Saturday, August 28, 2010

Ballot Synopses completed August 27, 2010

The King County Prosecutor's office completed the required Ballot Synopses for the recall on August 27, 2010.

Here are those documents.

Note #8: The Board and the District have not implemented sufficient policies and controls to ensure compliance with state law, its own policies, and findings of the Washington State Auditor.

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The District has retained Lawrence B. Ransom of Karr Tuttle Campbell of Seattle to challenge the sufficiency of the recall. A hearing without oral argument will take place on September 10, 2010 to determine if Mr. Ransom's intervention is appropriate.

There will be a hearing on September 23, to determine if the evidence for recall is sufficient and then determination regarding the wording of the Ballot Synopses.

Note: The Ballot Synopses wording is directly from the Washington State Auditor's reports in 2010.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

August 25, 2010 UpDate + Conflict of Interest?

"Joan Sias"

Just got a call from the deputy prosecuting attorney who is responsible for processing the recall petition.

She said the draft ballot measure is ready. .......

Information: The district has indicated that it intends to file a request to "intervene" in this case, which means that they will have their own lawyer file a brief and, at the hearing, will make arguments against the recall. The amount of time we will have to review the district's arguments (their brief) prior to the hearing date will depend on which of the three options we agree to.

Three options.
1. Ask for hearing to occur in within 15 days of today, as required by statute. In this case, the hearing will be assigned to a different judge. we will have fewer days to review the district's brief prior to the scheduled hearing date.

2. Agree to a hearing date as currently scheduled Sept 14. The hearing time is 4 pm.

3. Agree to a hearing date in week of Sept 20 - Sept 24. With this option, we will get the most time to review and prepare response to District's brief, and then we might also be able to get a hearing scheduled during school hours (to get a hearing scheduled during school hours was a convenience I had requested of Janine when I talked to her last week)..
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"The district has indicated that it intends to file a request to "intervene" in this case."

This district action seems to be awfully close to a conflict of interest.

This seems typical of the complete lack of accountability to the public that is a hallmark of the Goodloe-Johnson administration. The District is using District resources to individually assist "Five" school directors in resisting a "Recall Attempt", which is based entirely upon the State Auditor's Reports.

How much money are members of the public expected to expend to hold "five" School Board Members accountable for failure to do their jobs?


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Note the 5 directors under Recall are the same five that voted 5-2 to extend Dr. Goodloe-Johnson's contract from two additional years to three just one day after the release of the State Accountability Audit that was among the worst ever received by any school district.