Greatschools uncensored
Local education listserv shut down, then restored, amid controversial discussions
By Andre Coleman , Joe Piasecki 05/18/2006
The Greatschools Internet listserv, for years a forum for critics of the Pasadena Unified School District, is back online after being shut down last week under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
After the Yahoo! discussion group disappeared Friday night, listserv founder Rene Amy filed a report with the Pasadena Police Department believing he was the victim of identity theft after finding someone had hacked into his eBay account. Amy believed the instances were related.
However, a local parent and school district supporter has claimed that she is responsible for asking Yahoo! to take down the listserv because she felt it was a source of hate speech and attacks against district authorities.
“I saw a lot of violence, anger and ugliness,” said artist Virginia Hoge of the listserv, telling the Weekly she secretly accessed the group by hiding her identity and used content from member posts in a series of complaints to Yahoo!.
As mysterious as the group’s disappearance was to Amy, he said he discovered Wednesday evening that Yahoo! had restored the original Greatschools group.
Prior to its disappearance from cyberspace last week, the listserv was host to a series of “bomb blasts,” as Amy put it, related to alleged district missteps.
Days after being the first to post allegations that PUSD Superintendent Percy Clark had plagiarized portions of a guest column for the Pasadena Weekly, Amy turned his attention to Universal Placement International, Inc., a staffing firm seeking a district contract to recruit speech and language therapists for the district, and its apparent owner Lourdes Navarro.
Following a brief Internet search, Amy found that Navarro, who was offering district administrators free trips to the Philippines to meet potential new staffers living there, shared the same name of a woman who in early 2000 had been convicted of Medi-Cal fraud, identity theft, grand theft and money laundering, according to a press release from the state Attorney General’s Office.
Amy wasn’t certain that Navarro the felon was the same person as the Navarro offering free trips to district officials, but noticed that discussion of Universal Placement was scrubbed from the Board of Education agenda after he raised the issue.
No school board member would comment on the matter, and district officials deferred to Assistant Superintendent Kathleen Duba, who said “concerns became apparent” about the company. Duba would not elaborate.
Calls to Universal Placement’s Navarro were not returned. Navarro’s attorney, Robert Silverman, offered little information about his client.
“Quite frankly, Mr. Amy has set out on a pattern of harassment of my client,” said Silverman. “Whoever my client is, she is a private person who runs a private business and in the end there’s no comment.”
On Thursday, Amy said he had been contacted by Los Angeles police because, one detective told him, a complaint had been filed against him for allegedly making multiple harassing phone calls to Universal Placement International.
Amy said he called the business four times.
“There’s a bigger issue at play, many bigger issues at play here,” continued Silverman, who nonetheless added he didn’t “have authority” to discuss those issues other than to say “the information about this particular transaction is incorrect — be careful what you publish.”
Spokespeople for the Los Angeles and Glendale school districts said they currently had no business dealings with the LA-based Universal Placement firm.
Spokespeople from Yahoo!, which like other Internet companies has come under fire for aiding Chinese censorship efforts and allowing NSA data mining, refused to confirm whether the company removed the listserv due to Hoge’s complaints, citing concerns for Amy’s privacy.
Amy, who has recreated the listserv at groups.google.com/group/pusdgreatschools, said he was more concerned about free speech.
“OK, so you’re trying to make the issues go away by trying to silence the person who is putting them out. The issues aren’t going to go away,” he said.
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The SSN of Filipino teachers in Louisiana recruited by Universal Placement were addressed in their LA, California office. As per teachers, the SSN envelopes were already opened.
See blog.
you have to see this blog.
http://pinoyteachershub.blogspot.com/200...