CURMUDGUCATION: LA: Buying a School Board

CURMUDGUCATION: LA: Buying a School Board:

LA: Buying a School Board

Danielle Dreilinger of the Time-Picayune and NOLA.com published an incredible story last week,outlining how some businessmen worked to buy themselves some members of the Jefferson Parish School Board in the 2010 election.

The Times-Picayune/NOLA.com had to sue its way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, but the  eventual result was 285 pages of emails from the government account of Lucien Gunter, former executive director of the public Jefferson Economic Development Commission and the private Jefferson Business Council and Committee for a Better Jefferson. Those emails leave no doubt that some business interests set out to push the teachers union aside, put their own people on the board, and make sure that their elected people did as they were told.

The time lag is due in part to a suit by one of Gunter's correspondents to keep the emails from being released, a suit that resulted in emails that were released, but with many private citizen names redacted. Dreilinger does not mention it, but I'm willing to bet that the lawsuits have also resulted in some government in-service training on How Not To Use Your Government Email Illegally For Your Own Private Baloney.

Journalists have done a lot of digging through those pages, and I recommend that you read the full article for the whole ugly picture. But here are some of the uglier parts.

The coalition, which called itself the "Enough Is Enough" coalition was led and coordinated by Jim Garvey, an elected member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In fact, in a "white paper" written by the business interests, he was called "the leader of their 'Strike Force'" Think about that for a second-- an elected member of the state education board conspiring with CURMUDGUCATION: LA: Buying a School Board: