenuous;
"we must respect the legal and privacy rights of our employees, which limits (sic) the amount of information we can share with the media.”The "limits" on the amount of information they "can" share with stake and interest holders, are determined by judges and juries after APS has squandered hundreds of thousands of operational dollars on litigation and legal weaselry, finally have to cough up the records. Look at their record of IPRA complaints and the amount of money they spend hiding records.
Because APS Supt Luis Valentino sent his Chief Financial Officer home on paid leave, taxpayers are on the hook for the nearly a $1K a day he earns.
Years ago, when APS Deputy Supt Michael Vigil was put on paid leave for his aggravated drunk driving arrest, the community and board were so upset over the fact that so much money was being wasted, they decided that in future, any suspended administrators would still continue to do useful work for the district.
Apparently, they've gotten over that upset.
To date; taxpayers have been offered no explanation or justification for the waste. It appears that the school board is just trying to sit on the lid until people forget what's going on.
Therefore, the APS School Board is;
The resources spent in what looks like an aborted attempt to rip off the operational fund, belonged fundamentally to the people. The resources that have been spent since, belonged to the people. The ethically redacted truth about how they were spent, belongs to the people.
The power that apparently was and is still being abused, belongs to the people. The ethically redacted truth about how their power was and is being spent, belongs to the people.
Politicians and public servants are obliged (according to any standards of conduct higher than the law) to tell the ethically redacted truth about the public interests and their public service. Those standards require them to be;
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| Executive Director of Communications and Public Information Officer Monica Armenta |
They are ignoring her in my opinion, because the guy who was at the helm when all this was going on, the guy who should have known better than to do what it is she says they have done, was none other than former school board president and KRQE's long time lawyer, Marty Esquivel.There was some stuff going on in the dark;
stuff we never would have known about
had not APS Supt. Luis Valentino
accidentally flicked on the lights.
Standing there, like deer in headlights,
people preparing to embezzle tax dollars.
There are people in the leadership of the APS,
at the Journal and in the media who would now
like you to lose sight of that fact.
Try to resist.
The New Mexico Political Report comes with this.
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;
By "the press" I mean Journal Editor in Chief Kent Walz. |
| FOG hero Brooks. |
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.There was an article this morning in the Journal, link. It had to do with how happy everybody is about librarians and assistant principals filling in for the teachers that APS did not hire in time for the beginning of classes. I'm guessing that the reporter did not interview many librarians or assistant principals.
I availed myself of the opportunity to post a comment on the story;
This reporter/the Journal need to do a little investigating before passing along APS press releases. This is not investigative reporting. It isn't even honest.
The truth is no harder to find than interviewing teachers who have left APS, and those who dream of leaving. Certainly there is some upset over standardized testing and teacher evals, but that isn't the whole story.
APS doesn't do exit interviews (I am supposing) because they anticipate results they won't like.
As but one example, they will find a number of teachers left and are leaving APS because of out of control students and classrooms; in particular an administrative failure to protect teachers and other students from chronically disruptive students. Anyone who doesn't believe this, simply needs to substitute teach for one day. If you don't think students are control in schools, go to any high school and see how many students are "sagging" in blatant violation of school board policy. This isn't about sagging, it is about the permission of prohibited behavior and the effects that has on educationally efficient environments.
Alternatively, drive by any high school and see how many students are "sagging" in blatant violation of school board policy. (This isn't about sagging; it is about the (overt or tacit) executive and administrative "permission of prohibited behavior" and the negative effects that has on educationally efficient environments.)
Enforcing the district's discipline policy is an administrative responsibility and one can see why APS administrators and the board don't ever talk about student discipline. And, why they don't and won't collect any data that exposes the failure to keep schools under the control of adults.
APS does not have a "discipline philosophy". Go ahead, search their award winning website; nowhere will you find any philosophy upon which they base their feckless and often conflicting discipline policies. The "leadership" of the APS cannot even agree whether to "punish" or even keep longitudinal records of deliberate misconduct.
APS cannot show you historical data on student discipline. A recent audit (by the Council of the Great City Schools) found administrators routinely falsifying crime statistics to protect the reputations of their schools.
They maintain a PUBLICLY FUNDED PRIVATE POLICE FORCE in order to keep a lid on the truth, in particular the truth about school board members and senior administrators who break the law. It's why, when former APS police chief Gil Lovato was canned, his lawyer Sam Bregman said, "if they ever get to court (to tell the truth about the cover ups), there won't be a single APS senior administrator left standing".
Sussing the Journal's steadfast refusal to dig any deeper into issues than the news releases that Monica Armenta hands them, is as easy as it is obvious; they are part of APS' cover up of an ethics, standards and accountability crisis in the highest levels of leadership.
That or what else, exactly?
Unclear still how many millions of dollars APS will be looking for in a bond issue election planned for February 2, 2016. A search of APS' award winning website produces five year old information, link.
Their preference and practice is to conduct the elections in relative secret; informing mostly those they think will vote yes.
Their public relations campaign is well on its way, link;
This year’s 13-month calendar features photographs of APS students and teachers in schools that have been built or renovated with funding approved by taxpayers in school improvement elections. The next election is Feb. 2, 2016.For its part, the Journal preference and practice has been to not investigate and report upon the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS. It has been apparently not newsworthy, even in the face of elections over hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bond issues, and will likely continue to be so.
What if, instead of sending his text to the guy he was "going after"; APS Supt. Luis Valentino had managed to get it to its intended recipient NM Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera?
What if his question had made it to the Secretary?
Got any bright ideas on how to fire a guy whose biggest problem seems to be his expressed opposition to standardized testing run amok?Part of the training students in the APS are supposed to receive as part of a concerted, deliberate effort to help them develop their character, was this admonition;
If someone asks you to do something wrong,Has Hanna Skandera asked herself why
you should wonder why they think you would say yes.
the Supt. of the APS thinks
she would help him screw someone out of their job?
APS' highly paid Executive Director
It would be nice if the Secretary would take a moment to disabuse interest and stakeholders of that misconception.
