PublicSource | News for a better Pittsburgh (https://www.publicsource.org/category/education/)
In the continuing saga over shredded documents in the Fox Chapel Area School District, the board voted Monday to hire a special counsel to review the shredding investigation of previous special counsel Thomas Breth.
But the special counsel who investigated said the documents in question were already destroyed when he was hired.
A child custody court document reveals that the deputy superintendent of the Fox Chapel Area School District was accused of strangling his wife and daughter on the night of the couple’s separation in June 2018.
Pittsburgh school board members heard disappointing news about student test performance Tuesday night. Scores for several grade levels fell, and the district continues to have wide achievement gaps between black and white students.
The Fox Chapel Area School District board hired a Butler law firm to act as special counsel in an investigation without telling the public what the investigation is about or how much it would cost the taxpayers. The board retroactively voted to approve the ongoing investigation at Monday's board meeting.
Residents of the affluent district are questioning the lack of public deliberation by the school board, leading to concerns about potential violations of state open meeting and ethics laws.
Students see new translation services and quicker transitions to regular classrooms. But they still face challenges.
ESL enrollment has steadily increased in the county’s public school districts.
For the past two years, Pittsburgh Superintendent Anthony Hamlet has not filed forms that disclose gifts, travel or outside income that he may have received. Public officials and employees involved in spending must file the forms annually, a requirement of the State Ethics Commission.
Now there are three official probes into the propriety of a vendor-paid trip to Cuba taken by Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Anthony Hamlet and four other administrators. On Wednesday, the Pittsburgh Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution authorizing solicitor Ira Weiss to conduct a review of district policies relating to procurement, contracts, ethics and conflicts of interest. This review compounds another prompted by the district and one launched by the state auditor general. The inquiries come in the wake of media reports about an April trip to Cuba on the tab of an educational technology company called Flying Classrooms.
The company had a one-year $73,000 contract with the district, which had expired at the time of the trip. Board member Sala Udin, City Controller Michael Lamb and state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale have questioned whether the trip violated the state ethics law that prevents district officials from accepting gifts from vendors.
