Retiring Beaverton superintendent Jerry Colonna's final salary, benefits, expenses: $303,900

http://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/index.ssf/2011/07/retiring_beaverton_superintendent_jerry_colonnas_final_salary_benefits_expenses_303900.html

Colonna cheated a lot of people. I was one.

As a commissioner on the state Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, he hired Vickie "Let's Make a Deal" Chamberlain who, with Colonna's former lawyer, Nancy Hungerford, put pedophiles back in the classroom with "pass-the-trash" deals to protect administrators' retirement packages. He paid Malcolm Dennis's health insurance when he was forced to quit at Westview HS after being caught at work drunk and he paid Amy Gordon $120, 000 for a year to stay home instead of run Southridge, because she knew too much. Oh, he paid Hungerford (secretly) over two hundred thousand education dollars to fire (and silence) me...after I had asked to quit.

He knows why Wesrtview's Gail Vangorder retired, and was rehired, and retired and is now at Lewis and Clark. He knows why Linda Borquist, Yvonne "Kickback" Katz's lieutenant, retired early and mysteriously.

And he knows who at the OEA is cheating Oregon's classroom teachers, because those folks are his buddies. One makes a lot of friends as a public employee for forty years. Especially if your school district can spend up to a half millionper incident secretly, without even telling the elected school board (See: Oregonian's Anitha Reddy 2005).

I have personal knowledge that Jerry Colonna is being paid well for work he never had to do. Administrators in Oregon face zero accountability.

www.teachingintheshadowoftheswoosh.blogspot.com

2003 Westview High School 
Freshman Lit/Comp Parents' Night
Kids from a very diverse 9th grade lit/comp class star demonstrate their talent and knowledge in a festive night created for their parents.

To Hon. Brian Clem and Hon. Matt Wingard, Oregon House of Representatives

Daily rushes from 2003 Westview High School Adv. Media original production "Wishes, Wisemen and Little Pigs"

In an effort to learn the structure of story-telling, we focused on "three's"--missing from the list in the title. (To English teachers: Do you use the 'Oxford comma' after "Wisemen"?

Brian and Matt,

Thank you.  I understand what sort of balls it takes to stand up to the Voldemort of Education but have never experienced much success so I am basking in the vicarious glow of your achievement with 2301and do not really mean "evil" : )

when I'm talking about your ethics...As a songwriter, I am learning to appreciate the value of succinctness and am in awe your powerful magic, turning 62 pages into 6.  

You would get an A in my English class if the government you were running had not stolen my license. 

Thanks,

Don 

(Just a?) teacher 

To the Oregonian:

"In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, it must be fought by a different kind of evil."
— Aereon, The Chronicles of Riddick

Beware the OEA. Seriously. Every taxpayer and human being in the state who might have kids in schools should be wary. Even the growing number of people who don't have kids in the schools but still want the neighbors' kids to have a place that employs competent people whose mission is to provide opportunities for children to become productive citizens and contributors to their communities should be frightened of the decision-makers who control the state's largest pot of disposable gold.

Why? Isn't that what really happens at schools--competent people helping guide future citizens? Hopefully. But (and this where the "Beware the OEA" comes in) if somehow the temptations of self-interest--temptations that are basically oozed by insular, well-heeled school systems--if those temptations should begin to erode the decision-making ethics of school board members or public school administrators, the destructive decay of foundational integrity can spread rapidly, virtually unseen. There may be no place outside of state capitols in our self-governed nation where so few people have so much influence over their communities as do the people who preside over all the prestige that can be conferred on school children. Those who oversee all the fields of play and all the platforms for glory--who can bestow all the honors and status of childhood achievement--are, in the lives of powerful people with children, exceptionally influential.

...AND there's usually a lot of money laying around big school districts, especially if you are self-insured and employ investors to decide whose bank all that taxpayer-money should sit in.

Lots of temptations for leaders...

If you are a teacher is such a district--as I once was in Beaverton, where the leadership was often not even opaque about personal avarice (see "Yvonne Katz")--you will be in need of strong support if ever you should challenge those perpetrators of inequity who are too often given authority in such schools.

