It’s hard for mere mortals to wrap our heads around the multi-dimensional game theory of malignant absurdity both revealed in the Kathryn LeRoy “investigation” and orbiting it in reaction.
I’ve spent most of two days trying to find a mental pathway into explaining this. But it’s like a moral and bureaucratic singularity. Once I crossed the event horizon, I feared I would never see light again.
Then it hit me. Back to first things. Good faith and bad faith. What I care about most in public life is good faith — not morality, not politics, not ideology. Where there is good faith, morality, politics, and ideology tend to take care of themselves and find their way to decent outcomes. I like to think that everyone from Neil Combee to Larry Giddens well attest to how I respond to good faith when shown it.
Where bad faith triumphs, well, you hire Sniffen and Spellman P.A. at $435/hour — at least if you’re Wes Bridges. And I start tearing through reports with bad intentions.
Very briefly, let’s recap the accusations and findings released by S&S.
Assistant Superintendent Greg Rivers filed a formal complaint alleging legally-defined sexual harassment and other misconduct by LeRoy. Rivers claimed the sexual harassment was directed at him because he just wanted to be friends with LeRoy and she couldn’t stop coming on to him over a period of years. And because she started being mean to him.
The S&S “investigation” found it could not substantiate the claims of sexual harassment against LeRoy for a variety of reasons. These reasons mostly amount to: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and “Dude, you were into to it, too.”
Understand, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a valid reason not to sanction someone with legal action — with the punishment power of the state. Had our happy lawyers concluded something other than
¯\_(ツ)_/¯, LeRoy would have faced various specific types of liability that I’m not lawyerly enough to enumerate.
But they didn’t.
What they found was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. They found an affair without sex. S&S found an intimate friendship between two people married not to each other. This intimate married friendship definitely involved: dates for dinner and drinks, special mix CDs, and texts about Hooters waitress boobs.
It may or may not have included some awkward elevator kiss-bombing and car hand-holding and some LeRoy speculation about how hard Rivers fucks. Really. “Wonder if he fucks hard.” With quotation marks. That’s in the report. LeRoy denies saying it. The investigation’s conclusion? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Ditto for the hand-holding and kiss-bombing.
Most substantively, like all intimate friendships based on mutual respect and platonic love, the special bond between LeRoy and Rivers broke down into a district-office-killing metaphorical chair fight between adults acting like their fantasies of children. She’s mad at me. He’s mad at me. He’s texting me mean things. No she is. I hate you. No, I love you.
But that office environment, which affected many other people, did not rise to the level of sexual harassment or misconduct, S&S said. Who was responsible? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
LeRoy, of course, hugged that shruggie so hard she squeezed it into “exoneration.” She made a self-congratulatory video. Key sentence:
“My office was fully exonerated, found innocent of wrongdoing regarding some very distasteful allegations. But it has been a learning experience that I value as a professional. I have come to realize what I what others describe as an outgoing personality can be misinterpreted by some. I regret that and I have learned from it.”
Disembodied pronouns are the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of language. Who describes LeRoy’s personality as “outgoing?” Who misinterprets it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who “exonerated” of her of a damn thing?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the woman who represents Polk County at conferences about education. This is who important visitors have to meet if they want to meet our school leadership. Watch this video Steve Scruggs, Elaine Thompson, Tony Delgado, Jim Freeman, Bruce Lyon, Eileen Holden. Peep those presentation skills. How easy is to sell what LeRoy is manufacturing? How often is she misinterpreted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, that’s the law, such as it is.
Legal harassment versus general awfulness
We paid a lot of money to be told, “Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” But a law firm, even one hired with heaping assloads of my money, does not get to define my sense of good faith and competence. They can’t absolve my School Board from the responsibility of assessing and cleaning up the damage caused by its top employees.
Put this another way, S&S can make determinations of law and fact related to the legalities of sexual harassment and the workplace. It is not charged, however, with determining general awfulness. That’s for the School Board; and it’s our job as citizens.
General awfulness is ample reason to fire Kathy LeRoy and Greg Rivers and Wes Bridges and not to vote for Hunt Berryman. Even if that means we have to pay LeRoy and Rivers and Bridges because they are so legally crafty in their awfulness. If only they were so crafty in their education leadership.
This report is very clear, even in its obtuse way, that the relationship between these two people consumed them and the people who worked around them. However, because total dreadfulness is not a legal term, Kathy LeRoy gets claim “exoneration” for sexual harassment. And because total dreadfulness is not a legal term, Greg Rivers gets to claim he’s a whistleblower acting in good faith. It works out pretty well for both of them actually.
