Update: Google resists a recent court decision in Europe ordering Google to remove results from Internet searches

UPDATE: GOOGLE REVERSES DECISION TO REMOVE NEWSPAPER LINKS

Google reverses decision to delete British newspaper links
Jul 4, 2014
(Reuters)

Google Inc on Thursday reversed its decision to remove several links to stories in Britain's Guardian newspaper, underscoring the difficulty the search engine is having implementing Europe's "right to be forgotten" ruling.

The Guardian protested the removal of its stories describing how a soccer referee lied about reversing a penalty decision. It was unclear who asked Google to remove the stories.

Separately, Google has not restored links to a BBC article that described how former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer E. Stanley O'Neal was ousted after the investment bank racked up billions of dollars in losses.

The incidents underscore the uncertainty around how Google intends to adhere to a May European court ruling that gave its citizens the "right to be forgotten:" to request the scrubbing of links to articles that pop up under a name search.

Privacy advocates say the backlash around press censorship highlight the potential dangers of the ruling and its unwieldiness in practice. That in turn may benefit Google by stirring debate about the soundness of the ruling, which the Internet search leader criticized the ruling from the outset.

Google, which has received more than 70,000 requests, began acting upon them in past days. And it notified the BBC and the Guardian, which in turn publicized the moves.

The incidents suggest that requesting removal of a link may actually bring the issue back into the public spotlight, rather than obscure it. That possibility may give people pause before submitting a "right to be forgotten" request.

"At least as it looks now, there are definitely some unworkable components," said Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins. "We've seen a number of situations in the past few days, where somebody in an effort to get a certain thing forgotten has brought more attention to it than ever was there before."

"It does make you think that maybe if you're actually trying to make an episode of your history be forgotten, this channel maybe isn’t the best way."

Google's objective is to protect the reliability and effectiveness of its search franchise. It remains uncertain how it adjudicates requests, or how they intend to carry them out going forward.

"Their current approach appears to be an overly broad interpretation," a spokeswoman for the Guardian said. "If the purpose of the judgment is not to enable censorship of publishers by the back door, then we'd encourage Google to be transparent about the criteria it is using to make these decisions, and how publishers can challenge them."

Google, which controls more than 90 percent of European online searches, said it was a learning process.

“This is a new and evolving process for us. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling,” the company said in a statement.

Notifying media outlets about scrubbed links has the effect of enhancing transparency, privacy advocates say. It might also prompt European courts to re-examine aspects of the ruling, including how it affects media outlets' coverage.

"It’s terra incognito for everyone," said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "If sites that receive the notices choose to publicize them in ways that end up boomeranging against the people requesting, that might cause the courts to examine what those sites are doing."

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Aurindom Mukherjee in Bangalore; Editing by Kirti Pandey and Lisa Shumaker)

ORIGINAL POST

Europeans don't have a First Amendment.  Are they losing the right to find relevant information on the Internet?  A recent court decision in Europe is forcing Google to remove results from Internet searches.

 

But the truth is that Google has already been removing links at the request of public agencies and others in the US.

 

Right to be forgotten: Google may hate it, but we're dangerously close to making it work

By Jo Best 

ZDnet

July 4, 2014

Last month, the right to be forgotten was enshrined in European law, thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Justice. Except it wasn't a right, you weren't forgotten, and it hasn't really been enshrined anywhere. Confused? You're not the only one.
In May, the ECJ ruled on the case of a Spanish national who had, over a decade ago, been involved in an auction of property to settle social security debts. When people Googled his name, newspaper stories about the auction appeared prominently in search results. The man thought that the information about him was outdated, and the court found in his favour, ruling that Google must no longer return links to those newspaper stories when his name is searched for. The newspaper articles remain online, and can be found through Google when other search terms are used.
The mechanism is not an outrageous one, and it has precedents in the offline world. When applying for a job, for example, individuals are often asked about any criminal convictions. They are legally bound to tell their potential employer about them for a certain amount of time, but for many types of conviction that duty will eventually expire and the individual no longer has to disclose it.
Nonetheless, the result of the ruling involving what one Spanish man did in the 1990s has potentially far-reaching consequences for internet use in Europe.
In some quarters, the ruling has been described as giving every European the right to be forgotten, in others, as bringing in a new wave of press censorship. In reality, it does neither.
The ruling allows Europeans to request that data controllers, like Google, remove links to outdated or irrelevant information when searches are performed for their names. In the event the request is found to be justified, links will be removed from results returned for searches on that person's name, but the original source material will remain online and can be found through other queries. Data controllers still have the right to refuse requests when they feel the links in question are still pertinent for searches on an individual's name.
However, since Google opened a web form for people to request search result removal, tens of thousands of people have asked the search firm to do just that.