That is why I say "Beware the OEA." The money taken from teachers' checks and sent to the OEA coffers is a never-ending flow of BIG TIME CASH that has very little to do with the people who are supplying it and much to do with the people who have access to it. When I needed the OEA (where office workers deposited my money monthly for a decade), I was betrayed and demeaned by both elected leaders and paid staff.

AND the lawyers...ESPECIALLY the lawyers, who have created a system of "justice" so empty of fairness for us poor smucks who actually go into crowded classrooms to try to teach that my stomach still hurts...years later.

So if some slick legislators in Salem--fallible folks like you and me who are supposed to do things openly--if some of them have done a little midnight rambling to remove some of the mojo from the monarchs in that fancy union-built castle near I-5, then we as a citizenry should be grateful for the effort. The need for lawmakers to be clandestine is unfortunate, but the end is justified and liberating.

Accountability and responsibility in school governance is sorely needed. Beware the OEA:

www.state
sponsoredtheft.blogspot.com

Editor's poetic title: "Public Education"

Letters to the editor: Charlie Hales, OEA, wind farms, pedestrians, July Fourth, illegal immigration

The hard-copy Oregonian, as well as this on-line version, uses the phrase "Public Education" to title Mr. Bunch's response to another letter voicing concerns about the Oregon Education Association. I could not wait to get home and write a "comment" to Mr. Bunch; I was at Starbucks very early today, as I am most days since that occasion several years ago when I needed the teachers' union I supported for 10 years.

As I drove home, I promised myself I would not use the word "screed" (oops--broken) but I am compelled to note Mr. Bunch's above-average management of well-turned phrases--the dude can write, huh? It is refreshing to see a Progressive appear cogent in print when so much of the Left's logic originates on the Comedy Channel.

Mr. Bunch and I are alike, I think, in our distrust of Libertarians, many of whom are basically anarchists with PR nuance. Where we diverge, I believe, is in our feeling about the OEA, an organization I was automatically enrolled in 1997, when I began teaching at a crowded middle school in Beaverton. My union representative, Tom Husted, sat on the board of the Beaverton Education Foundation, then run by Janet Hogue, who had an office in the Beaverton HR building.

In addition to deciding who got what money (and at Westview HS, where she ran the site committee, what space), Ms. Hogue was patron of the the Westview High drama program, whose inner membership traveled to Europe on a field trip fortuitously just before Mrs Hogue's daughter started writing essays about her significant life experiences for college admissions. Mrs. Hogue did not influence what happened at Westview as much as she owned the school.

My mention of these concerns (at an apposite venue) to the new superintendent, Jerry Colonna, earned no response from him at the time, nor from Dr. Tom Greene, who was present at this staff meeting where concerns were being discussed. However, sometime in the subsequent eight days, the Beaverton HR people (Holli Lekas was Hogue's former neighbor) got together with Husted to plan my termination, for allegations of insubordination that included a smokescreen sexual harassment charge on behalf of a librarian who, the record shows, was approached (twice) to sign a complaint.

Meanwhile, I was oblivious, teaching large classes and paying union dues, right up til the day I was locked out of my building...and then, two days later, fired a little bit more for not doing work I couldn't do.

Suddenly I had a lawyer the union had picked for me. My mother was dying, I had been cheated out of almost $20K in fair pay by unsupervised principals after doing 70-hr weeks for years and I HAD ASKED TO RESIGN. Instead the OEA got me a lawyer (Tom Doyle of Bennett Hartman) about whom, after these many years, I cannot think without being overcome by a sense of loathing.

He took my money to abuse and manipulate me because he knew he could. The OEA, for my apolitical remarks, abandoned me to the culture of secretive lawyers who enrich themselves off of education in Oregon.

Meanwhile, my district administrators secretly paid over $200K to a law firm to smear my name, damage my career and manipulate me for several years--all while the union leadership ignored my pleas for intervention. Taxation without representation leads to Tea Parties.

I worked for demonstrably poor administrators in the largest high school in our state, a low-functioning school whose administrators wasted a lot of money and time but did pretty good public relations work and knew whom to impress. When I needed a teachers' union to help me be a TEACHER--when I was hurt and vulnerable and angry--I was stabbed in the back by people whom I trusted (oops...I am afraid I will inspire Mr. Bunch to use that word "screed" again).

