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Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Where’s Timmy? New game in town is finding OnMessage’s office address, phone number; maybe Capitol’s Fourth Floor?

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on July 2, 2012| 6 Comments »

THE PIYUSH JINDAL ADMINISTRATION: where transparency and accountability go to die.

The Monroe News-Star did an excellent job of demonstrating just how far this administration will go to keep legislators and the public in the dark about the governor’s political agenda.

But there are other examples—some of which we have written about here and another that we are writing about today—that reveal an ominous trend of this administration to rule by intimidation and secrecy—a dangerous combination at any level of government. The latest issue might well be the actual status of Jindal’s former Chief of Staff Timmy Teepell, now ostensibly a partner and head of OnMessage Inc.’s Southern office in Baton Rouge. We will get to all of those momentarily, but first that News-Star article of Monday, July 2.

This publication, located in northeast Louisiana nearly 200 miles from the State Capitol, blew the lid off secrecy and misdirection in the Jindal administration with its story on Monday and in so doing, literally embarrassed the stodgy Baton Rouge Advocate with its fully-staffed Capitol News Bureau ensconced comfortably in the basement of the State Capitol.

All reporter Barbara Leader did was obtain email exchanges between State Education Superintendent John White, Jindal mouthpiece Kyle Plotkin and the governor’s policy adviser Stafford Palmieri which revealed White’s plan to “muddy up a narrative” and to “take some air out of the room” with a “due diligence” cockamamie response to news stories about questionable approvals of school voucher requests, most notably the 315 vouchers for Ruston’s New Living Word School.

In the wake of Leader’s latest revelations, one must be left to ponder the wisdom of keeping a policy adviser like Palmieri who apparently did nothing to keep White from making an idiot of himself with his ill-advised scheme or, for that matter, Jindal’s lobbying to hire a state superintendent like John White in the first place.

White’s email to Plotkin and Palmieri take on the appearance of a Shakespearean tragicomedy after he had been put on notice that he should be expected to answer questions about the department’s approval of New Living Word to participate in the expanded voucher program during his confirmation hearings before a legislative committee in the session’s final days.

In fact, White, through spokesperson Sarah Mulhearn, even went so far as to deny to LouisianaVoice that such vouchers had even been approved. In a June 26 email to LouisianaVoice, Mulhearn wrote, “The specific information you requested is not available because final seat numbers have not yet been decided. No school, including New Living Word, has been approved for any definite number of vouchers/scholarships. The 315 is only the number requested by the school.”

Now it appears that explanation may well have been subterfuge on the part of the department and White. Indeed, who knows what to believe from Education now? Any pronouncements from that agency–from the Jindal administration in general, for that matter–must now be taken with all due skepticism with a view toward an ulterior motive.

But as Sen. Ed Murray (D-New Orleans) pointed out during White’s confirmation hearing, there was no mention of “preliminary” acceptances in letters to accepted schools, including New Living Word, nor was there any mention of any “next phase” to include follow-up visits to schools prior to White springing the two terms on the committee.

White, in his email to Plotkin and Palmieri, said on the eve of his confirmation hearing, “I’d like to create (emphasis ours) a news story about the ‘the next phase’ of determining seats in schools before Murray creates an additional story for us tomorrow. I’d also like to take some air out of the room on the floor tomorrow and to give Steve (Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, chairman of the House Education Committee) some cover.”

Let’s see that again: “I’d like to CREATE a news story (as in make one up, concoct, fabricate, etc.) about ‘the next phase’ (this was White’s first-ever reference to any “next phase” in the approval process for school vouchers) of determining seats in schools before Murray creates an additional story for us tomorrow.” In other words, White puts it all in writing where it can be retrieved under a public records request as to how he plans to lie to the committee during his all-import confirmation hearing.

Again, and understand this in no uncertain terms: he is revealing to the governor’s office his plans to lie to the committee and no one in the governor’s office did a damned thing to try and stop him.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is Nixonian at its most basic level and must not be tolerated.

Remember, White was under oath when he testified at his confirmation hearing.

Where is the outrage?

White also wrote that his plan “would chill out some of our friends (presumably recalcitrant legislators), who aren’t being very helpful on the MFP (Minimum Foundation Program, the state formula for funding K-12 public education) by letting them know we’re thinking of the ‘criteria for participation.’”

