Who is Benjamin Olagadeyo?
Who is Benjamin Olagadeyo? Or, for that matter, Samuel Taye Olagadeyo? Or Mary Olagadeyo? Or Bematolas Envinronmental Consulting, LLC? Bematolas appears to be an artificial name created out of the personal names–BEnjamin, MAry , Taye, andOLAgadeyo. Don’t you love a mystery–especially when it has something to do with the way Newark schools superintendent Cami Anderson spends public money? Help me find out the answers and I will post the results here.
What we do know is that, according to trustworthy sources, Benjmain Olagadeyo showed up at the Hawthorne Avenue school Thursday with a key to the building. He was the leader of a delegation of people who descended on the school without notice.
Those people are all in one way or another essential to Anderson’s plan to take the Hawthorne Avenue School away from the people of the city and give it–via lease, apparently–to TEAM Academy Charter schools. It’s part of Anderson’s “One Newark” plan to close neighborhood public schools and help charters like TEAM and Uncommon Schools (Northstar) increase their enrollment and polish up their brand.
TEAM Academy is run by Tim Carden of Montclair, a former business partner of Christopher Cerf who, in turn, is the former New Jersey education commissioner and a close associate of Cami Anderson who once helped run Cory Booker’s campaigns. Oh, it all gets so confusing and financially and politically incestuous that it’s almost impossible to follow. But Carden, Cerf, and Anderson all are tied up with the Christie Administration’s plan to make Newark either an educational colony run by rich white b’wanas or an educational experiment (or both) by destroying Who is Benjamin Olagadeyo? | Bob Braun's Ledger: