It’s a known fact that the Cleveland County Board of Education and its lawyers lack credibility… math…and transparency. This is my opinion, and after many of you look at the resources provided here, you may agree.
Fortunately, there is a paper trail (a publicly available paper trail) of all the excuses and contradictions made by the attorney, as well as Director of Communications and Safety Greg Shull. As the attorney goes, so goeth the board. Their words do not match their deeds.
from: Leigha Sink <lsink@sinkmediations.com>
to: records@sunshinerequest.com
date: May 8, 2023, 12:04 PM
subject: Records Request re: All electronic communications related to “bullies”, “bullying”, “fights”, or “violence”. From 01/02/23 – 02/09/23.
To Whom It May Concern,We are in receipt of the below public records request. However, the search has produced a result of over 3200 emails. Reviewing this much correspondence to ensure PII is not mistakenly shared would be a very time-consuming and burdensome process. Could anyone at the Sunshine Request Team assist in narrowing the scope of this request while still accomplishing the goal of the requestor?
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Leigha Sink
Attorney for Cleveland County Board of Education
Let’s look at the timeline:
From reading the entirety of the timeline, you will notice many contradictions related to content, quantity, dates, costs, software, etc. Even after more than 14 months of waiting for the results, the request has yet to be rectified. The attorney stated that there were “more than 3200 emails”. I don’t have a clue as to how those emails were counted. I do know that there were 44 pdf files released. And within the pdf files, the 44 files contained 4001 combined pages. Many, if not most of the pages contained shared posts/emails from blogs related to educational subjects. Also, those files created more questions.
Questions such as, if these employees have the time to read and share these articles, etc should they be given additional duties? Also, those articles/emails aren’t necessary for them to complete their work. Their phones and computers are paid for by the taxpayers and for job-related work. Are these fireable offenses? Let’s look at some of the files they released to the public.
For our first example, click on this link and go to Gaggle. Once there, scroll the front page, and check out the links and information.
How do we know that the Cleveland County School system is using Gaggle? What does this have to do with CCS?
How about this?
In March, it was ruled that every public school in North Carolina would need a threat assessment team to monitor the concerns of students’ behavior, and Gaggle would offer the solution. Gaggle has primarily been funded through the state with the COVID grants. Supposedly, this grant will pay off again in September 2024.
See also, CommonSense Media for Students from the CCS website! (scroll down about halfway)
From the CommonSense Media site, mouse over Celebrating Community, and look to the top left at the dropdown sub-menu.
Should there be activism going on in our public schools? Should the school personnel be allowed to use school devices to share and use work time to read and distribute this stuff found on the files released as part of a public records request? You read – You decide!
Closing Academic Gaps
Ref: Project Achieve
Embedding DEI into the work of EdNC
Download the 4001 pages released from CCS Public Records Request
The above links and documents are only a few out of 4001 pages. As you can see, very few pages fit into the criteria of the timeline requested…from January 2, 2023-February 9, 2023. The files were assembled/copied hastily on 11/8/2023 and transferred to a flash drive on February 27, 2024. If more than 2 employees were involved in preparing these requests, their supervisor needs to go. The attorney claimed that it would take months to have this ready to release, maybe by March 1, 2024. As stated here above, the compilations were put on the flash drive on 2/27/2024. The redactions (few and far between) are sloppy and from a black marker, and not some specialized software. The mingling together of a bunch of blog posts, and random subscriptions and solicitations, most far outside the date range requested, were garbage. However, it did open a window that shows the public what a mess this school system is.
We will continue to expose that as we sift through the rest of these Public Records files available on the SunshineRequest website.
Stay tuned. There’s more to come.
