You would think the sky is falling with all the noise about how Gilbert Public Schools is going to the dogs because a few administrators are leaving ahead of a new superintendent taking over the district. We call it a clean sweep of assistant superintendents who are self-selecting for their own departures.
That’s right, all four assistant superintendents will be gone by June 30, 2014. Westie will stay on top of oversight, though, having learned how much damage these short-timers can still inflict on GPS. We recently learned about a new ton of bricks that’s about to fall on GPS, which might explain some of the so-called exodus clean sweep, along with police investigations and recent revelations of wrongdoing.
We have new information for you about one of the administrators who self-selected to skedaddle: Vicki Hester. It was fortuitous that she landed a job in the Mesa School District at just the right time … before the news hit about another police report and drugs endangering students at Meridian Elementary School. Meridian is the GPS school that Vicki Hester is leaving; she’ll be principal at Salk Elementary School in Mesa, a smaller school in a diverse community. Salk’s current principal, Dr. Karla Carlson, is retiring. Hey, lookie here: Vicki Hester finally gets the A+ School designation she so craved! Too bad someone else earned it and Vicki Hester just inherits it.
The news about drugs endangering students at Meridian Elementary School comes from a parent, who tried time and again to work with GPS top dogs and with Vicki Hester. The parent encountered the usual GPS reaction to something they didn’t want to hear: “Go ahead, file your claim!” We very helpfully attached to this post a copy of the police report and the parent’s Notice of Claim against GPS.
The Notice of Claim is a formality required by Arizona law. The process was intended to open communication and head off litigation, but GPS admins ignore Notices of Claim. That’s not what the legislators envisioned when they wrote this law, but that’s what it has become. Members of the Governing Board are routinely told to ignore Notices of Claim. They all go to ASRRT, The Trust, to be litigated from Day One. “We don’t want to walk all over somebody when they don’t deserve it,” Good Old Mike Tiffany said in a recent board meeting. Obviously, if someone files a Notice of Claim, The Trust and the GPS GOBs believe that citizen truly deserves the fire and brimstone issued by the Lawyers’ Perpetual Employment Society,BS the lawyers who work for “The Trust.”
The story of what happened at Meridian Elementary School is pretty much the same old thing from the usual suspects, according to the Notice of Claim. A child brought narcotics to school, because a parent put them in a pill bottle in a lunch box. When the claimant parent discovered that 30 narcotic pills had been issued, but only one was in the bottle discovered in the lunch box after school, the claimant parent sounded the alarm with Principal Vicki Hester. For all the claimant parent knew, the child had taken the entire bottle to school without any supervision. Who knows what could have happened if the child had ‘shared’ with classmates? Being unable to contact the other parent quickly, the claimant parent called the Mesa Police and Mesa Fire Department to help determine the extent of the emergency in terms of the child’s health. Then, the claimant parent addressed the situation with Meridian Principal Vicki Hester.
The claimant parent was rightfully upset, because only days before Vicki Hester had told both parents how the narcotic drug could be administered at school, and it certainly wasn’t by letting the young student self-administer a pill from a lunch box. There was a strict procedure to be followed, involving the child’s health care provider and the school nurse. The parent was to bring the prescribed drug to the school nurse personally, not send in a bottle in a lunch box that was never delivered to the nurse. Vicki Hester told the claimant parent, “The school has a zero tolerance policy, which prohibits a child from bringing illicit drug(s) to school, so be rest assured the school will follow procedure.”
Obviously, the discovery of the pill bottle in the child’s lunch box meant the zero tolerance policy had been totally ignored by one parent. The claimant parent was not only angry, but terribly worried that Meridian students had been endangered, especially if 30 or so pills were missing. The claimant parent asked to have the entire school notified that narcotic drugs had been brought to school and lost by a child who had just begun taking the medication and was oblivious to the drug’s strength and danger. Notifying all parents could have quickly established whether other students had acquired any of the missing pills. Doing this would have made Vicki Hester look pretty bad as a principal, though. Want to guess what happened next?
The claimant parent says the other parent is “friends” with Vicki Hester, so the whole thing was swept under the rug. The parent who sounded the alarm didn’t hear from Vicki Hester, who apparently relied on assurances from the friend-of-Vicki parent rather than investigate and report. The friend-of-Vicki parent claimed two pills were in the bottle that was sent to school with the child. Vicki Hester later said it was only one pill, so nothing to see here, folks.
The parent says that with a zero tolerance policy, the student should have been expelled. This shouldn’t be so hard for the claimant parent. School principals should be able to navigate a smart course to keep both parents involved in their children’s education. The principal should be as concerned as the parent about keeping students safe while they are at school. But this is Meridian Elementary School in GPS, where policies and procedures seem to depend on who is involved.
The upset claimant parent contacted Superintendent Jack Keegan, Assistant Superintendent Shane McCord and Administrative Services Director Joyce Meyer, all of whom apparently refused to get involved or investigate or do any of the Very Important Things that they usually do in the big white district office building. Now we all know that Jack, Shane and Joyce are flying the GPS chicken coop, so it’s pretty easy to understand they didn’t want to get involved. It appears Vicki Hester just shrugged things off, giving one parent preferential treatment and giving the other parent the cold shoulder, with the blessing of the Top Dogs. Then Vicki Hester got busy shopping around her resume just like her supervisor did, it appears.
There’s more to this story … with GOBs, there’s always more, it seems. The claimant parent describes an incident of possible sexual misconduct at Meridian that happened a few months earlier. In that case, the claimant parent involved Good Old Jack Blanchard. According to the Notice of Claim, this was swept under the rug, too. This story may hang around for a couple of years: if litigation results, there’s a process called ‘discovery’ where details get uncovered. For example, recent lawsuits uncovered how long it took Good Old Dave Allison to destroy the paper files and delete electronic files of his superintendency.
Now that GPS has Dr. Jim Rice as Interim Superintendent, maybe he’ll look into what is going to get the district sued this time. Maybe Dr. Rice can bring some sanity and common sense into the GPS administration. Heaven knows, we’ve all been waiting for a long, long time.
Just remember, citizens of the Town of Gilbert, you could have elected Westie as Interim Superintendent! We won’t hold a grudge, though, because the GOB self-selection process occurred anyway. Bye-bye GOBs. Welcome, Breath of Spring Air, also known as Dr. Christina Kishimoto!