Friday, April 27, 2007

Here's how the Cox Collaborative plays the game

The San Diego Union Tribune hides the wrondoing of public officials it likes. But the SDUT did give a perfect description of how those officials go about their business in the first paragraph of an article on April 22, 2007:

"San Diego County Officials aren't actively helping the Chargers find a new stadium site--they met only once with team representatives last year--yet since September they've paid $109,787 to two consultants who specialize in stadium deals."

The SDUT article goes on to note that a "one-hour phone call at a cost of $585" was part of the bill for something the county supervisors pretend NOT to be working on.

Gee whiz, you don't think Greg Cox and the all-Republican board of supervisors is trying to steer a stadium deal to Chula Vista, where his wife is mayor, do you? These consultants, who cost an average of $506 per hour, won't steer the Chargers away from cities with Democratic mayors, will they? Well, if they do, it's probably good for the Democrats. The Chargers have a tendency to drain money from any city that builds them a stadium.

San Diego County Supervisor Greg Cox pays public money to lawyers to get him what he wants, but pretends he himself is not involved. This is exactly how his wife, Cheryl Cox, operated in Chula Vista Elementary School District with her lawyers
Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz.

The Cox Collaborative sets up lawyers with an assignment, then continues to channel public money to those lawyers while looking the other way. A public employee is appointed as go-between so that the Coxes don't have to communicate directly with the lawyers. They can claim ignorance of all the dirty deeds--unless someone actually provides the Coxes with the proof of the misdeeds.

The Coxes were provided with proof that Daniel Shinoff and Kelly Angell (AKA Minnehan) obstructed justice and suborned perjury on Cheryl Cox's behalf. Rather than investigate, Cheryl Cox said that the lawyers had told her not to talk about the matter.

Cute little scheme, isn't it? Greg and Cheryl aren't as dumb as they pretend to be. They are, however, every bit as secretive and dishonest as they appear to be.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Why a new system for evaluating employees is needed

During over twenty years of teaching at CVESD, I noticed that some teachers use every available opportunity to work themselves up into a lather as they attack the reputations of innocent children, administrators, parents, and fellow teachers. These hostile teachers would do a better job in the classroom if they focused on improving themselves instead of destroying others, and on the talents and possibilities of students and their fellow employees instead of false and damaging gossip.

Principals are influenced by teachers who use every available opportunity to sit in the principal’s office and promote themselves and make demands about how children and other teachers should be treated. The best teachers spend these times working on lesson plans, but this causes them to lose political power.

In Chula Vista Elementary Schools, good teachers are sometimes pushed out of schools to please teachers who practice personal politics. For example, Luci Fowers was pushed out of Castle Park Elementary when the principal’s decision to move Nikki Perez didn’t go over well with powerful teachers. And Heather Coman was pushed out by Robin Donlan because Robin and her friends didn't think Heather supported their "Kingdoms" program. A majority of teachers voted to get rid of the program before Heather was pushed out, and again after Heather left. So why was she targeted? Because she had low seniority. They did it because they could. Robin Donlan demanded that she be allowed to bump Heather out of her position. Then, when her victim was gone, Robin "decided" she didn't want the position after all.

Good principals are also pushed out of Chula Vista Elementary Schools, because they resist the pressure of destructive teachers. This is why Henry Manriquez was pushed out of Harborside. He didn't show proper deference to the Queen Bee of the school. When I heard that Dwight Sykes was a good principal at Kellogg, I knew his days were numbered. I never heard anything bad about him, but I wasn't surprised when Lowell Billings ousted him. Billings behaved differently toward Sykes' predecessor, who did have black marks against him that were frequently discussed in the district. Billings promoted Hall to the district office.

It would improve education if personnel decisions were made without political pressure.