Wow. What?

And at the end of the day, White, instead of attempting to explain his deliberate, pre-meditated duplicity, chose to question Leader about how she obtained a copy of his email.

Perhaps Mr. White should refer to R.S. 44:1 et seq., otherwise fondly known as the Louisiana Public Records Act.

Not that this administration has any true regard for R.S. 44:1 et seq.

Way back on March 28, LouisianaVoice made a public records request in which we requested information as to Jindal’s whereabouts on specific dates in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, as well as a couple of dates in 2007 when he was still a member of Congress.

What we received in return was a dressing down by Plotkin in two separate emails on March 29. The first, at 8:52 a.m., said, “…it’s clear that you are simply making up travel dates in 2010 when the Governor was actually in state. You obviously have a bad source of information.”

He followed that with a second email at 9:05 a.m. that again said, “You are now trying to make up information.”

The only problem with his theory was that the dates we requested were dates of airline ticket purchases listed in Jindal’s own campaign records for 19 trips to Atlanta, nine to Fort Worth, seven to Houston and two each to Chicago and Dallas. We were quite naturally curious as to who made the trips and why.

It’s not that LouisianaVoice suspected anything illegal or underhanded about the trips; we just wanted to know where Jindal was on those dates. That was more than three months ago and there still has been no response to that request other than executive counsel Elizabeth Murrill’s offering of some travel receipts that did not correspond to the dates requested. Nor did her office allow LouisianaVoice to scan the information into a hand-held scanner, instead requiring that LouisianaVoice pay for the information.

But for the biggest mystery in town, one might contemplate creating a game called “Where’s Timmy” were it not for copyright laws involving “Where’s Waldo.”

Back in October, right after his re-election, Piyush announced that his Chief of Staff Timmy Teepell was leaving his $165,000-a-year position with the administration, “effective immediately,” to head up the Baton Rouge office of OnMessage, Inc., a political consulting firm out of Virginia.

OnMessage was used extensively by Jindal in his 2007 campaign which shelled out something around $1.3 million for consulting work by the firm.

Moreover, an OnMessage partner, Curt Anderson, ghost-wrote Jindal’s yawn-inducing book Leadership and Crisis.

So it was only natural that Teepell would gravitate to the firm and even set up shop in Baton Rouge after leaving the campaign.

Or did he? Did he actually join OnMessage? For that matter, has he ever really left Jindal’s employ? The answers to both questions remain hazy eight months after his announced departure.

While it’s true that the last official date of employment with the governor’s office was July 1, 2011, it’s also true that Jindal’s campaign picked him up about that same time, making a $6,324 payment to Teepell on July 15, 2011 and continuing those payments through Dec. 30, 2011. In fact, he received pretty healthy bumps in pay during his last four months when his pay was $11,872 and $17,856 on Oct. 14 and Oct 24, respectively. He then received a payment of $18,140 on Oct. 31 and payments of $18,562 each on Nov. 30 and Dec. 30.

Jindal’s campaign was continuing to shell out big bucks to OnMessage at the same time. The campaign paid OnMessage nearly $46,000 during November of 2011 and another $55,000 in December, well after his October re-election.

The November and December payments to Teepell might raise a few eyebrows given the fact that OnMessage released an announcement on Oct. 24 to the effect that Teepell had joined the firm “as a partner and head of our new Southern office.”

“Teepell will open and manage our new OnMessage Southern office in Baton Rouge and will work on campaigns throughout the country,” the press release said.

The only problem with that is that announcement was last October and eight months later there still is no listing in the metropolitan Baton Rouge area for a phone number or for a physical address for OnMessage. It’s rather difficult to drum up business when you don’t have an office or a phone.

A check of the Secretary of State’s corporate records was equally fruitless; there was no listing for OnMessage, Inc., meaning the company is not registered in Louisiana even though it ostensibly has an office in the capital city. Somewhere.

In February, it was announced that Teepell’s OnMessage office in Baton Rouge had signed on to work for Republican Congressman Bill Cassidy’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Again, the only problem is that when Congressman Cassidy’s campaign expenditures were searched, there were no payments to OnMessage or to Teepell through May 31. None. Zilch. Nada.

