California Teachers Association head counsel Beverly Tucker used to be a counsel for the ACLU

California Teachers Association head counsel Beverly Tucker used to be a counsel for the ACLU in Northern California. Obviously, she wasn't a true believer in civil rights, or she wouldn't have spent so much money and effort on silly efforts to violate my civil rights. Tucker didn't plan her actions well.

Tucker had no good reason to support the two teachers who said I was going to come to school and shoot everybody. Her reason for doing so? It was an election year for the teachers union affiliate in Chula Vista, and the incumbent (Gina Boyd) was afraid the two teachers might make trouble for her if she insisted on a proper investigation.

I think Tucker was careless. The matter simply wasn't important to her, so she didn't bother to use any energy thinking about it. Only a very tiny amount of brain work was required to reach a sensible solution to the problem. The teachers should have been told to apologize to me. Instead, Tucker has spent years forcing teachers to lie under oath, wildly contradicting each other, among other shameful actions.

Tucker has enormous power. The people who supported her in my case (Gail Mendes, Jim Groth and Peg Myers) are rising fast in CTA. This delights me, because it makes my case more newsworthy and it reveals the politics inside CTA.

Click on the labels below to see older posts about the individuals involved.

Is this CTA official completely incompetent--or is she committing perjury?

Gina Boyd, former president of Chula Vista Educators, an affiliate of California Teachers Association, gave some bizarre responses to deposition questions by Chula Vista Elementary School District teacher Maura Larkins. Maura Larkins was removed from her position at Castle Park Elementary when Assistant Superintendent Rick Werlin claim that he'd received Saturday night phone calls in which two anonymous teachers claimed that they feared Larkins would kill them. The school district never investigated the matter.

Why did Ms. Boyd hide the truth? The only motivations I can think of are that she wanted to get reelected, and to protect her friend Robin Donlan and other members of the Castle Park Five.


[Page 79 10:17:36 Maura Larkins:]

Were you curious as to what my behavior might have been that caused them to fear for their lives?

[Gina Boyd:]


(long pause...) I guess...I don't know...



[Maura Larkins 10:18:20:]

You weren't drivingly curious as to why teachers were concerned that another teacher might kill them?

[Stutz law firm Atty. Kelly Angell:]

Objection. Asked and answered.

[Maura Larkins 10:19:]

...Were you curious about it--the results of his investigation?

I don't know whether he ever completed it, frankly.

Q. Did you ask him?

A. No.

10:19:28

Q. Were you concerned about the safety of teachers at Castle Park?

A. I'm concerned about the safety of all my teachers...

10:20:06

Did any teacher ever tell you that he or she feared that I might kill him or her?

No.





[Page 81, line 19]

...Did you believe that I had behaved in a manner that threatened the lives of others?

No.

Did you think these two people had lied?

No...

Ethics Complaints Against CTA-affiliate Presidents and Directors Forbidden

Teachers Association of Long Beach (TALB) directors really had no choice but to file suit against CTA to get their union back because CTA lawyers have a policy of silencing complaints against the presidents and executive directors of local affiliates, no matter how illegal their behavior is.

When the CTA-chosen executive director of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, Scott McVarish, misused funds in 2007, CTA wouldn't let the TALB board of directors fire him. Instead, CTA paid for a lawyer to defend him when he slandered one of the directors.

Finally CTA realized too much money was being lost, but instead of turning over power to the directors, it took over the union itself and gave control to ex-CTA president Barbara Kerr.

The directors have filed suit to get their union back.

This is all familiar to those of us who know about the actions of Barbara Kerr and CTA head counsel Beverly Tucker in Chula Vista Elementary School District.

Tim O'Neill, the executive director chosen by CTA for South County Teachers United (CTA), informed Chula Vista Educators member Maura Larkins in December 2002 that she was forbidden from making a complaint to her union affiliate Board of Directors or Representative Council about unethical behavior on the part of the president. Why was she forbidden? Because president Gina Boyd herself refused to allow a complaint to be made about her.

You can't expect much in the way of ethics from an organization like this.

An open letter to CTA head counsel Beverly Tucker's subordinate

Hi Mike:
I just noticed that someone hacked my CTA webpage that had the quote of you saying that you and the rest of the public don't care if my due process rights were violated.

You shouldn't be any more ashamed of your attitude than Beverly Tucker or Carolyn Doggett or the officers of CTA should be ashamed of their attitudes. I hope they aren't making you feel bad about it. They should be nothing but grateful to you for doing what they paid you to do.

Ironically, your hostility was actually a measure of your humanity.