A new, unbiased system needs to be devised to evaluate teachers and principals. Most elementary school principals have no idea how their teachers actually perform in the classroom, and most district administrators have no idea how principals actually perform at their schools. The district administrators often rely on the same destructive teachers that principals rely on to tell them who to fire.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Chula Vista Police Department 2005-06 hoax on behalf of Cheryl Cox to cover up CVESD crimes

Chula Vista is not the place to go if you are looking for equal protection of the law. It makes a big difference to the CVPD if you're a Republican or Democrat. Republicans like Cheryl Cox get help from the CVPD in covering up crimes and other wrongdoing.

On the other hand, a Democratic employee of the City of Chula Vista who took two hours off work to spy on a Cheryl Cox fundraiser has been charged by Bonnie Dumanis with perjury for not admitting he was doing political work on the job.

There's a lot of political work being done on the job in Chula Vista, but you don't hear much about the work done by Republicans in the police department.

The Chula Vista Police Department is a friend of Cheryl Cox, who was a Chula Vista Elementary school board member before she was elected mayor. The CVPD failed for over a year to investigate a financial crime at Castle Park Elementary School reported in 2005. Why? The CVPD has a knee-jerk policy of covering up wrongdoing by Cheryl Cox and Chula Vista Elementary School District.

In 2006 I pursued a public records request for months before the CVPD admitted that it had a record of a police visit to Castle Park Elementary on April 21, 2001. When they decided I wasn't likely to go away, I finally received a copy of the Castle Park Elementary School "call" report.*

But the Chula Vista Police Department was doing a lot more than illegally hiding public records in its efforts to support Cheryl Cox's campaign for mayor of Chula Vista in 2006.

Between 2000 and 2006 a long string of crimes had been committed at Castle Park Elementary. Cheryl Cox and CVESD committed bigger and bigger crimes to prevent the exposure of earlier, smaller crimes and violations of law committed at Castle Park Elementary in 2000 and 2001.

See "Castle Park Elementary," "Teacher Reports," and "Law Enforcement" at MAURALARKINS.COM (link available on this blog's link list).

In 2005-2006, the most newsworthy crime being covered up by the CVPD and the media to protect Cheryl Cox and the CVESD school board was the embezzlement of about $20,000 from the Castle Park Elementary PTA.

Apparently fearing that this crime would eventually become public knowlege, perhaps because it was being reported by this blog and the San Diego Education Report website, the Chula Vista Police Department seems to have developed a plan in November 2006 to create the appearance that it was no longer covering up the embezzlement. Of course, by November 7, 2006, the election was over. The cover-up was successful. Larry Cunningham crowed that voters had seen throught the lies of his opponents. The truth is that the voters saw almost nothing because Larry and Cheryl had spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to cover up crimes and other violations of law at CVESD.

The police asked former Castle Park PTA president Kim Simmons to come in the CVPD office, where she was interviewed and arrested. Was Simmons arrested after a careful investigation? No, the CVPD does not carefully investigate incidents that might embarrass Cheryl Cox and the school board. CVPD arrested Kim Simmons simply to create the impression that they weren't covering up Castle Park crimes, and passed on their humble efforts to District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis.

What did Bonnie Dumanis do? Prosecute the crime? Not likely. Just as she had refused to prosecute CVESD Assistant Superintedent Richard Werlin for obstruction of justice, she also refused to prosecute Kim Simmons.

Why? Maybe because Kim Simmons knew too much about crimes at Castle Park Elementary.

Did I mention that Kim Simmons was a close friend of transferred teacher Robin Donlan, a member of a powerful teacher clique at Castle Park Elementary that received a great deal of support form local papers when she and several other teachers were transferred out of the school?

Robin Donlan and her friends created a bizarre brouhaha, in which they and the media attacked the principal of Castle Park Elementary without ever mentioning the crimes of which Donlan had been accused. The truth was that the principal was attacked for daring to challenge the authority of the "family" that had created a crime wave at the school.