The right to be forgotten: Can we really trust Google to decide when our data should die?

The first removals

This week, the first such removals began to come to light. Large news organisations like the BBC and The Guardian, along with more smaller B2B outlets, all reported Google had contacted them to let them know they were subject to removals, while Google users began to see messages that certain search results "may have been removed under European data protection legislation".
A handful of recent 'right to be forgotten' removals were highlighted by The Guardian on Thursday. According to the paper, Google had alerted it that six articles would no longer be returned in search results for individuals' names. The names were not disclosed, although three articles referred to a Scottish referree, while another was a sweet story about French office workers making art from Post-It notes on their workplace windows.
Yet both cases illustrate the flaws in the system. Is the information in the story about the referree no longer relevant after three years? Is a system ostensibly meant to protect people's privacy being wasted on individuals who once happily told journalists about their creative ways of wasting office stationery?
It's a similar story over at the BBC. The BBC reports one of its articles involving the former head of Merrill Lynch Stan O'Neal no longer appeared in search results for a certain name. That name isn't, as you might have expected, Stan O'Neal. Instead, it's thought that the request is linked to a name in the comments section.
Was it right to do so?
The wider question is perhaps, when does that information become outdated in relation to its subject...

Was newspaper slow to investigate a problems with a child-molesting teacher?

I'm not the only one who is concerned about media friendliness with school districts, and San Diego isn't the only place where newspapers protect bad actors in schools. The following story is from Maryland. I was intrigued by the two comments at the bottom.

School districts and their lawyers seem to have a lot of influence over the media. It seems that the teachers union has influence, too. The California Teachers Association (CTA) defended Albert Truit and Fred Kamper and endorsed Patrick Judd. It appears that both CTA and school districts will defend their own, no matter what they do to children or employees. On the other hand, CTA did not defend Coach Carter when the district retaliated against him for reporting that another coach had told a student to take a substance that caused the student to get kidney failure.

A teacher’s dismissal
By Editorial Board
Washington Post
September 29, 2012

THE MARYLAND State Board of Education has upheld the firing of a Montgomery County teacher who engaged in a pattern of suspect behavior with students. The decision is far from vindication of the county’s handling of the case. Rather it’s a stinging indictment of a school bureaucracy that for almost two decades believed it had a problem but reacted with a seemingly endless flow of ineffective warnings, letters, reprimands and — most appalling — reassignments of the teacher to other schools and other students. Montgomery officials boast about their skill at weeding out troubled and ineffective teachers. This disturbing case should temper the boasts and cause some soul searching.

Daniel J. Picca, most recently a teacher at Kemp Mill Elementary School, also taught at Candlewood, Rachel Carson and Luxmanor elementaries. He was dismissed in 2011 for insubordination and misconduct in office. The proximate cause for his dismissal stemmed from an April 12, 2010, incident in which another teacher at the Silver Spring school reported what she viewed as alarming contact with a male student. Mr. Picca, as was detailed by a hearing examiner who heard the case in 2010 and affirmed by an administrative law judge in July of this year, had been admonished over a 17-year period about his contact with students, mainly young boys. Reported contacts included inappropriate touching, having boys sit on his lap, wrestling and inviting boys to an after-school “Strong Boys Club” in which students said they were encouraged to take off their shirts. One 1995 incident resulted in a finding, upheld in subsequent appeals, by county child protective services that named Mr. Picca responsible for “indicated child abuse.” School officials say that the system’s central personnel office did not become aware of the child abuse findings until June 2010 when information was requested from child protective services as part of its then- ongoing investigation of Mr. Picca.