Teepell, while not physically occupying an office or having a phone listing, however, has maintained a regular and highly visible presence in and around the governor’s office and governor’s mansion. And during the recently-completed legislative session, he could routinely be found in the section on the floor of each chamber set aside for the governor’s staff as he monitored the progress of administration-favored legislation.

That then begs the question that if Teepell is indeed working for OnMessage, when and where is he conducting his consulting business? Where is the “OnMessage southern office in Baton Rouge?”

Given the time Teepell spends at the Capitol and the governor’s mansion and given that there is no listing for an address or phone number for OnMessage and given the fact that Jindal’s campaign has not made a payment to OnMessage since Dec. 30, 2011 and given the fact that Cassidy has paid neither OnMessage nor Teepell, a lot of loose ends are left hanging and a lot of questions are left unanswered.

To borrow a phrase from Plotkin, is someone trying to make up information?

Where’s Timmy?

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3rd lawsuit filed over Jindal’s education reform bill; ‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night’ (Bette Davis)

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Governor's Office, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on June 28, 2012| 7 Comments »

A third lawsuit was filed in state district in Baton Rouge on Thursday that charges Gov. Bobby Jindal and the legislature with violating the Louisiana Constitution when enacting Act 2 of 2012.

The action was taken on behalf of more than 30 local school boards working through the Louisiana School Boards Association, according to Robert Hammonds, legal counsel to LSBA and many of the local districts involved.

“All elected officials, including school board members, are required to take an oath of office that pledges to uphold the Constitution and laws of the State,” observed John Smith, president of LSBA and a school board member in St. Charles Parish.

“To the best of our ability, the members of LSBA operate mindful of our oath,” he added. “We have a right to expect that the Governor and members of the Legislature do likewise, and we have both a right and a civic duty to challenge them when we feel that they have failed to do so.”

“The Constitution was approved by the voters of the state”, according to Hammonds, “and, if the state wants to act contrary to its provisions, the Legislature should put before the voters the changes it wants to see. Until those changes are approved by the voters of the state, however, the existing provisions apply and cannot be disregarded by the Governor, the Legislature, or the school boards bringing this action.”

One of those constitutional requirements is that all bills receive majority vote of the membership of both houses to become effective. The vote on the MFP concurrent resolution (SCR 99) in the House of Representatives was 51 in favor, 49 opposed, and 5 not voting. House Speaker Chuck Kleckley, R-Lake Charles, ruled that the resolution had been approved. When he was questioned by other representatives about how it could have passed since it did not get majority vote of the 105 member House of Representatives, he stated that the House had a “long history” of violating the Constitution.

The LSBA-coordinated legal action is mounted against the Act 2 part of Gov. Jindal’s capitalist education reform package. Vouchers, legacy charter schools, and other parts of the reform program included in SCR 99 will siphon from the public school systems the limited dollars received from the state for public education. There has been no increase in state funding of public education for the last four years, despite ever increasing costs to the school systems for state-mandated retirement and group health insurance costs, among other expenditures.

“The lawsuit alleges that Act 2 and SCR 99 violate the Constitution by diverting money to non-public schools when the Constitution mandates the funds be allocated to public elementary and secondary schools to insure a minimum foundation of education in those public schools,” said Hammonds. The suit also alleges that part of the public dollars to be distributed to non-public schools, groups, and programs in Act 2 and SCR 99 comes from locally generated tax revenues. The tax propositions passed by the voters in each local school system call for the funds generated by those measures to be used for the benefit of the students and employees of that system, though, and not for the support of private and parochial schools and their employees.

Gov. Jindal claims that Act 2 gives parents the opportunity to escape failing schools. He has touted the state’s RSD schools as models of educational reform despite the fact that 100 percent of direct-run RSD schools have received grades of “D” or “F” and 79 percent of the RSD charter schools have received grades of “D” or “F”, according to Smith. “It makes no sense – educationally or financially – to take more than $150,000,000 from public school systems in the state to fund state-run and state-supervised programs that are less successful than those operated on the local level.