You couldn't have done the job that you were assigned to do if you hadn't dehumanized me. You had to believe that I didn't deserve the protection of the law or my union. You had to believe this, or it would have been impossible for you to help your clients get away with their multiple crimes against me. So hold your head up high when you are in the presence of CTA bigwigs--or 90% of lawyers. You might, however, want to bow your head in the presence of children.

Maura Larkins

P.S. You shouldn't be any more ashamed than Chula Vista Educators (CVE) officers Gina Boyd, Tim O'Neill, Jim Groth, or Peggie (Peg) Myers.

Secrecy in schools must stop in New York and California

At Jamaica High School in New York, deans were forbidden by the chancellor to call 911 under any circumstances because the school had landed on a list of dangerous schools as a result of too many altercations.

When a 14-year-old girl suffered a stroke at Jamaica High School in New York, her mother was called, but an ambulance was not called. The mother is suing the district for $10 million dollars because no medical treatment was sought for an hour after the girl was stricken. The girl is having trouble walking and reading, among other things.

Success through secrecy seems to be the motto of just about every school district in the country.

Secrecy is also a standard tactic for dealing with problems at Chula Vista Elementary School District, the school district where I studied as a child and taught as an adult.

The board and administration of CVESD refused to investigate a report by two teachers that there might be a mass shooting at the school. Even the teachers union, California Teachers Association, and the local Chula Vista Educators, refused to insist on an investigation. Why? Because past and current presidents of Chula Vista Educators (Gina Boyd, Jim Groth, and Peggie Myers) were afraid that crimes by teachers would be brought to light if an investigation took place.

We need administrators and union leaders who will solve problems at schools, not cover them up.

Chula Vista Police Department 2005-06 hoax on behalf of Cheryl Cox and the Santa Barbara Sheriff

Chula Vista is not the place to go if you are looking for equal protection of the law. It makes a big difference to the CVPD if you're a Republican or Democrat. Republicans like Cheryl Cox get help from the CVPD in covering up crimes and other wrongdoing.

On the other hand, a Democratic employee of the City of Chula Vista who took two hours off work to spy on a Cheryl Cox fundraiser has been charged by Bonnie Dumanis with perjury for not admitting he was doing political work on the job.

There's a lot of political work being done on the job in Chula Vista, but you don't hear much about the work done by Republicans in the police department.

The Chula Vista Police Department is a friend of Cheryl Cox, who was a Chula Vista Elementary school board member before she was elected mayor. The CVPD failed for over a year to investigate a financial crime at Castle Park Elementary School reported in 2005. Why? The CVPD has a knee-jerk policy of covering up wrongdoing by Cheryl Cox and the other board members of Chula Vista Elementary School District, who include Pamela Smith, Patrick Judd, Larry Cunningham and Bertha Lopez.

In 2006 I pursued a public records request for months before the CVPD admitted that it had a record of a police visit to Castle Park Elementary on April 21, 2001. When they decided I wasn't likely to go away, I finally received a copy of the Castle Park Elementary School "call" report.*

But the Chula Vista Police Department was doing a lot more than illegally hiding public records in its efforts to support Cheryl Cox's campaign for mayor of Chula Vista in 2006.

Between 2000 and 2006 a long string of crimes had been committed at Castle Park Elementary which resulted from criminal actions by a Santa Barbara Sheriff's deputy and his sister, a teacher in Chula Vista. Cheryl Cox and CVESD committed bigger and bigger crimes to prevent the exposure of earlier, smaller crimes and violations of law committed at Castle Park Elementary in 2000 and 2001.

See "Castle Park Elementary," "Teacher Reports," and "Law Enforcement" at MAURALARKINS.COM (link available on this blog's link list).

In 2005-2006, the most newsworthy crime being covered up by the CVPD and the media to protect Cheryl Cox and the CVESD school board was the embezzlement of about $20,000 from the Castle Park Elementary PTA.

Apparently fearing that this crime would eventually become public knowlege, perhaps because it was being reported by this blog and the San Diego Education Report website, the Chula Vista Police Department seems to have developed a plan in November 2006 to create the appearance that it was no longer covering up the embezzlement. Of course, by November 7, 2006, the election was over. The cover-up was successful. Larry Cunningham crowed that voters had seen throught the lies of his opponents. The truth is that the voters saw almost nothing because Larry and Cheryl had spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to cover up crimes and other violations of law at CVESD.

