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David Tuthill
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09/04/07 Sherri Brokaw
won't play fall guy for Dr. Hinojosa.
For over a year, or at least the last several months,
DallasArena.com has been calling for the removal of Dr. Michael Hinojosa as
Superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District. Not only has he
not adequately addressed any of the several embarrassments and scandals that
have occurred under his watch, Dr. H has been very flippant and blas?about each
event. His standard response has been a shrug and the blame game.
The Superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District pretty much
responds to each incident with "It's not my job, man."
When Allen Gwinn of Dallas.org exposed the DISD's over-extended and
under-supervised credit card program was being abused by hundreds of DISD
teachers and administration staffers, then DISD spin master Celso Martinez tried
to blame the entire mess on Sherri Brokaw. Apparently, Dr. H does not hold
mere females in high regard, particularly Anglo females. We hear Dr. H is
very disrespectful to at least one elected female member of the School Board who
frequently challenges him.
Well, Sherri Brokaw respectfully declined to assume the position for Dr. H. |
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9/4 Bookie Bob:
The worst problem in the DISD is the incompetence at the
school level. Principals
are untrained as managers or administrators.
My wife comes home every day with new
stories about her low performing school.
Seven principals in eight years at her school. They have not
found an Hispanic who can do the job
with one exception, but he gave up on the DISD
and went elsewhere. The current
principal is the worst.
Wife is not
Hispanic, so she is vermin and treated as such.
She was told she has
to learn Spanish in three years or be fired.
And people wonder why the anti-immigration movement is building.
My wife will not put all this in writing for fear of losing
her job. One past principal had his wife involved in performance
reportings on the staff. That
only shattered a few nepotism rules,
but, so what?
When the good teachers leave,
only the bad or weak are left. This has been going on so long, the good
are just overwhelmed by the bad.
The downhill slide began
when the illegals invaded, and they are
dragging it down further. |
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The DISD had to back off Dr. H's efforts to terminate Sherri Brokaw, but she is
not accepting their lame peace offering as compensation for the slanderous
allegations against her by DISD spinmaster Celso Martinez. She issued the
following press release through her attorney (and mine) James Murphy:
Release
The Dallas Independent School District has withdrawn its proposed
termination action against Sherri Brokaw,
the Administrator of the Pcard program that has received
much attention by the media in the past year. After a $1
million ?investigation? and five days of
hearings, the Judicial Council appointed by Michael Hinojosa, has
yet to render a decision on the DISD
request to terminate Ms. Brokaw?s contract with DISD. Ms.
Brokaw?s contract with DISD expired on August 31, 2007.
The District withdrew its proposed termination of Ms. Brokaw?s
contract on the last day of its existence.
Still pending before the DISD Judicial Council is Ms. Brokaw?s
request that her good name be cleared amid false allegations
made by DISD spokesman Celso Martinez in
the Dallas Morning News that Ms. Brokaw was incompetent in her job.
Also still pending is Ms. Brokaw?s federal civil rights
lawsuit against DISD, Dr. Hinojosa,
Martinez, and others, relating to charges that Ms. Brokaw was made
the scapegoat for the failed Pcard
program, which was suspended by Hinojosa when it came
to light that several DISD employees fraudulently abused the
use of credit cards issued by the
District.
Ms. Brokaw intends to vigorously pursue her yearlong
efforts to clear her name and to
recover damages against Hinojosa and DISD for smearing her name and
reputation in the public eye, all in an
effort to cover up high level administration officials? failures in
relation to the Pcard program. A DISD official has admitted
that Ms. Brokaw was not incompetent in the
performance of her duties as Director of Financial Control at DISD. |
Go get 'em, Sherri.
Allen Gwinn has a great commentary about all this mess on Dallas.org,
DISD Withdraws Brokaw Termination.
Ms. Brokaw is right to go forward with her action. She
was publicly
defamed by Celso Martinez, who has his own integrity issues regarding his
violating DISD residency requirements for executive level management.
See
Is
it DISD or is it Crime? |
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09/05 Betty
Culbreath:
I do not understand how
DISD cut checks, paid
bills (payroll and other expenditures)
without checking, invoices, available funds, budgeted item, expense
code,
grant or general fund and
all other general accounting practices most agencies check.
Recent salary stipends
were paid to employees that were not in
the budget; some being paid against
policy, others paid after yearly budget allocations
were spent.
How on earth do you run an organization
in that manner? If DISD were a
private company and not spending tax money,
it would be bankrupt.
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When Joe May died, some people thought I should have dropped my lawsuit against
him for the illegal campaign mailer he sent out against me during my city
council campaign in 2003. My lawsuit was not just to punish Joe May.
It was to expose the kind of stuff some political campaign operatives pull over
and over, and to stop it from happening to others in the future.
Councilman Steve Salazar (my opponent in that race) stood with me in my lawsuit
because similar tactics had been used against him in past council races.
Experienced campaign operatives cannot claim ignorance of election laws, but
they do and used to get away with their games. Most of the time wronged
candidates just don't have the resources or will to fight back and go after the
bad guys. Even those who do have the resources to take on a fight are
unwilling to do so because they don't want to look like sore losers.
If there's anything you have to put aside in public life it is fear of public
opinion or even public ridicule. Giving into either empowers and emboldens
the bad guys to do their dirty tricks again and again. Of course,
Councilman Salazar's support gave me an extra ounce of courage, but I had other
friends who stood behind me, too.