But betrayal is a tough pill to swallow, Mr. Bunch, especially when I see so many phonies playing golf and buying vacation homes with education money they never had to earn. So even when evil Libertarians with plots to annihilate public schooling "babble" about the OEA, I'm listening. A democracy is, by definition, a union. It is self-evident: Intelligent people accept the purpose of pooling the common wealth to achieve useful social objectives. Mr. Bunch resorts to non-sequiturs by presuming that the leaders of the "union" will not succumb to the same lure of power that unions are formed to curb (see: "Animal Farm").

So, although his letter is full of fine vocabulary, when he defends the OEA merely because its mission purports to serve something he believes in, his argument is hollow, specious and unsupported.

And the real "oxymoron" is found in the title the editor chose to place above Mr. Bunch's eloquent letter.

Don Bellairs, teacher
Oregon Education Association Fraud

June 2004 FDAB testimony of Linda Borquist, then-Associate Superintendent for Human Resources of Beaverton Schools, on her "unique" collaboration with Tom Husted, uniserve representative for the Beaverton Education Association. Husted was serving concurrently on the board of the Beaverton Education Foundation, a non-profit run by JANET HOGUE, a Westview parent with an office in the Beaverton HR building.

BORQUIST'S SWORN TESTIMONY JUNE 2004:

Q. Do you have contact with the Beaverton Education Association as you work with various personnel problems?

A(Borquist). Uh-huh. I think we probably are a little bit unique in how we work with our association. The person who is the administrator of certificated personnel, which is a job I have also held in the past, and I meet usually twice a month and go over any kind of what we call "issues sessions." We look at, you know, things that have been brought to either of our attentions, and we go through and have an open discussion about what we're hearing or seeing. The hope is that we would, again, resolve it at the smallest level. We are very frank with each other. We don't really hold any secrets or hold any information back. But we try to proactively work together. We've operated

that

(begin pg 47)

way for at least 12, maybe 15 years, ever since I can kind of remember with, you know, past association presidents. It is a culture that we have built. Because of that we have very, very few grievances. I can maybe think of three in my ten years in -- 12 years in HR. You know, I've never sat before this kind of a board before with a Fair Dismissal hearing. We're actively working together. Obviously they have a role of representing in this case a teacher, and we have a role that we need to play. But

we try and work cooperatively. When I have a meeting that I'm going to be setting up with a teacher, I give what I would call a heads-up phone call to the association president or the Uniserv rep saying that this person will be expecting a call from X because they'll probably be calling you. We're going to have a meeting. I want to make sure you're available when they call so they can have representation. That's how open our relationship is.

Q. You mentioned that you had these meetings generally twice a month. Who are those with?

A. It's my administrator for certificated personnel, the Uniserv rep and the BEA president.

Gavin Bristol and Beaverton School District's Meadow Park Middle School "C Hall" (7th grade) presents "The Odyssey." (An entire team of kids and teachers,come together to tell the Western civilizations first great story.

4th of July note to Beaverton Schools supt, Jeff Rose

Supt Jeff Rose

BSD

Mr. Rose,

I re-read a B- / C+ essay I wrote yesterday (it was wordy and needed two more edits) linking the OEA to the IMF guy, comparing their relative abilities to avoid accountability for misconduct by trashing the victim.  

DSK has paid lawyers to criminalize his victim, actually--using someone else's money--so I erred when I compared him to the OEA, an organization who took my money fraudulently for a decade--like taxation w/o representation. Beaverton school administrators' misconduct, more than the OEA employees', parallel the kind of social dysfunction that occurs when the rich and the poor conflict in the public arena.

Hollis Lekas and Mike Chamberlain, current BSD administrators, knew I had asked to resign and they knew I had been paid unfairly.  They both participated improperly in the witch hunt led by BSD's former lawyers, the Hungerfords.  Both Lekas and Chamberlain have gained personally from this unnecessary and expensive ordeal.  There is much that Icould have done differently and I understand that--and would have acknowledged it, but I was fired by sneak attack by some bad actors: Chamberlain and Lekas benefited financially as a result of my illegal termination.

