Buffalo Board of Education A Confederacy of Abomination

Charter Supporter Rallies His Troops

Rarely have I found myself with so much to hate in a given post that I almost couldn't write it. Today my poetry club girls wanted a topic or theme to write about so I suggested "Ambivalence." Since these are bright motivated kids they quickly dove into it. I am not enjoying the same quick acceleration as this is beginning to remind me of why I haven't watched one episode of House of Cards, Season Two. Namely, I find all of the characters unbearably Hobbesean, insufferable and odious. Hate waits for no man as I well know though so let's get this party started.

Commencing with a crazy exchange of correspondence I tripped across in a scurrilous little blog operated by a rich kid opportunist (Matthew Ricchiazzi)from what I can gather and aided by someone named Mike Madigan whom I saw described thusly in Artvoice by the inimitable Michael Caputo (with whom I suffered through a UB class called Literary Journalism back in the Dark Ages) :  "Mike Madigan is a crazy scumbag, a lying piece of shit, completely clueless about politics, convinced 9-11 is an inside job, and clearly knows absolutely nothing about the League or much else. He's the guy who protested about abortion while selling fetal stem cells for a living. No self respecting Republican would be caught near him and I wouldn't wipe my ass with him if he was 2-ply. Fuck him."

O.k. now that we've got that ball rolling... MM and MR operate this bloggish enterprise called The Buffalo Chronicle whose gothic scripted masthead recalls the age old banner of the Courier Express or Pac's Thug Life tat depending on your frame of reference. There's definitely a right leaning odor coming off this thing but I can't say it's Republican, Caputo won't for damned sure. I can't exactly call it Libertarian either but maybe that's closer than anything else. I have recently coined the derogatory term Teapartarian to describe any sensibility that tends to towards anger, intolerance, excessive violent over reaction and am irrational execration towards anything that could be construed as "liberal" or "Democrat." Tom Bauerle, pm drive time rightie of WBEN AM's suggestion that the Canadian government videotape the Ottawa shooter's body being stuffed inside of a pig carcass and interred somewhere on the steppes of Manitoba is a good example of the Teapartarian pulse. This, according to Tom is meant to offend his recently converted Islamic sensibilities and deny him a respectful burial. As it were.

The "Who Do I Hate More?" daisy petals begin to fall with one of Carl Paladino's (School Board member, Charter School Landlord to the 3rd power with no less than 2 more charter leasees in the pipeline) lawyers sending a Buffalo School Principal a letter on Paladino's Law firm stationery and identifying herself as a lawyer using an Ellicott Development email address. The contents of the letter essentially challenge the Principal for telling a parent active in the Opt Out movement that she is no longer welcome on school grounds. Oh wait now. I do think Carl is a scumbag but where does this Principal get off telling a parent such illegal, bullying garbage? The Principal in question, Tonja Williams, served as administrator of Home Instruction for a few years, a  job usually given to someone of marginal talent with a few years until retirement. I am not aware of her chops as a Principal nor her acquisition of that City Hall shortcut doctorate the dreaded EdD by which one is able to ascend the payscale without incurring much of the edification ordinarily involved in a real doctoral program. As director of H.I. she existed on paper but operated in full stealth mode invisibility and nobody was calling her "Doctor."

To fully enjoy the byzantine depths of invidiousness of both sides in this ping pong of the malignancy one should really read the exchange in all its  putrid entirety HERE. If you fear for the moments of your life you will surrender and never get back I can tell you the Principal forwarded the letter to the Board of ed attorney's office who then wrote back to the Carl's employee who forwarded that letter to Carl who responded to the Board's attorney asking:

Rashondra, I would assume you have some unusual  legal basis for your response.  The State allowed opt out.  What did Mary Bishop (parent)  do wrong?  Does Tanya Williams set her own policies?

I found this pretty reasonable even coming from a guy who sent horse porn to his friends. The Board lawyer responds and CC's Interim Superintendent Ogilve as well as all the other Board Members. And now, it is, as they say on the corner, officially "ON BITCHES!"

Nevergold calls out Carl for using an employee from his private practice to essentially intimidate an employee of the school district for which he serves as a board member. She exhorts Carl's Majority Ally James Sampson the current Board President to address the matter. At this point Carl is out of rational cards to play so he creates a verbal mural like one of those bizarre billboards he slaps up along the 90 downtown on the side of his building. I think the last one was Brian Higgins dancing marionette like on Pelosian strings. Here is the Carl money shot in all its glory:


Ms. Nevergold, you never cease to amaze me.

You have in the past looked the other way when your sisters Ms Cottman and Cassandra Wright acted as the sisterhood muscle to intimidate those teachers at Bennett who dared to speak up at a Board meeting to denounce the incompetent Principal.

Now you complain and blindly defend when one of your sisters is asked why she ignored State Law giving parents the right to opt out of testing and why she imposed sanctions on a parent. In the recent past, the Administration had been impossible to approach, incompetent, dysfunctional and not transparent. As a result,  many parents, administrators and others contact Board members with their problems. We get a huge amount of complaints and I try to answer every one of them.  My assistants always carry themselves professionally.   In this case, I was approached by a parent regarding an incompetent principal, who achieved tenure only by way of chicanery, administered the lowest rated priority school in the district.  She is so unskilled that it has been necessary to pay a full time assistant to follow her around and tell her what to do. She had specifically instructed teachers not to take attendance.  Violence is rampant because there is very little discipline.  She is obviously part of the sisterhood friends and family club.  She was given a fraudulent, exaggerated and incomplete APPR and recommendation for tenure by a Chief of School Leadership who has in the past lied, schemed and acted as the muscle for the past majority/present minority. Intending to respond, I was in the process of getting both sides of the story necessary to do so.

You should find something else to do with your time.  Any Board member who would take money and support from the union, the chief adversary of the Board, and not see it as a conflict is seriously lacking in good judgment.  Your actions opposing matters involving charter schools clearly indicate that you are a pawn of Phil Rumore.  If you really wanted to help the kids you would get Rumore to give up the management prerogative that paralyses the Administration’s ability to function.  You refused to appoint me to the Joint Schools Construction Board when I was the only person on the Board of Ed who had any experience in Construction and now we find that the real reason for not appointing me was that you and Florence Johnson violated the public trust as fiduciaries and were complicit with others to deny transparency on the lack of any reasonable due diligence before certifying payments to the Program Manager during the entire term of the 12-year $1.4 billion contract.  Although the lack of such reasonable due diligence and oversight demands a complete and through independent audit that any knowing and responsible fiduciary would recognize, you chose to lead the minority of the Board to vote against the audit.  Your motivations are highly suspect.  Last year when the Board was considering the discharge of Pamela Brown, you , as President of the Board, conspired to pack the Board meeting with your friends and family club and allow a number of your trained activist friends to spew venom and racist remarks at me during the public speaking portion of the meeting.

I recognize that it is difficult to become irrelevant but the system failed dramatically under the watch of you and your former majority cohorts’.  You are blind to your incompetence and the dysfunction that your racist and union oriented  attitudes brought to the Buffalo Public Schools.  You are obviously more interested in enjoying the power of the office than doing anything positive for the kids.  You should resign.

The Sorority Majority has pretty much been rendered toothless by the May election results where Carl's developer pal and former part owner of the Sabres Larry Quinn breezed into office on a "throw the bums out and bring in the rich connected white guys" ticket. The Sorority Majority were a shiftless, cronyistic and race driven coven, make no mistake. The real damage they did was in creating an "Anyone but Them Mentality" among the 2% of people who actually vote in school board elections. Nobody bothered to ask why Larry Quinn all of a sudden gives a flying fuck about education. Nor did they ever ask Patty Bowers Pierce if she'd ever had an original idea in her vacuous head or if her only contribution to the children of B-Lo would be to vote however Quinn, Sampson and Carl told her to vote. Nobody gave a shit. All voters wanted was to unload this corrupt, self serving, race card playing Sisterhood as Carl loves to call them. They chalked up a 6 year reign of terror hiring thug jackass James Williams and two more years of circling the edu-drain under Pamela Pearls Brown, PhD Harvard. They stuffed their faces on catered meals before and during meetings, they took trips to conferences other members described as shopping and restaurant tours with no report on the conference materials and no feedback to other members who weren't part of their junkets. They hired multiple unqualified incompetents and ran off Amber Dixon a competent knowledgeable Super because she wasn't black. And now they've made it possible for a cadre of moneyed pompous asses to start making deals with Rookie Commissioner King, with Frank McGuire and likely Steve Polowitz and his Chameleons as well. Word has it Eva Destruction and her Suckcess Academy is probing the possibility of a Buffalo franchise. The Sorority Majority's legacy of sucking continues even though their own influence is dead and gone. As I told you a while ago, there is almost too much here to adequately despise all of it. But we'll give it a shot.