Mr. Sanders,
The former OEA uniserve rep for Beaverton schools, Tom Husted, sat unethically on the board of the Beaverton School District's chief fundraiser, Janet Hogue, an affluent woman who, at the time, had a stranglehold on the state of Oregon's largest public school, Westview High. According to her husband Jim Lekas (my friend when I taught at Westview), his wife Hollis (then an HR director for Beaverton schools) had been Hogue's neighbor when her first husband died; Lekas had received a substantial loan from Hogue in the aftermath of her loss. Hogue's Beaverton Education Foundation shared a building with the BSD HR directors when I worked for them.
According to testimony in my long-delayed "just cause" hearing, Husted had been regularly meeting with Lekas and her supervisor, former associate supt. Linda Borquist, even while oblivious Beaverton teachers paid his salary.
When I voiced concerns about inequities at Westview to new superintendent Jerry Colonna, I was fired two weeks later by sneak attack for false sexual harassment charges and insubordination and assigned a manipulative, unethical attorney by a union to which I paid dues of ten years. Borquist said in her FDAB testimony against me that Colonna was kept out of the loop in my case because he was new.
I was soon involved in four different court cases including a breach-of-trust federal lawsuit filed by my OEA lawyer without my knowledge…for a million dollars...For freedom of speech--while I was being smeared with false sex charges. He and the former Beaverton lawyer Nancy "Pass-the-Trash" Hungerford coerced me to sign a settlement for $40K and withheld the check for over a year to mislead a US District Judge Robert E Jones, whom they had told that my case was "settled." while they were simultaneously trying to make me sign "stipulations" for the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission to behavior that never occurred, for which there is still no documentation or testimony. The director of the TSPC, with a history of close association to BSD administrators, used a first-of-its-kind preclusion finding ("accept-certain-facts-as-true") to help HR directors Borquist and Lekas avoid perjury charges and to suspend my license without cause, four years after I was illegally terminated.
Borquist was forced into early retirement and Lekas was removed from the BSD HR department by Colonna when he was given information about their misconduct in my case. Husted retired to Hawaii after stealing from Beaverton's teachers for years and Hogue was given a "teaching" job without students or classes by her friends on the BSD school board after being forced out of her fundraising position.
Not that it matters much ten years after my career was trashed, but before working in Beaverton, I had taught with distinction in four other states (and worked as a sign language interpreter in a fifth), earning an honorable mention Teacher of the Year in one. In seven years in Beaverton schools, I received many raises, promotions and exemplary evaluations…until the last one, created to help violate my employment agreement, which was post-dated and signed illegally by a principal who was subsequently fired and given a secrecy agreement as payment for his silence after being caught coming to work drunk.
When I tried to get support from the president of the Beaverton teachers' union, Hanna Vaandering, she brought me a second settlement to the federal law suit--even though Judge Jones had been told my case was settled (see Toledo/Doyle emails--attached).
I want my dues money back and my name cleared by the TSPC, a state agency acting in concert with unethical lawyers employed by the OEA and Beaverton Schools who defamed me to protect greedy school administrators who have, for too long, been their unaccountable gravy train.
Your organization, by protecting unethical and unqualified bureaucrats, has diminished the education profession in Oregon and has been stealing from my family and from other teachers' families for a very long time. Your inaction is evidence that you are complicit in that theft.
No teacher can be prepared for the kind of bullying or betrayal I experienced at the hands of people you continue to employ. There can be very little doubt that your organization deserves a great deal of credit for the poor condition of Oregon's deteriorating public schools.
With continuing determination,
Don Bellairs, dues-paying member '97-'07