Two days into your new job, you are employing some people who have used public resources illegally to demonize me and damage my career, which was teaching--a job too many of your employees avoided when they were being paid to do it. That is an on-going matter of public concern that I hope you are able to address soon.

A lot of hurting people are celebrating a document and an ideal today.  The people who wrote the document and believed in the ideal fought for a long time to ensure their survival.  

I am eager to help you create an open, professional administration of our public schools. To that end, I look forward to meeting with you at your earliest convenience (your predecessor did not like the eye-to-eye thing much). I  intend to clear my name of false charges used by former Beaverton lawyers to smear my work and personal reputation at a difficult time in my life. 

Happy Fourth of July.   Let's make it mean something.

Don Bellairs, teacher

DSK and the OEA

Many people are saddened and/or angered by the recent release of one of the most powerful men in the world by the Manhattan DA's office. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, emerged from his lavish house arrest free on bail as the media trumpeted the collapse of the case against him...because the woman whom he was charged with raping turned out to be human.

She is an imperfect woman, it turns out, who has a shady friend who grows pot, has told some lies to improve her opportunities in life and, according to transcripts of a phone call in her native dialect, felt like she might profit from the humiliation of being objectified by another, more influential, human.

There is a lot of evidence to support the rape charge. Fair observers are safe in assuming the worldly financier did not give the dark-skinned hotel maid bouquets of flowers or boxes of candy prior to ejaculating his semen on the wall (where it was later found and, not ironically, left for a maid to clean). It is not a leap to envision a less-than-romantic experience for a frightened woman.

Strauss-Kahn's countryman, the philosopher Anatole France, is credited with saying, “How majestic is the equality of the law that it allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridge at night.” I was introduced to that concept decades ago, while living in a basement in suburban Corvallis, working in a shelter for wayward boys while helping my brother with his masters' degree. I didn't understand the idea behind the concept as clearly then as I do now, but now I recognize that the ruthlessness of the lawyers one hires is proportionate to the ruthlessness one can afford.

Once, many years ago, I spoke out about people who were cheating me in my job as a public school teacher (and, by extension, were also cheating my students and the taxpayers who pay for schools). These people about whom I spoke truthfully had on their speed dials and contact lists some important people in state government and, more egregiously, the OEA--the same leaders whom I had been paying to protect my employment rights.

I worked very hard in poorly-managed schools and then was forced to wait for a very long time to tell my story, time-and-again encountering a series of “legal” obstacles designed to protect the public images of the Beaverton School District officials whose professional conduct had caused me concern. My mistreatment required the complicity of the director of the TSPC and a judge in the Oregon Office of Administrative Hearings. I had an epiphany about three years into my ordeal: I had become, the moment I had purchased a teacher’s license in Salem, a disposable element in a bureaucracy that did not value my work or my humanity.

That's a tough epiphany to deal with. Like the rape victim in Manhattan, I was helpless as the lawyers swarmed—ruthless, highly paid lawyers who had years of experience in smearing teachers who earned the disfavor of entrenched school administrators, unaccountable big shots who, like DSK, had some embarrassing behaviors they wished to keep from the public.

My union representative betrayed me and handed me over to a pre-arranged lawyer who worked closely with my adversaries to beat me up psychologically while I futilely sought help from OEA leadership. My mother, a teacher for over 30 years, died watching me fight with the Oregon Education Association.

Now I am a sadder, wiser man and I have been taught that powerful, unaccountable people for whom there is not much room under the bridge in this economy do not seem inclined to sleep there anyhow. I have been taught that I was employed in a system that did not care about the quality of quantity of my work me as long as I understood that abstract concepts like “equality under the law” do not protect my employment or civil rights should I conflict with some one with “juice.”

So I know a little about how the maid feels for telling the truth after being abused. The administrators who paid lawyers to discredit me professionally and personally have spent a lot of education money concealing how they REALLY spend education money. These (remarkably unqualified) leaders continue to enjoy an anonymity no longer available to the former IMF chief, but Governor Kibitzer’s recent mauling of the OEA lobby (grown soft from bullying Sizemore?) presages a growing awareness among Oregon's voters of the culture of corruption caused by the overlapping of a teacher’s union and a state government.

