It’s just so gosh-darned HARD to be the Superintendent of Gilbert Public Schools when the public and members of the Governing Board hold you accountable for your failings and screw ups.
If you’re Christina Kishimoto, she of the famously habitual 3-2 votes and a record of mediocrity in public service, you get emotional and lash out. It’s always someone else’s fault … like the 5th grader who typed the word oral into a search engine while working on a school project about oral history traditions. Christina Kishimoto’s minions probably blame it all on that kid’s parents for letting him use a district-issued Chromebook in the first place.
The problem for Christina 3-2 Kishimoto was that parents were upset about their kids, who had been issued GPS Chromebooks and Google email accounts, were encountering pornography on those district owned and controlled electronic devices. Although parents tried time and again to explain to GPS top dogs, following the mandated chain of command, they were brushed off, they said.
Parents talked about the GPS porn problems in board meetings, in emails, in face-to-face meetings with Kishimoto’s underlings to no avail, they believed. The media picked up on the stories, which must have embarrassed Christina Kishimoto and her squad of Carpetbaggers and Scallawags, so they tried in vain to co-opt parental input.
“We’ve got Internet filters!” they cried. “Okay, so the filters didn’t work, now we’ve got new Internet filters!” they proclaimed. When irate parents used the public comment segment of board meetings to try to get their messages through, they were pretty much ignored or belittled for their obvious lack of parenting skills, since it was THEIR kids who were accessing porn. When parents asked to meet with Ms. Top Dog herself, they were stiff-armed.
A problem arose when a board member believed that Christina Kishimoto said she had met personally with parents about these Chromebook porn complaints. Later, board member Julie Smith discovered that it was Kishimoto’s underlings who *met with* parents and not Queen Christina herself, who would never deign to speak to people whose loyalty to her highness had not been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt … but we digress.
Fortunately, plenty of people know about the porn problems that GPS is having as a result of rushing 1:1 technology into the hands of junior high school students this year. How many ways can the public try to tell the clown car inhabitants that their *Digital Citizenship* crapola was not sufficient to teach junior high school students about responsible use of the Internet for scholarly purposes? The kids heard the word “Internet” and immediately began clicking on their new Chromebooks. We all know about junior high school kids and their selective listening skills. Now, GPS is learning about the kids’ selective online surfing skills, and they’re not what the GPS clown car inhabitants represented to the public. <Cue Bridget: “They never are, dear.”>
First off: BING! Sleazy Steve Smith, the GPS IT Czar, filtered out Google images. Cool move, dude! How’s that working out?
Keyboard: That’s a rhetorical question, don’t bother trying to answer. We all know that the kids just switched their search engines from Google to Bing. Duhhh…
Sleazy Steve Smith and his staff keep trying to make the case that they have more requests to UNBLOCK SITES from their filtering software than requests to blacklist sites, but we’re not buying that. Oh, and everyone is just working so darned HARD! <Channeling Mr. Wilson: Rotten kids who won’t do as they’re told…>
Getting back to the point where we digressed, Christina 3-2 Kishimoto definitively stated during the board meeting that the *spontaneous outpourings* of support for Chromebooks by GPS staff, teachers and a student absolutely were not coordinated. Christina Kishimoto went so far as to state, “we have never said that they are coordinated.” This shows just how disconnected the superintendent is from the reality of what goes on the Gilbert Public Schools. Anyone who doesn’t remember the parking lot tailgate party and thinly veiled threats of violence, the neon green tee shirts and the “sea of black and red” has a very selective memory about things in the board room not being coordinated. Right, Diane Drazinski?
We suspect this will be yet another incident where public records reveal quite the opposite of what was said in public. Perhaps Christina Kishimoto did not personally coordinate the spontaneous outpouring, but our birdies are chirping loudly that her minions did the dirty deed for Her Highness. We’ve requested a batch of emails that will prove the point. What are the chances GPS will actually allow us to review those public records sometime before the end of 2016? Hint: don’t hold your breath.
GPS seems to have a problem with truthfulness in public proclamations on various topics of interest. Take the recent violations of Open Meeting Laws, which were the subject of a two-hour OML training session earlier in November. Board President Lily Tram and Superintendent Christina Kishimoto made light of why that big old mean Attorney General staff made them study up on OML. “We forgot to put an address on an agenda,” they asserted several times. Yeah, sure, that’s why two *official* board meetings and an OML training session were taken up with this matter.
Don’t forget about the lawyer from Udall Shumway law firm who was sitting in the audience for hours during the December board meeting. Good Old Denise Lowell-Britt didn’t know much about the actual OML violations and the two letters from the Assistant Attorney General (as she emphasized when she spoke). <Critical thinking: We suspect Denise Lowell-Britt billed about a thousand dollars for that gig.>
When Good Old Charlie Santa Cruz asked if it were true that Gilbert Public Schools is no longer under investigation by the Attorney General’s office, Denise Lowell-Britt was emphatically sure that was the case. BTW, she also said that GPS had chosen the Gust Rosenfeld law firm to monitor them for six months, as the AG letter required, but if GPS wants to change lawyers, she’ll happily do the monitoring job. Somehow, we think Denise Lowell-Britt believes the job is akin to being a *hall monitor* … but that dates those of us who can remember back that far to their school days. But we digress again. By a show of hands, how many people believe GPS is no longer under investigation???
Vote!
Thumb–Yes
Index finger–Lean yes
Middle finger–Hell No
Ring finger–Lean no
Pinky–Not sure/No opinion
Don’t worry, birdies, we’ll have lots more information about how Gilbert Public Schools thumbs their noses at state laws and such that require openness and transparency, or at least some semblance thereof. You know we have the goods on The Usual Suspects. For now, let’s all go get our Christmas shopping done!