The Beat Goes On

The Beat Goes On

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Message to School Board Candidate Kurdell":

The payoff did not occur on Elia's watch. It happened during the Leonard administration. Leonard's enforcer Hamilton did the dirty work along with a couple of other top level cronies.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 8:11 PM

The payoff for Hamilton never stops. Elia created two jobs for him so far that the board did not even remove from the consent-agenda cover-up scam to query the necessity of the jobs and whether they got advertising for the best-qualified person. Success in ROSSAC does not depend on credentials--academic and business; it depends on the willingness to comply with the orders--plain vanilla or criminal--of the superintendent and cohorts.

Nobody got punished for the criminality that preceded the court case filed by Mr. Erwin after incredible efforts on his part to get the authorities in administration and the board to stanch the crime on school grounds.

I suspect payoffs at some level. The board stands suspect since faults riddled the new schools from holes in roofs to general water damage, ACs that should last twenty years lasting only five, and even shoddy things like doorknobs and locks.

My favorite copy of a piece of the Erwin story was when he, finally giving up on the administration, took reporters on top of a roof of a new school to show them the holes. An administration lackey spotted the press tour of the roofs from his office window and called the news downtown to the ROSSAC culprits.

The board stands guilty of tolerating the crime on school grounds. Mr. Erwin did everything he could to alert its members, but they looked the other way, the board's usual stance when anything difficult faces its layabouts.

Board members have turned the schools over to the administration. They charged voters $35,000 for a fake ad to show they were advertising "nationwide" for a superintendent. All the time the fix was in for Ms. Elia. She had a deficient academic record and meagre experience on site that included her overbuilding classrooms and not detecting a real-estate scam under her nose (The SPT investigated and exposed it). The board members who picked her notwithstanding her deficiencies, claiming with pious duplicity that she was "the best qualified" nationwide, were Edgecombe, Lamb, Valdes, Kurdell, Faliera, and Olson.

Griffin's election had not taken place, so she's free of participating in a scam since she wasn't there. Had she been, my sense is that she would have gone with the crowd. She wants to do the right thing but she lacks the guts and moral heft to bull right ahead when the rest of the board is up to the usual business of echoing Ms. Elia's orders.

I have had to buy another printer to be able to scan in the final Erwin documents. My old one just lay down and died. Then I had to spend about two hours on the phone yesterday with the HP help people determining that the new printer was a dud. They will send me a replacement, arriving in a week. I felt the applicability of Hamlet's, "How all occasions do inform against me."