Northwest Indiana Discussion

ATLANTA — The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools and nearly three dozen other administrators, teachers, principals and other educators were indicted Friday in one of the nation’s largest cheating scandals.Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faces charges including racketeering, false statements and theft. She retired just days before a state probe was released in 2011 and has previously denied the allegations. The indictment represents the first criminal charges in the investigation.

The previous state investigation in 2011 found cheating by nearly 180 educators in 44 Atlanta schools. Educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in, investigators said. Teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation, creating a culture of “fear and intimidation” in the district.The cheating came to light after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.The criminal investigation lasted 21 months, and the allegations date back to 2005. In addition to Hall, 34 people were indicted, including four high-level administrators, six principals and 14 teachers.

HAMMOND — A former Morton High School algebra teacher accused of having sex with one student and possessing sexually explicit photos of at least one more student will remain in jail after a federal judge denied his request for home detention.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Koster said during a detention hearing Wednesday afternoon that she wasn’t comfortable letting Jon Erik Lilly, 27, of Cedar Lake, live at his mother’s house under home detention partly because the house is within 500 feet of Lake Central High School.

Lilly was arrested last month after friends of one student, identified in court records as Jane Doe 1, reported to school officials that the girl, then 17, was having sex with Lilly.

U.S. Homeland Security Investigations officials eventually found pictures of Jane Doe 1 and another student, Jane Doe 4, that they say are sexually explicit. He also had images of two other students, Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 3, in states of undress. Koster said at the hearing Wednesday that they were investigating how old Jane Doe 2 and 3 were when the pictures were taken and that officials are still trying to identify all 10 females who were in pictures that Lilly possessed and how old they were when the photos were taken.

Lilly has still not been charged, after waiving his right to being indicted within 30 days. Koster said Wednesday that he did so because he was interested in reaching a plea agreement early and agreed to give officials more time to investigate the case. Along with charging Lilly with possession of child pornography, the government is also considering counts of production of child pornography and enticement, which comes with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.

Koster said that along with Lilly’s nearness to another high school, she was also concerned by how many victims might be involved.

“We are troubled by the number of victims,” she said.

She pointed out that Lilly could get on the Internet because a nearby restaurant’s open wireless connection reached to the front steps of his mother’s house.

Lilly’s attorney, L. Felipe Sanchez, stressed that his client is still presumed innocent and that Lilly’s mother and other friends and family members were committed to making sure he was always supervised, never had access to a computer or cell phone and never had access to the victims or other witnesses.

“Life is often difficult; it is not impossible,” Sanchez said.

U.S. Judge Paul Cherry disagreed, however, and ruled that Lilly was a danger to the community and should remain in jail pending trial.

The next hearing, which will be either an arraignment or status update, is set for June 21.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has released a new photograph of a former D.C. elementary school teacher from Northwest Indiana who was arrested in Nicaragua over the weekend on child pornography charges.

The FBI hopes that the photograph of Eric Justin Toth, a 200 Highland High School graduate and Hammond native, will encourage any other potential abuse victims to come forward.

The new picture being distributed Wednesday shows Toth with much longer hair than in the posters previously made public by the FBI. Because it’s the most recent pictures of him, authorities are hoping that by distributing it, more people who came in contact with Toth will recognize him.

Toth, a former teacher at the Beauvoir school, was arrested in Nicaragua on Saturday after five years on the run. The 31-year-old was ordered held without bond after brief court appearance Tuesday.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – More than 200 Wisconsin teachers and school administrators traveled to Green Bay last week to attend CREATE Wisconsin’s 2013 state conference.

EAGnews decided to join them, to get a first-hand look at what the program, sponsored by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, is all about.

State officials contend the CREATE program is nothing more than an effort to help teachers better understand and serve minority students. But as EAGnews previously reported, CREATE appears to have a much more broad and progressive agenda than simply working to close the achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts.

Many of the presentations focused on how public schools supposedly promote “white culture” and “white privilege,” to the detriment to students of color. Presenters called on educators to recognize and acknowledge their white privilege and encourage their students to do the same. Only then, presenters argue, can all students truly receive a multicultural education.

The conference also focused on teaching race-based topics in the classroom and how to respond to student resistance when talking about white privilege. The goal seems to be to crush dissent, convince white kids that they need to feel guilty about themselves and the society they grew up in, and convince minority kids that current American social structures are hopelessly stacked against them.

Teaching ‘white privilege’ to children

In a workshop titled “Establishing Critical Thinking and Multicultural Education in Rural Wisconsin Schools,” Dr. Marguerite Parks discussed the importance of multicultural education and how to create culturally responsive classrooms.

Of course the concept of “white privilege” was near the center of the discussion.

Parks, an associate dean for the College of Education and Human Services at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, said educators are often ignorant of their own “white privilege” or do not know how to broach the subject in class.

“What we often discover is that teachers don’t have the resources or don’t know what books to use,” she said.

An email from Lake Central School Corp.'s top official indicates district resources were used to push its voter referendum. But in a subsequent letter, the district denied an anti-referendum group access to the same resources.

Indiana law requires school corporations to provide equal access to facilities or equipment when promoting a position on a local referendum.

In a Sept. 8 email obtained by The Times, Lake Central Superintendent Larry Veracco told a parent he provided parents' email addresses to the political action committee supporting the referendum. District officials later denied a request for the same records by a group opposing the referendum, which sought voters' approval to rebuild Lake Central High School and construct a new Protsman Elementary School.

