UPDATE: “Threat that closed Los Angeles schools Tuesday now being investigated as hoax”
Newsflash: The people who run the LAUSD are idiots.
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles public schools were abruptly shut down and students sent home on Tuesday after the police received what officials described as a credible bomb threat against the nation’s second-largest school system, throwing into disarray the lives of millions of Angelenos — students, parents, teachers and other school staff members.
The threat was made electronically, and it was explicitly “to students at schools,” said Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He said “some of the details talked about backpacks and other packages.”
So who is the idiot who runs the LAUSD? Steve Sailer wrote May 26, 2012:
That gray Japanese robot from outer space on the right preparing to burn down with its flamethrower the beige Los Angeles Cathedral has recently been named The Ramon C. Cortines School of the Visual and Performing Arts. Due to its shape and location right on the 101 Freeway in downtown, the $242 million Ramon C. Cortines School is the most visible public high school in L.A., even more than the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Schools on Wilshire Blvd.
Which makes the following from the L.A. Daily News even funnier (the details keep piling up as the excerpt goes on):
Los Angeles Unified [School District] will pay $200,000 and give lifetime health benefits to settle a sexual-harassment allegation filed by a facilities executive against retired Superintendent Ramon Cortines, officials said Wednesday.
Scot Graham, who has worked in the Facilities Division for 12 years and is now director of leasing and asset management, claims that Cortines made unwanted sexual advances during a weekend spent at the superintendent’s second home in Kern County in July 2010.
Graham’s attorneys notified the district in March – nearly a year after Cortines retired – that he intended to file a sexual-harassment claim.
Hoping to avoid potentially expensive litigation, the school board met three times in executive session before voting 4-3 on Tuesday to approve the deal.
The settlement gives Graham $200,000 cash, plus lifetime health benefits that officials valued at roughly $250,000. In exchange, the 56-year-old Graham agreed to retire from his $150,000-a-year job on May 31.
During a briefing for reporters, officials released a statement from Cortines that outlined his years-long friendship with Graham and how he’d alerted his buddy to a job opening at the district in 2000. He also admitted to a single incident of consensual sex in 2010, but denied that his advances were inappropriate.
“As the district’s former top staff member, I regret allowing myself to engage in such spontaneous, consensual behavior,” said Cortines, 79, who has never beeen married. “However, Mr. Graham had never indicated to me that our interaction was unwelcome.”
Is this $450k coming out of retired Superintendent Cortines’s pension? If not, what evidence is there that this isn’t one Big Gay Collusive Scam?
However, I think it only fair that Cortines be punished by forcing that absurd high school, with its Water Slide of Doom, to continue to bear his name.
Cortines was chancellor of New York City schools in the 1990s. Mayor Rudy Giuliani pressured him into quitting by telling him to not “be so precious.” So, now we know what Rudy was hinting at.