In October 2004, Kim Simmons entered a Castle Park Elementary classroom, and asked to use the school phone during class time so she could call up Robin Donlan and ask for instructions on how to proceed with her attacks on the principal of the school. The teacher gave permission, and took the opportunity to explain to her students that she was "mad at the principal." (There has been a dearth of professionalism at Castle Park Elementary since this "Castle Park Family" teacher group took over.)

Kim Simmons, along with Gina Boyd, the president of the teacher union, and school site council President Felicia Starr were working with transferred teacher Robin Donlan to get rid of the first principal who had had the nerve to stand up to the arbitrary power of the group of teachers who ruled the school.

What was Cheryl Cox's role in all this? She and all the other board members authorized the payment of hundreds of thousands of public dollars to Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz law firm to represent Robin Donlan and cover up the crimes initiated by her and Assistant Superintendent Richard Werlin and several other CVESD officers and employees in 2000 and 2001. After fostering perjury and other crimes, and using huge sums of public money to keep bad teachers in power, Cheryl Cox ran for mayor on a platform of "charater" and "fiscal responsibility."

The San Diego Union Tribune has maintained to this day a complete black-out regarding crimes committed by Robin Donlan, Richard Werlin, Cheryl Cox and others at CVESD. On November 17, 2006 the SDUT published a small article about the arrest of former PTA Kim Simmons. The story immediately went into "partially hidden" status in the Union-Tribunes archives. (If someone does a signonsandiego search for "castle park PTA Simmons," he'll get a message back saying "No articles found.) The article can only be found by leaving "simmons" out of the search. If you already know about Kimberlee Simmons, the San Diego Union Tribune doesn't want you to know more.

Of course, there has been no follow-up to the SDUT story. But there should be--because the story created the false impression that the police were actually intending to do something about crime at Castle Park Elementary. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The police waited until Cox was elected, and then they did their hoax arrest, but Kim Simmons was never charged with anything.

When wil the SD Union Tribune publish the full story, revealing Kim Simmons' close association to Robin Donlan and the "Castle Park Five"? When will the San Diego Union Tribune apologize for so maliciously attacking the honorable and decent principal of Castle Park Elementary on behalf of Robin Donlan, Kim Simmons, and the rest of their clique, after the group was found to be responsible for yet another crime after the SDUT had written so much on its behalf? How about it, Don Sevrens?

The SDUT November 2006 story about Simmons arrest was published to create the impression that Bonnie Dumanis and the Chula Vista Police Department are not covering up crimes involving Cheryl Cox and Castle Park Elementary School. It appears that Simmons wasn't really the fall guy; she was actually the pretend fall guy.

Bonnie Dumanis, why don't you investigate the use of public resources for political purposes at CVPD? Why don't you investigate crimes at Chula Vista Elementary School District, including perjury by Cheryl Cox and Robin Donlan? Or do you only use the public resources under your control to investigate Democrats?


*The police "call' report that was hidden for months by the CVPD revealed Assistant Superintendent Richard Werlin's attempt to silence a teacher who had suggested that the media might investigate what was happening at the school in 2001. The teacher clearly knew nothing about the media in San Diego. The San Diego Union Tribune, the Chula Vista Star-News and La Prensa still have not reported those crimes, although all three newspapers have long known about them. These three publications exposed their lack of journalistic ethics when they published a deluge of letters, articles and editorials defending the teacher, Robin Colls/Donlan who initiated the crime wave! All three papers were incensed when Robin Colls was transferred from Castle Park Elementary. Richard Werlin, who called the police when the teacher mentioned the media, didn't correctly estimate the power of his Chula Vista Elementary School Board bosses, including Cheryl Cox, to silence the media. Werlin did go on to achieve a certain amount of notoriety for his use of the police to silence teachers. He had second-grade teacher Jenny Mo arrested in front of her students at his new school district in Richmond, California this year when the teacher went to the media with a story about bullying at her school. Of course, Werlin didn't step up and take the credit/blame for the arrest. He let the principal sit in the hot seat. He took indefinite sick leave from his position.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Cheryl Cox gets away with suborning perjury, but gets young man indicted for taking time off work

It must feel pretty heady for Chula Vista mayor Cheryl Cox to get away with suborning perjury (click here to see one such case involving Cheryl Cox) and at the same time be able to get District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis to prosecute someone who tried to take a picture of her for this rarely-prosecuted crime. Cheryl has played rough for a long time, but she turns out to be more vindictive than I had imagined.