The police asked former Castle Park PTA president Kim Simmons to come in the CVPD office, where she was interviewed and arrested. Was Simmons arrested after a careful investigation? No, the CVPD does not carefully investigate incidents that might embarrass Cheryl Cox and the school board. CVPD arrested Kim Simmons simply to create the impression that they weren't covering up Castle Park crimes, and passed on their humble efforts to District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis.

What did Bonnie Dumanis do? Prosecute the crime? Not likely. Just as she had refused to prosecute CVESD Assistant Superintedent Richard Werlin for obstruction of justice, she also refused to prosecute Kim Simmons.

Why? Maybe because Kim Simmons knew too much about crimes at Castle Park Elementary.

Did I mention that Kim Simmons was a close friend of transferred teacher Robin Donlan, a member of a powerful teacher clique at Castle Park Elementary that received a great deal of support form local papers when she and several other teachers were transferred out of the school?

Robin Donlan and her friends created a bizarre brouhaha, in which they and the media attacked the principal of Castle Park Elementary without ever mentioning the crimes of which Donlan had been accused. The truth was that the principal was attacked for daring to challenge the authority of the "family" that had created a crime wave at the school.

In October 2004, Kim Simmons entered a Castle Park Elementary classroom, and asked to use the school phone during class time so she could call up Robin Donlan and ask for instructions on how to proceed with her attacks on the principal of the school. The teacher gave permission, and took the opportunity to explain to her students that she was "mad at the principal." (There has been a dearth of professionalism at Castle Park Elementary since this "Castle Park Family" teacher group took over.)

Kim Simmons, along with Gina Boyd, the president of the teacher union, and school site council President Felicia Starr were working with transferred teacher Robin Donlan to get rid of the first principal who had had the nerve to stand up to the arbitrary power of the group of teachers who ruled the school.

What was Cheryl Cox's role in all this? She and all the other board members authorized the payment of hundreds of thousands of public dollars to Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz law firm to represent Robin Donlan and cover up the crimes initiated by her and Assistant Superintendent Richard Werlin and several other CVESD officers and employees in 2000 and 2001. After fostering perjury and other crimes, and using huge sums of public money to keep bad teachers in power, Cheryl Cox ran for mayor on a platform of "charater" and "fiscal responsibility."

The San Diego Union Tribune has maintained to this day a complete black-out regarding crimes committed by Robin Donlan, Richard Werlin, Cheryl Cox and others at CVESD. On November 17, 2006 the SDUT published a small article about the arrest of former PTA Kim Simmons. The story immediately went into "partially hidden" status in the Union-Tribunes archives. (If someone does a signonsandiego search for "castle park PTA Simmons," he'll get a message back saying "No articles found.) The article can only be found by leaving "simmons" out of the search. If you already know about Kimberlee Simmons, the San Diego Union Tribune doesn't want you to know more.

Of course, there has been no follow-up to the SDUT story. But there should be--because the story created the false impression that the police were actually intending to do something about crime at Castle Park Elementary. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The police waited until Cox was elected, and then they did their hoax arrest, but Kim Simmons was never charged with anything.

When wil the SD Union Tribune publish the full story, revealing Kim Simmons' close association to Robin Donlan and the "Castle Park Five"? When will the San Diego Union Tribune apologize for so maliciously attacking the honorable and decent principal of Castle Park Elementary on behalf of Robin Donlan, Kim Simmons, and the rest of their clique, after the group was found to be responsible for yet another crime after the SDUT had written so much on its behalf? How about it, Don Sevrens?

The SDUT November 2006 story about Simmons arrest was published to create the impression that Bonnie Dumanis and the Chula Vista Police Department are not covering up crimes involving Cheryl Cox and Castle Park Elementary School. It appears that Simmons wasn't really the fall guy; she was actually the pretend fall guy.

Bonnie Dumanis, why don't you investigate the use of public resources for political purposes at CVPD? Why don't you investigate crimes at Chula Vista Elementary School District, including perjury by Cheryl Cox and Robin Donlan? Or do you only use the public resources under your control to investigate Democrats?


*The police "call' report that was hidden for months by the CVPD revealed Assistant Superintendent Richard Werlin's attempt to silence a teacher who had suggested that the media might investigate what was happening at the school in 2001. The teacher clearly knew nothing about the media in San Diego. The San Diego Union Tribune, the Chula Vista Star-News and La Prensa still have not reported those crimes, although all three newspapers have long known about them. These three publications exposed their lack of journalistic ethics when they published a deluge of letters, articles and editorials defending the teacher, Robin Colls/Donlan who initiated the crime wave! All three papers were incensed when Robin Colls was transferred from Castle Park Elementary. Richard Werlin, who called the police when the teacher mentioned the media, didn't correctly estimate the power of his Chula Vista Elementary School Board bosses, including Cheryl Cox, to silence the media. Werlin did go on to achieve a certain amount of notoriety for his use of the police to silence teachers. He had second-grade teacher Jenny Mo arrested in front of her students at his new school district in Richmond, California this year when the teacher went to the media with a story about bullying at her school. Of course, Werlin didn't step up and take the credit/blame for the arrest. He let the principal sit in the hot seat. He took indefinite sick leave from his position.