Sherri Brokaw has been very wronged by DISD officials and even
Dallas Morning News
reporting. As recently as June 12, 2007, the
DMN was pretty much
regurgitating the DISD's position of blaming the credit card abuse fiasco on
Sherri Brokaw. If you go to the link below, you will see the
DMN reporter was
still claiming they broke the credit card abuse story. Allen Gwinn broke
the story on Dallas.org.
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The Dallas school administrator who oversaw the district's defunct credit card program could lose her job, in part, over the unauthorized purchase of an office refrigerator.
The administrator, Sherri Brokaw, is accused of ordering a subordinate to buy the refrigerator with a co-worker's credit card ? a violation of district policy, which prohibited employees from using each other's charge cards. As the top official in charge of the program, Mrs. Brokaw used poor judgment in breaking the very rules her department was supposed to enforce, the district contends.
That allegation and others were raised Monday during an administrative hearing arising from the Dallas Independent School District's efforts to terminate Mrs. Brokaw's contract. She's fighting the allegations, and Monday's hearing was called to determine whether the district has "due cause" to fire her.
The hearing ended without a conclusion. It will be continued sometime next week, when Mrs. Brokaw will have an opportunity to respond to the allegations. She has contended that the district provided her office with too few resources to keep up with the spending on 1,400 cards.
Such hearings are usually closed, but Mrs. Brokaw opened hers to the public.
... The district chose to renew Mrs. Brokaw's one-year contract last August, even though she was on leave and the credit card program was under investigation by district officials and the FBI.
... Beyond the systemic problems, district officials contend that Mrs. Brokaw should be fired for certain actions, such as her decision to disable automated e-mail alerts for some district managers. The alerts notified administrators when subordinates made charges, but investigators found that the alerts had been disabled for more than 100 managers.
... James Murphy, Mrs. Brokaw's attorney, argued that the automated alerts were useless because they sometimes arrived months after purchases were made and contained little information that managers would find useful, such as what was bought.
... Once the hearing ends, the three-member panel hearing Mrs. Brokaw's case has three weeks to rule on whether the district has "due cause" to terminate the contract. If the panel rules in favor of the administration, Mrs. Brokaw can appeal to a committee of the school board.
... During fiscal 2004-05, for example, spending hit $17.9 million. But even with so much money involved, the recent investigation found that the program was "haphazard at best and sloppy in execution."
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This is why Sherri Brokaw must
go forward with her lawsuit. She was falsely accused of being responsible
for the credit card fiasco when she was never given the resources to do her job.
There is nothing I can think to say positive about Dr. Hinojosa.
Initially, I was pleased that a DISD alum had come back to fix the system, but
that enthusiasm did not last long. Here are just a few of my problems with
Dr. H:
1. He let public school facilities be used for the benefit of three
trustees who support him when they were up for re-election.
2. He has not taken any responsibility for the poor procedures that
allowed for the credit card abuse to happen.
3. He did not forcefully deal with the public lying by Celso Martinez (see
Is
it DISD or is it Crime?)
regarding Martinez's lack of residency inside the DISD boundaries. Sarah
Dodd just nailed the smarmy liar. Boy, I wish she was still reporting, but
she's got bigger and more positive stuff happening in her life these days.
4. He obviously has no management or administration skills.
5. He surrounds himself with other macho-women haters who reinforce his
bad attitude toward White women.
Please don't take my support of Ms. Brokaw as complete affirmation of her
actions in the credit card abuse. I don't know if there is more that she
could have done to blow the whistle on the situation. I do know that in a
bloated bureaucracy like the DISD no one really cares about saving taxpayer
money or whether it's wasted. She was damned if she went public and is
being damned now that she didn't.
A friend who works for a county agency in another county once told me about some
stuff she had to do because of year end budget constraints, about spending all
of the department's budget so the Commissioners would not reduce their budget
for the next fiscal year. It is pretty standard thinking in governmental
bureaucracies and even large companies.
It's exactly why small companies should never hire people who worked for the
government or large corporations. People get so accustomed to perks and
shortcuts, and they don't understand there is a bottom to the well.
Someone from a large law firm with bloated staff of support flunkies will have a
tough time working in a small law office where everyone has to multi-task and do
the big and little jobs -- and watch the bottom line.
Dr. H's complete failure as DISD Superintendent is testament to the need to hire
someone with a corporate background to manage the DISD's Multi-Billion Dollar
operations. Hire an educator to be the Assistant Superintendent.
Being a good teacher, which Dr. H may once have been, is not a qualification for
running an organization the size of the DISD. Just paying someone a huge
salary does not give them the skills needed for the job. With the kind of
money we have wasted on Dr. H and Lounge Lizard Rojas, we could have hired a
professional manager who had some concept of REAL MONEY.
Dr. H is a professional bureaucrat who has never worked in the private sector.
His entire career has been financed by taxpayers, for whom he has shown complete
disrespect. What's the old saying? You can't get respect if you
don't give it!
I admit to being biased in Ms. Brokaw's favor because I know and trust her
attorney, James Murphy. Just as importantly, I am biased in her favor
because of the people who hung her out to dry -- DISD Superintendent Dr.
Hinojosa and Celso Martinez.
Thanks to Sherri Brokaw's courage and self-respect, other DISD employees may not
be afraid to come forward in the future when they are put in a no-win situation
where they are given an impossible assignment without the means or staff or
resources to do it right.
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