A preliminary hearing on the LSBA case, which will be consolidated with the cases filed by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana Association of Educators, is expected July 10, Hammonds said. “It is significant that the LSBA, the LFT, and the LAE have similar concerns about Act 2 and SCR 99 and the impact of such legislation on the future of public education in this state. We will be working together to bring those concerns to the attention of the court in the clearest and most concise fashion.”

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Suddenly, BESE, DOE, RSD and Piyush caught up in swirling litigation over reform, funding, and bureaucratic SNAFUs

Posted in BESE, Campaign Contributions, Contract, Contracts, Education, Governor's Office, Teague on June 27, 2012| 2 Comments »

The Louisiana Department of Education could find itself mired in state and federal courtroom disputes for years to come, thanks to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s sweeping education reform legislation and to the confusing mishmash of educational bureaucracy in Orleans Parish.

Disregard for the time being the last week’s court ruling that could end up costing the Orleans Parish School Board upwards of a billion dollars for the wrongful firing of about 7,000 teachers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That lawsuit did not involve the state—just Orleans Parish.

But across the state, several parish school boards and teachers’ unions are lining up as plaintiffs in various lawsuits against Jindal, the Louisiana Department of Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to contest Jindal’s reform package that is being hailed by media everywhere but in Louisiana as groundbreaking, innovative and progressive.

One interesting development at the local level occurred in Ruston when the Lincoln Parish School Board recently voted to join litigation against Jindal’s move to usurp Minimum Foundation Program funds and local tax revenue from local school boards and to use those monies to pay for vouchers, or scholarships, to other schools—even if those other schools were in a different parish.

The local boards contend that those funds are dedicated to the parishes and should not be taken away.

In the case of Lincoln Parish, board member Trot Hunt was the only dissenting vote when the board voted to join as a plaintiff against the administration. He said the board could well do with a little more budgetary restraint.

But did Hunt have an ulterior motive other than fiscal prudence?

Well, consider this: his firm, Hunt-Guillot and Associates, has a couple of mega-contracts with the state which total more than $18 million, according to state documents. The largest, for $17.6 million, calls for the firm to administer HUD grant management activities for infrastructure and other projects undertaken as a result of damages from hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike.

The other, a $900,000 contract, calls for the company to review applications for grant funds for the Department of Health and Hospitals.

Hunt-Guillot also contributed $4,750 to Jindal’s campaign in 2007 and Trot Hunt personally contributed $5,000 that same year.

If Hunt needed further incentive to vote against joining the lawsuit, there’s also the fact that his business partner, Jay Guillot, is a member of BESE, having been elected last fall thanks in part to strong support from Jindal that included a $5,000 contribution from Jindal’s own campaign. BESE, of course, overwhelmingly supported the Jindal reform package that calls for vouchers, the creation of charter schools and more teacher accountability.

And, of course, It’s pretty much a given that Hunt is keenly aware of what happens when anyone, be it an employee or legislator–or in this case, a contractor–crosses Piyush with a negative word or vote.

Can you say Teagued?

All that aside, there is yet another lawsuit brewing down in New Orleans, this one in the Eastern District of U.S. Federal Court.

If the Department of Education’s action earlier this month is any indication, it is taking this lawsuit quite seriously.

After eschewing Louisiana law firms and the Louisiana attorney general’s office, the department decided to enlist the powerful Washington, D.C. law firm of Hogan-Lovelis as its defense counsel. The initial contract was for $249,999, which is one dollar less than the $250,000 threshold at which the approval of BESE President Penny Dastugue would have been required.

But on May 30, it was decided to go for broke in defending this lawsuit when State Superintendent John White requested that Dastugue approve a $1.2 million amendment, bringing the contract to an eye-popping $1,449,000. Dastugue signed off on White’s request on June 6.

The lawsuit was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in October of 2010 on behalf of 10 lead plaintiffs and approximately 4,500 Orleans Parish students with learning and physical disabilities. It names former State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, the State Department of Education and BESE as defendants.

The suit claims that 16 Orleans Parish schools fall under the parish school board, 23 are run by the Recovery School District (RSD) and 49 more are stand-alone charter schools. This arrangement, the lawsuit claims, results in the creation of 51 separate school districts, or local education agencies (LEA). Each charter school, it says, is an LEA.