It’s almost like it was in both their personal and financial interests to mutually deny that actual full-on sex occurred. How might this report look different if they admitted to a sexual affair? It’s almost like it was in both their personal and financial interests for Bridges to hire a law firm at $435/hour to come up with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It’s almost like this entire thing is one long exercise in bad faith with the public by everyone involved designed to get our protagonists/antagonists paid as the price of ridding ourselves of this metastisizing hiring mistake.
In most sexual harassment investigations, we’re forced to pick a side between victim and accused. In this case, the public is the victim of both accused and accuser — a fact made obvious by a cursory reading of the report. And the perpetrators have the audacity to claim both “exoneration”
and whistleblower status.
With that in mind, let’s look at three passages from the report.
Untested contentions
This is first, from the very methodology of the investigation.
We asked both Superintendent LeRoy and Mr. Rivers to subject their personal cell phones to forensic review by an independent third party. Both agreed and both provided us with the output from that review subject to their own redaction of messages they contended were non-public communications that were not germane to the allegations and scope of the investigation. [my emphasis]
Do you get what that says?
LeRoy and Rivers got to determine, on their own, which texts on their phones were relevant to an investigation which was largely dependent on the content of phone texts. And the lawyers supposedly representing us did not bother to question them on their redaction choices. Seriously.
Note the word “contended.” That’s a lawyer’s language choice. It’s meant to emphasize subjectivity. It’s meant to distance the writer from the claims of LeRoy and Rivers. It’s meant to absolve the lawyer.
Note also that this passage is the first and only time that selective text discovery is even mentioned in the report. I see not one suggestion in S&S’s report that it made any effort to test the evidentiary contentions of the very people it investigated. One wonders if Jerry Hill would just take Rivers’ and LeRoy’s word for the character of texts on their phones. One wonders if there are any legal penalties for bad redaction.
Honestly, “subject to their own redaction” will be the epitaph of this generation of the American organizational leadership class — private and public. This is especially true in the massive national grift factory that is professional education “leadership.”
Bottom line? If one were to suggest that every investigative finding following that paragraph is $435/hour bullshit, would one be wrong? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What songs did Rivers burn on LeRoy’s mix tapes?
Consider this.
Mr. Rivers on at least three occasions, by his own memory, made compact disc music compilations for the Superintendent. He made and gave these to the Superintendent not upon her request, but as gifts. The last of these CD compilations was given to the Superintendent when Mr. Rivers took the Superintendent out to lunch in August of last year for her birthday, less than three months before he filed his complaint.
I’ve given a song mix to a co-worker exactly once in my life. I was 23. It was a tape. She was a smart, hot, trash-talking bartender. I was a waiter. My tape was a strategic gift, given with intent. I crafted my song choice to deliver a result. I dropped REM’s Nightswimming on her. And Liz Phair. It worked. She married me. (Sorry, honey. Making a point.)
We don’t know — and the lawyers seem not to care — if Rivers’ mix CDs were all R. Kelly or The Wiggles. Marvin Gaye or Marilyn Manson? Content matters. It tends to bear on intent.
No wonder Hunt’s mad
Vice Chairman Hunt Berryman went on a legislative trip to Tallahassee in February of 2015 along with the Superintendent and Mr. Rivers. The three drove together and Mr. Berryman recalls that the tension between the two of them was palpable. To that end, shortly after the trip, Mr. Berryman suggested in a conversation with the Superintendent that there be a mediation of sorts between them so that whatever differences existed could be ironed out. The Superintendent agreed to engage in such a meeting. It should be noted that Mr. Berryman, at that time, had no knowledge as to any type of personal friendship between the Superintendent and Mr.Rivers.
Ms. Tankson facilitated an hour and a half meeting between the Superintendent and Mr. Rivers in early March of 2015 where their concerns were aired and mediated. Ms. Tankson asked both parties to put everything on the table” that they were concerned about so that she could listen. According to Ms. Tankson, both Mr. Rivers and the Superintendent voiced a principal concern of not being able to trust the other. Ms. Tankson offered both of them her best counsel and concluded by getting them to agree not to make negative statements about the other to third parties…
Interestingly, neither Mr. Rivers in his written complaint nor the Superintendent in her response, made specific reference to this mediation. The Superintendent did refer to this session with Ms. Tankson and Mr. Rivers in her interview.
Now look at this excerpt:
Mr. Rivers’ third allegation alleges that on February 13, 2015, the Superintendent sent Mr. Rivers a series of texts that threatened his employment to his personal phone. Mr. Rivers attached a copy of at least part of the text exchange. The exchange was as follows:
Superintendent:
“So very sad, Truly never thought it would come to this. I am so naive will make decisions that best fit what I think is important for Polk. Not truth. Sad. Please get your stellar resume on the street.”
