It’s about time! After almost two years of waiting for Sean Moore to get charged with something, information comes out that he is being charged by the feds for theft. This very quick blurb in the News Journal states Moore has three federal counts against him. As most folks in Delaware know, Moore, along with his co-charter leader/co-conspirator Dr. Tennell Brewington, both formerly with Family Foundations Academy in New Castle, DE, got busted after a forensic audit showed they spent over $150,000 in school funds for personal use. They were terminated and the school could have closed if a nearby charter school didn’t essentially take them over.
I was curious why Moore was charged by the feds and not Brewington. Either they haven’t announced anything for her yet or her theft of taxpayer money for personal use didn’t involve anything with federal dollars.
Now we just have to wait for the other former charter thieves, Noel Rodriguez of Academy of Dover and Shanna Simmens of Providence Creek Academy, to get their charges. Delaware Attorney General Matt Denn hinted to me almost a year ago that “other parties” were looking at these situations. As I waited and waited, with nothing coming out, I took it upon myself to contact the FBI about this earlier in the spring. I imagine Denn’s hands were tied once the feds became involved and he obviously couldn’t say anything concrete about it. I’m glad he was on the up and up about it though.
This is the only information I could find on these charges, but it looks like the Associated Press picked up on it because the same story appears in the Washington Post and many other media outlets. There is an important lesson here: don’t steal from kids. This is what happens when you get caught! As more information on this becomes available I will certainly give updates. I can’t find the actual court filing yet, but once information becomes available, you will know!
It is beginning but everyone is missing it. Our children are guinea pigs for education technology companies. When will parents begin to care?
By Deb Herbage – 9/11/16
i-Ready Diagnostic exploded onto the scene like the many, many other “competency based education” (CBE) curriculums since the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). It is now believed by many that the implementation of the CCSS and the focus on the standardized tests that went along with the CCSS was yet another extremely, well-crafted and timed implementation to distract parents, teachers, students and some school officials while district and state officials put in place the many ed-tech companies, corporations, investors, foundations, and non-profit companies curriculums, textbooks, programs, etc. who all quickly and methodically jumped on the CCSS bandwagon and strategically moved their various curriculums, textbooks, programs, and services FULLY aligned to the CCSS into place. While we were distracted with the CCSS and end of year standardized testing – in school districts all across the state of Florida and across the country, i-Ready…
View original post 2,742 more words
If the strategy to improve special education in Delaware is to delay improving it for two years, the Delaware Department of Education is doing a bang-up job!
The Delaware Dept. of Education put out an announcement today for their “Special Education Strategic Plan”. This plan was snuck into the epilogue language of the FY2015 budget on June 30th, 2014. Here we are, over 27 months later, with NO Special Education Strategic Plan. The director of this strategic plan is a former employee of the Rodel Foundation with no actual teaching experience in the classroom. Matthew Korobkin worked for a collaborative that helped ten school districts with assistive technology. That is NOT the same thing as living and breathing special education. But somehow that qualified him for a job with the Massachusetts DOE (which Rodel CEO Paul Herdman worked for way back when) where he worked for 14 months. Then he worked for Rodel for 2 1/2 years. In October of 2014, he joined the Secretary of Education office as a “Special Education Officer”.
Given his background with technology and Rodel, I can easily see where this “strategic plan” is heading. I can picture words like “personalized learning” and “competency-based education” being in this report. And let’s not be fooled by this new desire for public input on special education. This guy has never once sought out my opinion on anything. This is more of the DOE charade where they give the illusion of public input so they can include it in the report with words like “we brought stakeholders from across the state together to discuss this”. Right out of the Rodel playbook…
After butting heads with the Autism community over the failed amendment to Senate Bill 93, this is the guy who we want creating this strategic plan? Let’s get real here. Somehow, someway, Rodel wanted to get in on special education. Their biggest enemy, in my opinion, is parents of children with disabilities. We see through their crap and know that anything they want to invade our kids lives is somehow going to benefit companies and not our kids. So they wormed one of their guys into the Secretary of Education office. This guy has been collecting a paycheck for well over two years with NO results. And now, we are led to believe we are going to see this “strategic plan” sometime before Jack Markell leaves office? Why haven’t they been soliciting parent input on this for the past two years? If this guy was remotely serious, he would have gone to parents in the first place. Not wait two years. When the DOE has this strategic plan overshadow everything else in special education, I have a major beef with that. I guess we have to wait even longer for our kids to get the special education they needed two years ago so the ex Rodel guy can figure it all out. How ironic they will be getting this out along with the Every Student Succeeds Act implementation and “stakeholder” input. Almost as if that was the plan all along…
Meanwhile, the Delaware DOE is seeing a large increase in special education due process hearings and administrative complaints. The placements in residential treatment centers is increasing every year, whether in-state or out of state. Students with disabilities continue to do poorly on the Smarter Balanced Assessment as they are forced to take the test for longer periods of time than their peers. Is it really a coincidence this is all happening at larger rates since Delaware implemented Common Core? And what will happen to these students when we go full-blown personalized learning? Competency-based education and special education are oil and water.
Here is the press release with my thoughts in red.
Public input sought to inform special education strategic plan
The Season Of Myths 