Making sense of an unfolding scandal

Want to read the report that the Buffalo News has been writing about for the last four days, without ever quoting from it directly? Go to AV Daily at Artvoice.com, download the PDF and read it for yourself.

Here’s what we know about the report written by Bill Kresse, the well-respected principal of City Honors, the jewel in the Buffalo Public School District’s increasingly tarnished crown:

■ Last fall, Kresse felt pressured by senior administrators Will Keresztes, Joseph Melvin, and Folasade Oladele to revert to the school’s former method for calculating GPAs. (Kresse and a task force of secondary school principals had arrived at a district-wide standard for GPA calculations in January 2007.) Keresztes’s daughter benefited from the reversion to the old formula.

■ In December, Kresse felt pressured to re-admit the daughter of then deputy county executive (and current AV columnist) Bruce Fisher by Melvin, Oladele, and school board member Chris Jacobs, despite his and his staff’s judgment that Fisher’s daughter would be better served at another school.

■ Kresse hastily wrote a report about these incidents in December at the behest of of Melvin and Superintendent James Williams.

■ The report lay fallow until two weeks ago, when rumors of its contents began to fly and news outlets—including this one—began hunting it down.

■ On Sunday the Buffalo News published a front-page story about the report and its allegations, thus identifying the two children involved—much to the consternation of Fisher and Keresztes, who both deny exercising undue influence in the affairs the report documents. (Fisher’s denial is plausible, though it’s possible influence was exerted on his behalf without his knowing about it; Keresztes’s denial seems a little thin.)

■ For his part, Kresse stands by his report, though he has indicated that he never expected it to become public.

Again, you can read the report at Artvoice.com and judge for yourself.

We’ll be examining what the report indicates about the administration of Buffalo Public Schools generally over the coming weeks.

—geoff kelly