Mr. Picca, in a telephone conversation with us, labeled as false any allegation that he did anything improper. He noted that — despite investigation by police and the state’s attorney in 1995 — he has never been charged with a crime. He characterized the proceedings against him as a setup, partly in retaliation for his advocacy as a union activist. He noted that the parents of the boy involved in the April 2010 incident said that their son was pressured into making a false statement.

But three principals and two superintendents over many years raised red flags. “The evidence is overwhelming,” Administrative Law Judge David Hofstetter concluded in his July ruling upheld last week by the state board, that Mr. Picca “engaged in a pattern of conduct over many years which was reckless, brazen, unjustified and, most importantly, of grave potential harm to his students.”

How could school officials for so long do no more than put another strongly worded letter into his personnel file and move him to another school? Read the letter then-Superintendent Jerry D. Weast gave to Mr. Picca in February 2000 and consider whether you would entrust your child to such a teacher. The letter instructed Mr. Picca not to engage in any “bodybuilding”-type of activities with students or have contact with them outside the classroom. Shouldn’t the expectation be, as the state board wrote, that “when confronted with such obvious inappropriate behaviors on the part of a teacher toward his students . . . that the teacher will be removed from contact with students with alacrity?”

Mr. Picca was judged to be an effective teacher. He received high ratings on performance standards, but disciplinary proceedings are kept separate from professional evaluations. It’s not clear whether his principals even were aware of all the information that had accumulated in his central office file; as the state board noted, it is as if each reprimand stood alone without reference to past directives. School officials told us that procedures have been tightened, notably better communication between child protective services and the school system. We hope that they are following the advice of the Maryland school board directed to all the state’s systems to scour their personnel files and review policies to ensure “there are no cases, like this one, lurking in their schools.”

This case did feature a few bright spots. The Kemp Mill teacher who walked in on Mr. Picca and a student she saw to be uncomfortable immediately reported what she saw to the principal, who requested investigation by the central office. Mr. Weast rightly rejected a suggestion from Mr. Picca’s counsel for a voluntary resignation or early retirement and insisted on termination, a decision the Montgomery County Board of Education backed in the face of community pressure for a teacher who enjoyed considerable popularity. Montgomery officials said they have requested that the state revoke Mr. Picca’s teaching license.

Mr. Picca is contesting that move and said he may appeal his termination in Circuit Court. Currently he operates UpperHand Promotions, which describes itself as an outfit intended to aid high school athletes in the college recruiting process.

Comments

freestategal
10:11 AM PDT
This is also a 'stinging indictment' of Post editor Vernon Loeb, who is responsible for coverage of Montgomery County, including MCPS. For years the Post has had a cozy relationship with MCPS superintendents and staff. This editorial only appeared after the Parents' Coalition broke the story and posted the documents. For the real story go to www.parentscoalitionmc.blogspot.com. These crocodile tears from the Post editors come as too little, too late.

mcps teacher
10:30 AM PDT
I agree with freestategal. Check out Dana Tofig's tweets. Out to lunch with the principal from College Garden's Elementary and Michael Birnbaum of the Post.

Washington Post, you are being cozy with Weast's leftovers and they've been doing a lot of covering up in their school system. Finally, it looks as if the door is opening. There is an opportunity to stand up and declare "NO MORE DISHONESTY" from MCPS and their BOE.

Please, Post, do the right thing and investigate what is going on in MCPS. This editorial is just the tip of the iceberg...

The Shelia Jackson brouhaha makes me ask: Which newspaper is better, the San Diego Union-Tribune or the Voice of San Diego?

UPDATE: July 29, 2011
Here are my latest comments on the Jackson story in Voice of San Diego:

To VOSD:
You guys are doing something wrong. I don't think your decisions are motivated by race, but the unbalanced racial makeup of the people you choose to attack exposes a problem. I'm not talking about the top elected officials. I am talking about how VOSD chooses which of the other 3 million people in San Diego to attack, protect, or discuss. There's something wrong with your methodology when so many of the people attacked are black women. There is something arbitrary and inequitable about your methods. The law of probability indicates that you are somehow pulling some of the cards out of the deck before the game begins.

You are exposing your methods unintentionally. The same thing happens with people who cheat on their taxes. The IRS spots them by looking for certain numbers that tend to pop up more frequently in the tax filings of people who are cheating. They use statistics to spot the fraud, without even looking at the reasons given for deductions.

VOSD has stepped gingerly around some stories, and stepped heavily into other stories.

The people that get the gentler treatment from VOSD tend to be white, not because VOSD is racist, but because, I suspect, the people whom Buzz Woolley and the rest of the top dogs at VOSD want to protect happen to be white. People high up on the food chain in San Diego schools are treated gently (and the superintendent there is a black man), while people who rank lower take the heat. Also, people down at SEDC get harsh handling.

Obviously, commenter "bigfan" doesn't like Shelia Jackson, and doesn't want to question VOSD's motives for choosing to attack Jackson while staying silent on more important issues in schools.

My point is that I think VOSD chooses stories for the wrong reasons, but not necessarily for racial reasons. But one must suspect that something is wrong when there is such a surfeit of black women being attacked. The laws of probability are being violated. The choices seem arbitrary. It appears that people are attacked if they are not on the protected list.

Let's look at the facts. When Regina Petty at SEDC wouldn't turn over public records, VOSD went after her with a vengeance. We were treated to 13 "Petty Watch" posts. It took two months of "almost constant hounding" to get SEDC to release public records.

But VOSD reported that when it asked for records from the County Office of Education "that would show if the trips were given to the agency rather than the employee, it didn't provide any." VOSD didn't begin an aggressive "Crosier Watch." No constant hounding. The difference in treatment was not due to the fact that the SEDC lawyer was black and Diane Crosier, the lawyer in charge of keeping public records out of public view at the County Office of Education, was white. It's because Petty had no friends at VOSD, and Crosier apparently does. I call it friendship when you meekly accept a "no" answer to a public records request instead of doing all you can to shame Diane Crosier into turning over the records.

I'm not saying VOSD shouldn't cover the Jackson story. I'm saying that we can clearly see that there is a problem when racial patterns emerge so clearly in VOSD stories. I'm saying VOSD needs to start telling the whole truth about schools in San Diego. And it should start with a "Crosier Watch."


ORIGINAL POST:

My opinion of the San Diego Union-Tribune has been on the rise since it covered the Dan Puplava story about financial company kickbacks to an employee of San Diego County Office of Education.

On the other hand, the SDUT has kept the secrets of lots of powerful people in San Diego Schools.

For this reason, I never expected the SDUT to cover the story when school attorneys managed to get Judge Judith Hayes to issue an injunction saying I couldn't mention them on my website--or even speak their name. I wasn't surprised that no one from the SDUT was there on July 11, 2011 when USD law professor Shaun Martin spoke on my behalf before the California Court of Appeal in San Diego. He did a great job. On the other hand, when the presiding justice asked the opposing attorney if he had any case law to support his position, he said he couldn't find any cases. "I tried! Believe me, I tried!" he whined.

While I had no expectations of the SDUT, I was surprised and disappointed that Voice of San Diego would keep this story quiet. My only explanation is that Buzz Woolley, the chief financial supporter of VOSD, is very much a supporter of school administrators, and this support apparently extends to their attorneys. VOSD apparently wants to protect the secrets of those attorneys even when (or especially when) they obtain unconstitutional injunctions that violate the right to free speech. It also seems to want to protect them when they help schools keep secrets from voters.

Just a few weeks ago I complained to editor Andrew Donohue and CEO Scott Lewis that VOSD had repeatedly protected powerful white men while going after less-powerful black women in the same organization. In each case, the more powerful person knew or should have known what was going on, but VOSD didn't hound them with public records requests. It went after Regina Petty at SEDC with a vengeance, but never took such a stance with Diane Crosier at SDCOE. Instead of an aggressive campaign like the "Petty Watch" against SEDC attorney Regina Petty, VOSD meekly reported, "But when VOSD asked for records that would show if the trips were given to the agency rather than the employee, it didn't provide any. Instead, the County Office argued that in the past, it just wasn't required to report gifts given to the agency. Despite repeated questions, the agency gave no further explanation of why it wouldn't have to report those gifts."


SEDC Chairman of the board Chip Owen had to notice that huge amounts of money were being saved because employees left without being replaced. How did he explain that the agency kept coming in barely under budget? Why is it only his subordinate Carolyn Smith (and her finance director Dante Daycap) who are facing criminal charges? Owen was in charge, for heaven's sake! He was responsible for oversight! Everyone says he's sharp and effective. If that's true, he knew.

The case was similar to the problems in another redevelopment agency across town, where Nancy Graham (a white woman) took all the heat, and her boss, Fred Maas, resigning discreetly about a year after the excitement had passed

VOSD has also been very polite in its public records requests to SDCOE. In addition, it has found no reason to write about Dan Puplava and Diane Crosier's legal issues, and has gone silent on the story of Diane Crosier's odd relationship with the attorney to whom she gives millions of dollars worth of work. Meanwhile, VOSD triggered a state investigation of a lower-level SDCOE employee who recommended that a tiny fraction of the legal work be given to her husband's firm. You guessed it,Crosier is white, the other employee is a black woman.

When I complained, VOSD assured me that it was just a matter of chance that it so aggressively attacked black women. But black women are just 5% of the population. How does VOSD manage to find so many of them to pursue?

Still, I was willing to believe that VOSD wasn't racist. I figured it was simply protecting the powerful, and, of course, the powerful tend to be white and male.

Then I learned that VOSD has been following Shelia Jackson around. Now I'm really wondering what is going on over there on Historic Decatur Road. Did I mention that the law firm that obtained the injunction against me is the next-door neighbor of VOSD? Is there something in the water in Liberty Station?

[I should also mention that NBC reporter Rory Devine, mentioned prominently in the VOSD story below, also decided to keep mum about the school attorneys who got Judge Hayes to protect their secrets from exposure.]


Five Possible Problems on Jackson's Residency
July 27, 2011
by Emily Alpert

We teamed with NBC7 San Diego to do a television version of our story about questions swirling over where San Diego Unified school board member Shelia Jackson lives. Here it is:

Reporter Rory Devine did a good job breaking down this complicated story. She explained that there are three possible problems here:

• Whether or not Jackson lives in the area of the school district she was elected to represent.

We saw Jackson coming to a Kearny Mesa apartment complex late at night or leaving in the morning four times in a week, raising questions about whether she lives there. Jackson says she does not. The apartment belongs to her daughter and Jackson says she stays there a few nights a week. The schools trustee, however, also used that address as hers when registering a business in August last year.

• Whether it is appropriate for her to accept free rent from a San Diego Unified employee.

Jackson says she lives rent-free in her district at a home owned by Gwendolyn Kirkland. Jackson voted with the rest of the board to approve choosing Kirkland as an interim principal last year.

Jackson and Kirkland both argue that she was not swayed by the free rent; Jackson also said she had no role in the selection process that led up to Kirkland being presented to the school board...


Remarks on this subject:
Frances O'Neill Zimmerman


Well, thank goodness the voice, in its zeal to uncover the truth about School Board member Shelia Jackson's legal domicile, mentioned that back in the day it was deemed perfectly okay for School Board President Ron Ottinger to live outside his District D at Coronado Quays and to send his youngest child to Coronado High School.

But Ottinger was rich and Anglo and could maintain a condo in the Gaslamp to keep up the fiction that he was a resident of District D. Ottinger also was the linchpin on the School Board threesome that kept Alan Bersin in business, so there was no way he was going to be sacrificed to some legal nicety that people are supposed to live where they are elected from. That residency rule was proved by Ottinger to be highly flexible.

In contrast, Shelia Jackson is African-American and working-class...

Secrecy in schools--and in the media

The authors below seems to agree with the things I said in "Free the Union-Tribune 5!"

\
The Educated Reporter
Commentary on education coverage, writing and a few other things
Linda Perlstein
December 7, 2009

Everything that’s wrong with us, Part Two. The biggest barrier to excellent education journalism has nothing to do with the institutional weaknesses of that clunky old mainstream media. Rather, it lies within the schoolhouse doors. And the boardroom doors. And the superintendent’s office doors.

Educators operate in a culture of fear.