Cheryl approved the actions of her favorite law firm, Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz on behalf of CVESD. (This is Leslie Devaney's firm, to which the City of Chula Vista, of which Cox is mayor recently awarded a cozy settlement in the Madigan case.) Cheryl's decisions as school board member put extreme pressure on two law officers to commit perjury. When she received an official complaint about the crimes of Rick Werlin, San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis decided it was okay for Richard Werlin to commit obstruction of justice on behalf of Chula Vista Elementary School District.

But it's a different story when the shoe is on the other foot. Bonnie kowtowed to Cox and brought felony charges against a young man who tried to photograph Cox with Cox's disgraced family friend David Malcolm. This young man's actions pale in comparison to those of Cheryl Cox and CVESD. Bonnie claims the young man committed perjury when he said he had taken leave from his job to go to the Cox political fundraiser, where Cox and Malcolm were socializing. Bonnie says the young man was actually being paid by the City of Chula Vista at the time he was at the Cox luncheon.

For Cheryl Cox, having political power means she is above the law.

It is clear that Bonnie's prosecution of Jason Moore is politically motivated. Perjury is, sadly, an extremely common crime in our legal system. Cox's former lawyers, Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz, use it as a knee-jerk perjury response to true allegations. Naturally, Bonnie Dumanis refused to investigate the felonies of Cheryl Cox and Rick Werlin.

Am I the only one who believes that Cox uses public money to achieve her own personal and political goals? Apparently not.

On November 2, 2006, the San Diego Union Tribune published these comments by Sharon Floyd:

"Candidate Cheryl Cox refuses to acknowledge the ties she has to David Malcolm, former Chula Vista council member and port commissioner who was jailed for corruption. Records show that she has taken tens of thousands of dollars from Malcolm.

"Cox has been a paid lobbyist, not only for developers who have business with the city, but also casinos, trucking companies and liquor stores.

"Cox likes high-rises. Her family had a deposit on a condominium in the now infamous EspaƱada project."

Cox also approves of stretching the truth when she's not under oath. After wasting hundreds of thousands of tax dollars in Chula Vista to achieve her personal and political goals, including doing business with builders who channelled money to her campaign, she had the nerve to run for mayor of Chula Vista on a platform of fiscal responsibility and character issues. Clearly, Cox cares more about her own power than she does about the education of children, fiscal responsibility, or the law.

Cheryl Cox also put the Sheriff of Santa Barbara in a difficult position when she covered up crimes at CVESD. Cheryl weaved a tangled web of deceit after deciding to cover up Robin Doig/Colls/Donlan's crimes at Castle Park Elementary. Robin's brother and his boss, Commander Sam Gross, were pressured to commit perjury by Cox's decision.

Deputy District Attorney Patrick O'Toole, San Diego Union Tribune reporter Tanya Mannes and the grand jury involved in the Cox case will, if they have any interest in equal application of the law or journalistic ethics, take note of proof of perjury by the Sheriff of Santa Barbara to help Cheryl Cox cover up crimes.
They will also look at supporting pleadings in this perjury case, which was thrown out because plaintiff did not correctly plead the alteration or destruction of documents.

Did you know that there is one--and only one--crime that anyone can commit and not be liable for civil damages. It is perjury. You have to have power to get someone prosecuted for perjury. The reason for this is, of course, that perjury is committed all the time at the behest of many lawyers and by witnesses who want to cover up wrongdoing. The only time such perjury is litigatible is when documents are destroyed or altered. Such destruction of documents occurred at Chula Vista Elementary School District when Cheryl Cox voted to violate the law and cover up crimes.