Why did Chula Vista mayor Cheryl Cox foment fear at Castle Park Elementary?

After she was falsely accused, Maura Larkins, teacher at Castle Park Elementary, voluntarily spent hundreds of dollars to get a fitness for duty examination by a psychiatrist. The doctor faxed his report to CVESD.

Why did Cheryl Cox and the CVESD board and their attorneys Daniel Shinoff and Kelly Angell continue to foment hysteria at Castle Park Elementary even after receiving this doctor's letter in August 2001?

Answer: They wanted to smear Maura Larkins in order to prevent her from revealing their violations of law. Was this smart? It would have been smarter to retract the false accusations and apologize. Instead, they stopped Maura Larkins pay (in violation of the contract) and refused to grant her the hearing to which she was entitled (also in violation of the contract).

Robin Donlan (who became famous in 2004 as one of the San Diego Union-Tribune's "Castle Park Five," then in 2007 for claiming that she had no idea how her school teacher husband suddenly came to possess 7 million dollars) also worked hard, along with her personal friend, Chula Vista Educators' President Gina Boyd, and Beverly Tucker of the California Teachers Association, to smear Larkins.

But it appears that there was another reason for Cheryl Cox's support of violations of law and the contract: she wanted to get rid of Superintendent Libia Gil.

In May 2002 Cox was willing to violate yet one more law against Maura Larkins, Labor Code 1102.5, in order to get rid of Libia Gil. Cox and Bertha Lopez went along with the BIG THREE, PATRICK JUDD, PAMELA SMITH, AND LARRY CUNNINGHAM, and voted to dismiss Maura Larkins less than two months after Larkins filed suit against the district.

Cox and Lopez got something in return: Libia Gil's resignation.

Clearly, these people felt so certain that they were above the law, that they were not afraid to flagrantly violate it.

Former CVE president sued for covering up teacher Linda Watson's crimes

Beverly Tucker, California Teachers Association lawyer, has been sued for suborning perjury and destruction of documents to undermine a member of CTA.

The teachers union is big in California, and it didn't get that way by acting like a bunch of school teachers. The union acts more like prison guards. Maybe it will be more powerful than the prison guards union one of these days.

Tucker and Hersh represented Chula Vista Educators President Gina Boyd, who was a personal friend of Robin Donlan. Robin Colls Donlan is mentioned in the case, but is not named as a defendant. Virginia Boyd and Castle Park Elementary teacher Linda Watson are named, along with CVE and CTA.

The Serious Issues Behind Bathroom Bullying

Many teachers are unmoveable in their negative attitudes towards bathroom privileges for students, and toward just about any other privilege for students. In fact, these teachers are unmoveable in their opposition to the idea that education is the main goal of teaching.

The main goal, they believe, is to teach kids who's in charge.

If Student A does his homework, but gets failing grades on tests, while Student B fails to do his homework, but scores 100% on tests, what will these teachers do?

In many cases, they will give Student A a higher grade than Student B. Student B is likely to drop out. Student A will get a worthless diploma. Is it any wonder our schools are failing?

But these rigid teachers don't just cause problems within their classrooms. They also cause many problems in their schools. One reason is that the teachers union consists largely of just this type of teacher. In some districts, there are innovative teachers who challenge this control, but these districts are rare. My union president boasted to me that her students at Castle Park Elementary in Chula Vista were fond of the saying AVOID BOYD. She thought it was something to be proud of. Needless to say, Gina Boyd supported abusive teachers. During her presidency, four above-average teachers were forced out of Castle Park Elementary in a period of six years.

One thing you can count on the California Teachers Association to do is to back up an abusive teacher, no matter how cruel or incompetent that teacher might be, when a parent or child complains about the teacher.

I hope Michael Patterson's mom (see previous post) will be able to start a discussion and an investigation into bathroom rules at her son's middle school. It's something that should be done at every school. And then the discussion needs to be expanded. Schools shouldn't be havens for Little Ceasars. They should be places where children and education come first.