Schools bar access to reporters, and that is a problem. Always has been. Worse, though, is the paranoia that prevents anyone, from the top on down, from speaking honestly about what works and doesn’t in education, what policy might look like (or does look like) in action. If I were a principal and politicians were visiting my school, I would show them the worst things in the building, so they could see our challenges. I would allow my teachers to speak with the press, without prepackaged messages to deliver. I would be starkly frank with my own bosses. But these days, there is no incentive for such honesty...

So teachers only tell their principals what they want to hear, principals tell their superintendents what they want to hear, superintendents tell their boards what they want to hear, all the way up to the national policy makers. Given that calculus, of course, the truth that makes its way to the vast majority of journalists is varnished to a glow.

Education is a secretive world. (Not convinced? Think about the fact that we have built an entire system around the results of tests that in most states nobody outside the classroom is allowed to see.) But with access and honesty comes greater understanding. For ages, the Washington Post had so little access to D.C. schools that they only covered the district as the inept bureaucracy it largely was...There was blame enough for everyone: central office, school administrators, parents, Jonathan himself.

... Superintendents tell me that because they can control their own message through electronic media, they don’t “need” journalists anymore. That scares the crap out of me, and it should scare you too.






To Write About Curriculum, Reporters Need Classroom Access
By Mary Ann Zehr
Edweek
December 7, 2009

A former reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked to my colleague Lesli Maxwell that for journalists to better cover classroom issues in schools, they need to have better access to classrooms. Lesli included the views of Dale Mezzacappa in a story about a report by the Brookings Institution that documents a lack of education stories on the front pages of mainstream newspapers nationwide. The report also concludes that education gets scant attention in the top news stories produced by radio and television reporters.

Mezacappa's remarks resonated with me because I've found that the ability I have to provide examples of how a school's curriculum plays out in the classroom depends on whether I'm permitted to spend a lot of time observing in classrooms.

I sometimes find it difficult to convince school administrators that when I visit a school, I want to spend at least a whole day observing students and teachers, rather than taking a tour of the school and mostly interviewing administrators. With observation, I can identify examples to show how a curriculum is implemented. See this story I wrote about summer philosophy classes to get a sense of examples I gleaned from a day of observation. And even in this policy story about Striving Readers, a federal adolescent-literacy program, I was able to provide a classroom example at the end of the story because Chicago public schools gave me good access to classrooms during a site visit.

The Brookings Institution report decries the lack of news coverage of curriculum.

One way that school officials might be able to urge reporters to take a greater interest in curriculum is to invite them to observe in classrooms.

Why was a gentle essay about Patrick Judd (CVESD trustee) removed from the web?

Patrick Judd has a lot of control over the media. He succeeded in keeping the story of my lawsuit against CVESD out of the Chula Vista Star-News (above) and the San Diego Union Tribune.

Now, it seems, he's managed to GET A PASSAGE REMOVED FROM MY PRIVATE WEBSITE!

I have long wondered how sentences, paragraphs and entire pages have suddenly disappeared from my Yahoo website from time to time. Attorney Ljubisa Kostic told me recently (when he was deposing me) that all someone has to do to get something removed is to complain to Yahoo. My guess is that the "someone" has to be a lawyer threatening a lawsuit for defamation. Yahoo hasn't admitted this to me, but Mr. Kostic could be right.

So the question becomes: Why did a particular paragraph or page disappear? Was it offensive? Illegal? Defamatory?

No, apparently that's not necessary. Take for example the following passage that disappeared from my "Seven Happy Clowns" page recently:

Judd says that having even one member
on the board who supports teacher unions
would destroy the board’s “collegiality.”

But what does “collegiality” mean?

In this case, it means that the current
board has agreed to hide its conflicts
from the voters. Important
differences exist between Judd and
the two board members who respect
teachers, Cheryl Cox and Bertha
Lopez. Judd's opponent, Jill Galvez,
would bring MORE collegiality to the
board because she shares the
positive attitudes of the board’s two
most forward-thinking members, Cox
and López.

[Blogger's note: Cheryl Cox and
Bertha Lopez, as it turned out, joined
Judd, Pamela Smith and Larry Cunningham
in a long series of unanimous and
irrespnsible decisions. They were not
as forward-thinking as I had imagined.]