I remain eager for a legitimate hearing to clear my record of false charges.

www.statesponsoredtheft.blogspot.com

2003 Westview High School "Advisory"  program (four-year home room) starring A. J. Anderson.  

Created and produced in 2003 by Don Bellairs, Westview High School video productions teacher, for former Westview principal Malcolm Dennis for a presentation to Beaverton School District administrators and principals.

Jerry Steps Down

Colonna says leading Beaverton's schools a "gift."

Disclosure: I am not a fan. I taught for Colonna for four months in 2003-04, yet his signature was at the bottom of a list of false charges covering a period of several years,  a document created by ruthless lawyers (no longer employable in B'ton) and dishonest administrators (some of whom received "secrecy agreements" to resign or retire).  Mr. Colonna's former HR director, Linda Borquist, is on record under oath (FDAB 2004) as saying that Colonna, the then-new BSD superintendent, didn't actually didn't know anything about my case when he signed my termination papers.

He also didn't bother to talk to me about it...

When he was on the TSPC board of commissioners in 2002, Colonna voted to hire the current director, Vickie Chamberlain.  Chamberlain, aided by her former investigator, Susan Nisbet (no longer employable by the state government) harassed me for almost four years to sign a confession that would shelter Mr. Colonna, as well as his lawyers and some bad actors STILL performing in the BSDrama.

(I would learn this is standard operating procedure in Oregon's education bureaucracy, coercing these confessions, euphemistically called "stipulations.")

My OEA rep, Tom Husted, dined and drank with Beaverton's HR administrators while serving on the board of the Beaverton Education Foundation, whose director at the time, Janet Hogue, shared a receptionist at Beaverton district headquarters with Borquist and Hollis Lekas (who used to be Hogue's neighbor).

That is a cozy situation.

My tale is one of the firing of a stubborn and opinionated hillbilly who arrogantly stood up to some bigshots with a lot of influence and huge self-importance.  I'm guilty: I believe schools that are run by snobs are failing their communities and  Westview was one of those when I was there.  I hope it no longer is.  I also want to be treated and paid fairly when I am doing my job.  At Westview, I was not.

Mr. Colonna, during his first four years at Beaverton, paid the Hungerford Law Firm to coordinate a long, painful termination process that required the tacit support of my OEA lawyer, Tom Doyle, about whom the nicest thing I can say is he is dishonest. I was supposed to sign a confession for the TSPC to keep my license to teach so I would never tell this story--but I CAN'T QUIT TELLING THIS STORY.

The taxpayers paid Colonna a generous salary to do a prestigious job and I am certain he has worked hard.  I know I worked 70-hour weeks, frequently with kids whom other teachers did not want to teach. I have been licensed in three other states and some of the best teachers I worked with were at Meadow Park Middle and Westview High, but I encountered a lot of selfish people, too--it seemed to be a professional objective for some of our teachers to avoid classroom assignments.

But even opinionated hillbillies have rights in our state. The complicity of the OEA leaders and the TSPC administrator (as well as the curious conduct of former ALJ Andrea Sloan, who used a "first-of-its-kind-in-Oregon" legal maneuver to deny me due process) is the matter that should concern Oregon's citizens.

And, in that light, Colonna's poetic recollection of his time in Beaverton as a "gift" is easy to understand...He was in a job where he was virtually unaccountable, where he could secretly spend education money (over $200,000 to fire me for four years--just weeks after I had asked to quit) to conceal the misconduct of his administrators and preserve his enviable public image and generous retirement package.

Some of the people who have cheated me and my family continue to work in the BSD. My teaching record has been damaged by unethical, punitive public employees. I remain eager for someone in administration to be held accountable.

Without administrative accountability, Jerry, teachers are vulnerable, disposable chattel--second-class citizens working for poorly-supervised principals, naively paying a union representative who cuddles with your administrators.

Without administrative accountability, Jerry, all the programs with the cute names (and the additional costs) are merely smokescreen hypocrisy.

www.teachingintheshadowoftheswosh.blogspot.com