Mr. Rivers:
“No ma’am. I plan to work for the district until I retire.”
Superintendent:
“As all senior staff you are on an annual contract.
As Superintendent if I believe that your vision doesn’t support mine that is
a serious problem that I will have to address.?”…
After receiving these texts, Mr. Rivers called Vice Chairman Berryman to discuss the threat, his concerns as to his relationship with the Superintendent, and that he felt he was being subjected to harassment. He approached Mr. Berryman due to the fact that they had worked closely on transportation and capital funding issues. He asked Mr. Berryman if he could speak with him, “person to person.” Mr. Berryman agreed to meet
with Mr. Rivers but cautioned him that it was Mr. Rivers? responsibility to report any personnel issues he may have with the Superintendent or anyone else. Mr. Rivers also generally referred to his concerns regarding the system (Allegation No. 5) in his discussion with Mr. Berryman. At the end of the conversation, Mr. Rivers asked Mr.Berryman not to act upon the discussion as he “did not want to make it public.”
Thus Hunt Berryman knew one year ago — with visceral, direct understanding — that his superintendent of schools and his top school facilities executive were in a toxic relationship of some kind. Who cares if it was an affair? Who cares if it was sexual harassment? It was dysfunctional and thus harmed every child and teacher and employee for whom they work.
It was so toxic that it required an informal “mediation,” like a kindergarten teacher putting two five-year-olds in time out. It didn’t even freaking work. And still Hunt kept it quiet.
If Hunt Berryman had reported publicly at the next School Board meeting — back in February of 2015 — that his school district leader and a top lieutenant can’t get in the same room together, do you think we might have a better outcome now? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When Polk County’s business and charter muckety mucks got together a few years back to force Frank O’Reilly to retire and jam Hunt into office, Hunt’s record as a decisive business executive was part of the pitch. And now? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
As always, the number one rule of Important People Fight Club is that no one talks about Important People Fight Club. Our kids matter much much less to Hunt than protecting buffoonish executives from themselves. Thus these deeply important matters among our leaders must always be kept from the public. We reserve personal humiliation and punishment for teachers caught smoking a little weed in their off time. They’re important public figures, you know.
The only outrage coming from Hunt Berryman at this point as that we unwashed masses know about the petty, impotent, incompetent bad faith the entire School District top leadership has trafficked in for at least a year. And it’s pretty breathtaking if you think about it.
Berryman added that people aware of the investigation were instructed not to talk about it. He said the leak should have never occurred.
“Someone has talked when they shouldn’t have,” Berryman said. “I’m mad at whoever disclosed it.”
Of course you are, I’d be mad, too — if that’s who I was.
Don’t let this drag on anymore. Cut our losses.
It’s not like this general awfulness occurs in a vacuum.
There’s the branding nonsense, which cost the salary of two first year teachers; the mock execution at Jewett from which LeRoy hid for three days before blaming her principal. And there’s the fact that I have never ever heard a positive comment about her from anyone who works with her or for her. None. Not once.
Believe me, when I was writing tough things about LPD and Lakeland city leadership, the pushback and disagreement was strong. I was right. But people argued with me vehemently.
No one’s arguing with me now. And yes, I’m fully engaged. This is nowhere near over. I will do whatever I can to get every Polk County institution — private and public — to express clearly its lack of confidence in this clown show. I fully intend to get to the next School Board meeting and ask some people these questions to their faces. If I can’t make that meeting, I’ll get to the next one. This brand is NEVER going away — until it goes away.
I lack the power to take anyone’s job. But there are people you might ask — superintendent and “hubby” and vice chairman — about my ability to persistently annoy. To the extent I can be the mold in your house, I will be. It’s one of my few talents.
This dragged on at the city of Lakeland for more than a year. There’s no reason for that to happen here. These are people without constituencies. Let’s just be done with them.
If you’re reading this and share my lack of confidence, email the School District and just leave simple line: “No confidence.”
If you’re in the Teacher’s Union, call for a no confidence vote.
If you’re Steve Scruggs, make a judicious call communicating how this all looks looks on Google.
Let’s do whatever we can to make this entire sorry era end.
Let’s meet the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯-shrouded bad faith of everybody involved with cleansing clarity — and even an extorted check if necessary. As LeRoy herself might say:
So very sad, Truly never thought it would come to this. I am so naive will
make decisions that best fit what I think is important for Polk. Not truth. Sad. Please get your stellar resume on the street.
I’m not naive. And I fully expected us to get to this point. Other than that, that’s pretty good advice. Leroy should heed it.