This arrangement, the petition says, creates a confusing, impossible-to-navigate system for children with disabilities who, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA), are entitled to “the appropriate resources, policies and procedures” to provide unfettered access to special education services—“from evaluations to related services and supports.”

Federal law prohibits public entities from discriminating against individuals with disabilities but, the lawsuit claims, students have been subjected to systemic violations that included:

• Discrimination and denial of access to educational services;

• Failure to develop and implement child find procedures are required by law;

• Failure to provide free appropriate public education;

• Failure to protect students’ procedural safeguards in the disciplinary process.

The petition cites a survey conducted by Educational Support Systems which said that schools “under-identify students with disabilities in an effort to escape their legal obligations under IDEA.

Some students referred to the RSD for initial evaluations “frequently must wait months before an evaluation occurs—losing valuable educational time during the wait,” the suit says.

“New Orleans is the only geographic region in the state in which students cannot receive child-find services until they are actually admitted and enrolled in a public school,” it added.

The lawsuit also claims that the RSD has an “abysmal” graduation and school completion rate for students with disabilities. “On average, across the state of Louisiana, 19.4 percent of all students with disabilities graduate with a diploma,” it says. In comparison, only 6.8 percent of RSD students with disabilities obtain a diploma, the petition says.

While he tries to put positive spin on the recent legislative session, there can be no denying that Jindal fell far short of getting what he wanted in terms of state employee retirement reform and the sale of state prisons.

Even though he appears to have been successful with his education reform, there are signs that his support in the legislature may be starting to crumble in that regard as well.

Legislators, already miffed at demotions within their ranks, the use of one-time funds for recurring expenses, the veto of a major commercial project in Livingston Parish, drastic cuts to higher education and the closure of a prison in central Louisiana, are also hearing from their local school boards and public school teachers.

And what they’re hearing may be causing them to entertain second thoughts about their having allowed the governor to rip funds from local school boards.

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‘Oops Factor’ permeates Piyush Jindal administration as the Boy Blunder stumbles into succession of bizarre oversights

Posted in Education, Governor's Office on June 23, 2012| 16 Comments »

Jimmy Breslin would love this group—Piyush Jindal and his minions—that calls itself an administration and which apparently believes it is doing a magnificent job of running the State of Louisiana.

Take the sudden emergence of IRS eligibility of Jindal’s new retirement plan, for example.

Stand by. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The only difference between this administration and the Three Stooges is that the administration contains far more than three slapstick lovable clowns. And they aren’t lovable. It would appear, instead, that these people are multiplying like rabbits. We can only hope that is a dream and we will soon wake up.

Breslin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News who once wrote a best-selling book called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight which was made into a movie that typically didn’t do the book justice.

His fame is as a “street columnist,” meaning he gets his political column ideas from New York’s seedier bars, cops on the beat, garbage collectors—anyone but the politicians themselves.

He has written some memorable lines in his career of 40-plus years—like the one about a subject’s receiving “immediate lacerations of the credibility,” or “…designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy,” or, our personal favorite: “Media, the plural of mediocrity.”

But we digress. Let’s get back to why Breslin would love Piyush Jindal, Timmy Teepel, Kyle Plotkin, et al.

The shocking speed (or should we say Shock Doctrine speed) at which the legislature approved Jindal’s education reforms is still seared into our collective memories. Well, okay, some of our collective memories. There are those so caught up in Dancing with the Stars and TMZ that they are not even aware there is a legislature, let along education reforms.

One of the “reforms” in that education package was the approval of vouchers. But guess what? The vouchers were approved without the administration’s or the Department of Education’s having bothered to establish accountability guidelines. Thus, we have 315 vouchers going to a Ruston school that for all intents and purposes, doesn’t even have books, desks, or buildings to accommodate 315 students. Then there’s that school in DeRidder whose administrator is on court-ordered probation to exercise no financial authority over anything. Yet it received approval for vouchers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—and school officials couldn’t even correctly spell “Scholarship” on its portable sign set up outside the school.

Oops.

In pitching his education reform, Jindal made a big deal of saying he wanted to rid the state of failing teachers. Yet, his new law allows uncertified teachers to teach in charter schools while traditional public school teachers still must have certification.

