More McKinley High School allegations

On March 4, 2008, Ralph Hernandez, Vice President of Executive Affairs for the Buffalo Board of Education, sent a letter to State Commissioner of Education Richard P. Mills requesting an inquiry into serious allegations of wrongdoing at McKinley High School leveled by a former teacher at the school who retired last year and wished to keep her identity anonymous for fear of reprisal against relatives still working in the district.

Although Hernandez says he receives a lot of anonymous letters, this one was different due to the degree of detail included in the accusations. After sitting on the letter for two weeks, Hernandez claims his conscience led him to send the letter on to Mills, copying Superintendent James Williams and the Board of Education.

On March 6, Hernandez says he delivered the copies by hand to the appropriate Board of Education staff member, asked that she stamp them and make sure they were delivered to all the board members and the superintendent. “Then I came back the next day [March 7], and they weren’t there. She told me they’d pulled them,” Hernandez says.

On Friday afternoon, Artvoice posted redacted copies of both letters on Artvoice.com) and sent out emails to local news outlets, blogs, politicians and, for good measure, all members of the school board, alerting them to the withheld document.

On the WKBW-TV six o’clock news that evening, reporter John Borsa did a story about it. On Monday, March 10, WIVB-TV’s Rich Newberg interviewed Hernandez. By now, the story had grown to become as much about the allegations included in the anonymous letter as it was about the fact that it had been withheld from school board members to whom it was addressed.

In defense of that puzzling course of action, Stefan Mychajliw, Special Assistant to James Williams, claimed, while rolling his eyes on camera, that “The board president and the superintendent just wanted to make sure Commissioner Mills wasn’t blind-sided by one letter from one board member.”

Which begs the question: Do they understand what happens to a letter once it is sent certified mail by the United States Postal Service from Buffalo to the State Education Department in Albany? How could withholding it from board members in City Hall possibly prevent Commissioner Mills from being “blind-sided” by anything? It’s like they witnessed a leak in the dyke and in a panic chose to stick their fingers in their belly buttons in an attempt to plug it up.

In the same interview with Newberg, Mychajliw went on to say, “We have to be very, very cognizant of the proper political protocol as far as the board of education is concerned, and the one voice for the board of education is Mary Ruth Kapsiak, the Board President.”

Sounds official, but there is no such “protocol” and there is nothing preventing anyone from sending letters to Commissioner Mills. He’s a grown man and he doesn’t need the superintendent, his spokesman, or the board president to try, however unsuccessfully, to censor his mail. For her part, Board President Kapsiak denies it was she who decided to pull the letters.

Among the allegations of wrongdoing at McKinley, there is one that Mills should be able to check without too much difficulty. It involves Regents Exam Fraud in a specific 11th grade English class at the school. If in fact it is discovered that “almost every one of her students wrote the same answer to the essay question…[giving] almost identical examples in their essays,” as is alleged in the anonymous letter, it could be a starting point in an investigation of the other charges. Last year’s exams should be on file right there in Albany. It shouldn’t require a $25,000 investigation to do that much.

Buffalo News writer Peter Simon covered the story as well on page B3 of the Wednesday, March 12 issue of the paper. In it, he quotes Mills’ spokesman Tom Dunn as saying, “Ordinarily, anonymous letters don’t have the same weight as signed letters from identifiable people.”

On March 11, Dunn told me, “It’s an anonymous letter, and we’re studying it.” I asked when I should call back to see what they’d learned from their studies. He said, “Umm...no doubt it will hit the [sigh] media when we respond.” I reminded him that I am part of the media. He said, “I would check back at the end of the week.”

As this issue of Artvoice goes to press, Hernandez is expected to question the concealment of the Mills letter from school board members until Monday, March 10, by which time two television stations had broadcast some details of the letters that had been available at Artvoice.com since March 7.

Although we all should have learned this in school, let’s remember: There is no protocol in place for contacting a public official. If you’d like to contact the State Commissioner of Education yourself, here’s that address:

Richard P. Mills

Commissioner of Education

President, University of the State of New York

State Education Department

Education Building

Albany, New York 12234

If you’d like to read the allegations yourself, you can still find a PDF of the letter from Hernandez to Mills, including the anonymous letter from the retired teacher by clicking here.