And I am hoping it is so tightly wedged that he won’t slither out of this one.
If you are here, I expect you already know about the latest crock of lies, evasions, deceits, illegalities, and violations of civil rights on the part of Wardynski and his henchmen: the May 2012 NSA tip-off (which the NSA denies) about a so-called immediate threat of danger (aka juvenile last day of school humor) with a foreign connection: one of the 100s of people following then junior Auseel Yousefi’s Twitter feed was a Yemeni (and thus, it seems, presumed to be a Muslim Jihadist terrorist) and how this tip-off led to the never-spent-a-day-on-the-battlefield retired colonel forming a surveillance project that the Board of Education maybe did or maybe didn’t know about (damn! who was responsible for delivering the scripts last week?) two months before the Yemeni non-event occurred.
There! I packed a whole lot of it into one sentence. But I am sure there is much, much more to come.
First, praise for al.com’s Challen Stephens who is doing investigative journalism! I could dance with glee. Starting with the September 24, 2014 story, “Huntsville schools say call from NSA led to monitoring students online,” and following up with an interview with Auseel Yousefi, who outed himself in the comments responding to Stephens’ first article, the subject has grown and other reporters are on board.
There are tons of issues. There’s the matter of funding, well addressed by geekpalaver:
“Off The Books Spying Program $1 Million,” “All Kids Are Our Kids” and “Wardynski Violates Board Policy.”
Oh dear, post interrupted by consideration of the beady eyed one’s proclamation, Monitoring social media part of Huntsville schools’ responsibility to keep students safe: guest opinion.
My responses follow: So Colonel, now bullying is a problem? I remember a time when it wasn’t. In October 2012 you told WAAY 31’s Shea Allen: “Bullying has been going on for a long time. There was bullying when I was a kid. But I can tell you when we look at the statistics, while its [sic] about 80 percent of what you guys talk about its [sic] only about one percent of what we see.”
Remember way back then? Same season when one girl at Butler was beat up by three other girls in a bathroom and you referred to the event as”horseplay” and suggested the victim was at fault since she was “in a bathroom 20 minutes after class“ had begun and then gave her mother all kinds of hassle before granting the child a “temporary transfer”?
Funny what you can find on the internet.
and
Oh yes, then there’s the outsourcing of alternative schooling to Pinnacle Schools. It’s so outsourced that the only mention of it on the HCS website is one sentence about athletics (“A student [sic] that is attending the Seldon Center or Pinnacle is only eligible to represent the Seldon Center or Pinnacle. A student attending the Seldon Center or Pinnacle cannot participate at any other school.” [Students are people; “that” should be “who.”]) although millions of taxpayer dollars have been funneled to Pinnacle.
Where was the concern for student safety when Julian Lorenzo Boykin, one of the guards at Pinnacle’s Huntsville campus, was charged with “torture and willful abuse of a child”?
Or when Karen Lee, owner of Pinnacle, hired her son Eric as a counselor (!) at the remote private prison (which these days you are calling a “boot camp”) AFTER young Eric was charged with felony drug trafficking AND firearms charges (confiscated weapons included “shotguns and rifles.”). Was it revealed that Eric was “outfitted to hunt ducks or deer” and so couldn’t possibly be a threat? I missed that update.
Your response: renew the contract!
If you don’t know what I am on about just hit the tag word Pinnacle.
And I’ll be back with much more.
Merts Center Monitor 