The pro-referendum committee, Friends of Lake Central Schools, sent parents multiple emails in the months before the election.

Ultimately, voters approved the $160 million referendum in November, but not all parents were happy about receiving those messages.

"I do not know if it was an overt handover of my email address or if it was done by someone in the school system who was sympathetic to the cause, but I have a unique email address that I use for the RDS Parent Network and as the contact email on file with the school system," one parent wrote Veracco on Sept. 8. "That email has never been used anywhere else. ... I'm writing, as a supporter of the goals you have, to suggest that you risk undermining those goals by using (school) funds, facilities or information in support of that goal."

That parent asked to not be named because his child still attends Lake Central schools.

In response to that parent's email, Veracco wrote:

"We did provide parent email addresses for this initial PAC mailing so all parents (dozens of requests) know where to go for information. I realize that some of our parents may prefer that we spread the word in a manner other than email, but we made a decision to do so since we believe the greater majority will benefit."

The Times obtained copies of emails to and from Veracco through a public records request to the school district.

Residents opposed to the referendum argue Lake Central school officials gave the district and its supporters an unfair advantage in swaying public opinion.

'I was mistaken'

Veracco told The Times during a recent interview that he isn't sure why he sent that email. He said he later checked with the assistant superintendent and employees in the technology department, and they told him the district did not provide the parents' email list to the pro-referendum group.

"I believe, in hindsight, I was mistaken," Veracco said.

His denial comes despite his Sept. 8 email, which references specific actions taken by a Web consultant to disseminate the email addresses.

Veracco said the political action committee may have received parents' email addresses from some of Lake Central's Parent Teacher organizations, but representatives of four PTOs reached by The Times said they did not do so.

Chuck Pollen, chairman of the pro-referendum Friends of Lake Central Schools, said he does not know how the political action committee gathered parents' email addresses. He referred questions to pro-referendum volunteer coordinator Gina Marten. Marten declined comment, referring all questions to Lake Central School Corp.

MADISON — Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madisonpublic schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School Districtin July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air.

“One student said something to the effect of ‘Scott Walker wants to close all the public schools’… So the rest of the class started drawing their own cartoons and they turned very political. They have very strong feelings about Scott Walker,” the teacher wrote on her blog.

“The cartoons started getting a little inappropriate so at this point, we stopped drawing and discussed what a political cartoon was,” she wrote.

If the drawings weren’t appropriate, why did the art teacher publish them on her blog? It turns out these weren’t the inappropriate drawings.

Students said they wanted to show their love for their country, but a superintendent believes it went a little too far.

The result? More than a dozen students are suspended for drawing on doors and windows and scattering small American flags outside their high school.

It took place Monday at Red Wing High School as part of Homecoming Week, but it’s a back-and-forth that’s gone on for weeks.

“Red, white, and blue streamers, small American flags and erasable paint,” Bryce Reps said.

He’s a senior and took part in the senior “prank.”

Some seniors covered almost every window, some outside doors, even the skylight with the paint.

“We have to take these things seriously,” Red Wing Schools Superintendent Karsten Anderson said.

There’s a bit more to this red, white, and blue demonstration that dates back to last month.

A bipartisan bill that would stop convicted sex offenders from working in schools has been passed by the House but is running into a foe as it heads to the Senate: major teachers’ unions like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Kyle Olson, with the Education Action Group Foundation told Megyn Kelly Wednesday night on “The Kelly File” that the unions’ objection to the bill proves “unions are out to protect the adults…they are not out for the interests of the children.”

“We should have zero tolerance for issues like this,” Olson said. “We have zero tolerance policies for weapons, a kid who bites a Pop Tart into a gun or has a Hello Kitty bubble-maker will be suspended or expelled if they have those sorts of things…”

The measure would require school systems to check state and federal criminal records for employees with unsupervised access to elementary and secondary school students, and for people seeking those jobs. Workers refusing to submit to the checks would not be allowed to have school positions.

Teachers play an incredibly important role in children’s lives.

Perhaps their most fundamental responsibility is to make sure the kids entrusted to them are safe when they are in school, five days per week, six or seven hours per day.

That’s why law enforcement officials in Rochester, New York are so baffled and upset by the lack of cooperation they received from several teachers and school administrators who had worked with Matthew LoMaglio, an elementary gym teacher who was convicted last month of sexually molesting an 8-year-old male student during the 2006-07 school year.

Many in the community were also surprised and disappointed that more than 20 educators wrote to the court in the pre-sentencing phase, expressing support for LoMagio but little or no sympathy for the young victim.

“Some of the people (on the school staff) who were cooperative told us there was talk at school, sort of like ‘Are you for the teacher or for the student,’” Kyle Rossi, the assistant district attorney who tried the case against LoMaglio, told EAGnews. “It was very disappointing to make contact with teachers who wouldn’t give us the time of day until they were instructed to.

“I would say that, being in that position, they have a special duty to recognize issues and protect kids. I would think it has more do to with ignorance than anything else.”

LoMaglio, 37, was found guilty in November of second degree sexual conduct against a child and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Last week he was sentenced to four years in prison by New York State Supreme Court Justice Joanne Winslow.

Rossi said he was also troubled by the 22 letters the court received from various teachers, expressing support for LoMaglio. He said he is not authorized to turn over the letters to the public or divulge the names of the teachers who wrote them.