School boards who keep secrets DO
NOT benefit taxpayers or children;
they only benefit incumbents.

They conduct trade-off diplomacy: I'll
vote for yours if you'll vote for mine,
and the public will never know what
our disagreements were.

Why not do the RIGHT THING EVERY
TIME??

Probably Mr. Judd genuinely believes
in what he is doing, but his rigidity is
an obstacle to progress in Chula Vista
Elementary School District.

The five-member school board is not
smarter than all the people of Chula
Vista put together.

The decision-making process needs
to become open to all. Does
disagreement result in worse
decisions? No! It results
in BETTER decisions because more
ideas are considered. We need to
hear from educators who DON’T
PLAY POLITICS!

I honestly can't figure out how anybody could convince Yahoo to remove this mild opinion piece.

So I'm back to wondering if friends of Patrick Judd have been hacking my website.

P.S. A few months ago, part of my California Teachers Association webpage was blacked out, as opposed to being blanked out.

A note to Patrick Judd: Teachers play politics with education just like you do. They need leadership to learn collaboration. I suggest you read "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."

I've noticed that south county San Diego has more cover-ups

This morning I read in the Union Tribune that an ex-coach in San Marcos has admitted stealing $40,000.00 from a girls’ softball team.

Once again I am reminded that South San Diego County has the most deceptive news coverage in San Diego. If you steal money from a PTA or other fund for students in any other part of San Diego, your neighbors are probably going to read about it.

Why has the truth about Chula Vista Elementary School District crimes been covered-up? If the violations of law that were committed by the school board, teacher union, and PTA in Chula Vista had been committed in any part of the county other than Chula Vista and its surrounding communities, voters would have read about it in their newspapers.

San Diego south county voters, on the other hand, are kept in the dark by the Union Tribune’s Don Sevrens, the Star-News’ Linda Rosas Townson, and Daniel Muñoz’s La Prensa.

I doubt that Cheryl Cox would have been elected mayor, and the Chula Vista Elementary School District incumbents re-elected, if voters in south county knew the whole truth about them.

Don Sevrens wrote plenty of negative articles about these individuals in the Union Tribune’s south county edition, but at the same time, he covered up the facts that would have proved his points. Most people assume that anyone who gets fired probably deserved it. It is human nature to give the benefit of the doubt to authority figures. Don Sevrens wanted people to vote against the incumbents because they fired or transferred employees. Yet he covered up the fact that school board members had committed multiple serious violations of law. Why did he cover it up? Because the teachers’ union, Chula Vista Educators, had also been deeply involved in the crimes.

The former head of Castle Park Elementary’s discipline committee now sits on the site council, helping to cover up the theft of $20,000.00 by one of her supporters. This former chair of the school’s “Peace Committee” is known for dealing out punishments to kids that far exceed the seriousness of the child’s transgression—and for demanding that other teachers do the same. This teacher has often been verbally abusive and excessively punitive toward kids who commit small transgressions. But stealing $20,000.00 is something she doesn’t want to talk about or act on.

The staff as a whole has been unanimous in its desire to cover up serious wrongdoing at the school. Not one single teacher has come forward to tell the truth since a crime wave by teachers began in 2000.

After a year without investigating, the CV Police Department finally showed a tiny spark of interest in the missing $20,000 AFTER CVESD board member Cheryl Cox was elected as mayor of Chula Vista. Chula Vista police then called in Former PTA president Kim Simmons, talked to her, arrested her, and then let her go. District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis did not press charges. Why? Perhaps she's too busy prosecuting a young man who worked for Cheryl Cox's opponent, Steve Padilla, for allegedly lying about taking two hours off work. The San Diego Union Tribune finally allowed a short note about the arrest of Castle Park Elementary's former PTA president to be published in November of 2006, but told nothing about the other serious crimes at Castle Park.

Update May 6, 2007:
Now that teacher Robin Donlan, a close friend of former PTA presidents Kim Simmons and Felicia Starr and former teachers union President Gina Boyd, is being investigated along with her husband Vencent Donlan for the theft of $7.7 million from Vence's former employer, perhaps the crime wave at Castle Park Elementary that was started in 2000 by Donlan and her brother MIchael Carlson will get some attention.