When a teacher in a public school is found to be a pedophile, in violation of drug laws or of prohibitions against sex with underage students, the one weapon heretofore available to school administrators was the ability to yank the teacher’s certification so that he could never again teach in Louisiana. That safeguard does not exist in charter schools.

Oops again.

Before the school reform debacle, there was the Office of Risk Management which the state paid F.A. Richard and Associates (FARA) $68 million to take over and then added another $6.8 million sweetener less than eight months down the road. Within weeks of the approval of the $6.8 million contract amendment, FARA sold out to an Ohio firm, which less than four months later, sold out to a New York firm—all despite a clause in FARA’s original contract which specifically said its contract could not be transferred without “prior written approval.” When asked by LouisianaVoice for a copy of the prior written approval, the word from the Division of Administration was that no such document existed.

Double oops.

Now about that retirement SNAFU.

Jindal failed to gain approval of all but two of his state employee retirement bills. One that did pass was the changeover to a 401(k)-type pension plan for new hires but the administration again managed to get the proverbial cart ahead of the horse by not tying up a few important loose ends—like, oh say, will the approved plan be a “qualified plan” under IRS regulations and thus be tax-exempt?

If not, vested contributions by employees would be subject to taxation, according to Cindy Rougeou, executive director of the Louisiana State Employees Retirement System (LASERS).

Jindal took time out of his busy nationwide speaking schedule and jockeying to become Mitt Romney’s running mate (which has about as much chance as Rosie O’Donnell’s being chosen Miss America–but Lord, wouldn’t it be fun to watch Jindal and Joe Biden in a vice-presidential debate?) to try to get a clarification—again, well after the fact.

Piyush on Friday authorized Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater to apply to the IRS for a determination letter on the eligibility of the “cash-balance” plan, scheduled to go into effect on July 1, 2013.

The issue of whether or not the new plan would be considered the equivalent to Social Security also created a new legal wrinkle that must be considered.

A tax attorney also told the LASERS board on Friday that should the cash-balance plan not be considered equivalent to Social Security, then new employees would be required to be enrolled in Social Security in addition to the 401(k) plan. That would mean the state would have to match employee Social Security contributions, thus adding significant costs to the state whose employees are not now members of Social Security.

“It is the responsibility of the employer—the state of Louisiana—to provide the equivalent benefit,” Rougeou said. “They (the state) are the ones (who are) going to be on the hook for paying for Social Security,” she said.

Only one other state, Nebraska, has a cash balance system, Rougeou said, but she pointed out Nebraska state employees also have Social Security.

The real absurdity in all this is that the LASERS board was first at the starting gate in deciding to seek the IRS ruling Friday morning but Jindal, as is his wont, jumped in front of the parade later that same day and shouted, “Follow me!” in an effort to make it all seem as if it were his idea.

In his executive order, Piyush said that as pension plan sponsor, the state would be the “appropriate party” to fill applications with the IRS. LASERS is not the only state retirement plan for which a determination must be made, he sniffed; there are three other systems that must also be considered. He said in his order that it would be better to coordinate applications “in a manner that avoids multiple, duplicative and conflicting submissions.”

Jindal can’t say he wasn’t given a heads up on this issue. LouisianaVoice, well before the spate of retirement bills ever came up for debate, posed the Social Security question. If we, with our admittedly (like Jane Smith) limited knowledge of such matters, could see the problem, then where were the political geniuses?

Of course, we know that Jindal probably wasn’t even in the state. He was too busy campaigning for others, raising campaign funds for himself and hawking his book to attend to such mundane fiscal matters.

Still, the question lingers: why wasn’t Jindal, with all those whiz kids around him to give him the benefit of all their wonderful knowledge, made aware of the potential IRS and Social Security problems—before the retirement bills were written, introduced, and voted into law?

Why indeed.

It’s a question that should not be allowed to go away.

All together now: Oops.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables on June 22, 2012| 1 Comment »

“Is that worthy of the people whom we represent that when we have disagreements with people, we’re going to try to have a chilling effect on whom they communicate with?”

–State Rep. John Bel Edwards (D-Amite), head of the House Democratic Caucus, commenting in March on a request by the law partner of the executive director of the State Republican Party for copies of all emails he had exchanged with representatives of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers over Gov. Piyush Jindal’s sweeping education reform package.

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