Member Newsletter
I’m tempted to say, TPM gets results! But it’s not quite that simple, at least in terms of mainstream chronology.
But it’s still super good. So hold tight.
Yesterday I brought you the news of the war time school board of Douglas County, Nevada, which culminates in the hiring of a new superintendent who has the kind of rap sheet that might normally get you expelled from a public high school as a student. All true!
But I’d missed the latest development.
As I explained, last week, the Douglas County School District school board formally offered the job of superintendent to John Ramirez, Jr., by a 4-to-3 vote, notwithstanding the fact that, according to this article at local news site Carson Now and other reports, he has a long list of bad acts, misuse of school credits cards, alleged frauds and multiple formal complaints of sexual harassment. Even more dirty laundry came out in subsequent days. Then on Tuesday of this week a new board meeting was held.
It was a pretty raucous affair.
According to press reports, the public meeting drew some 300 protestors outraged at the Ramirez job offer. The crowd was feral, with lots of shouting, placards and disruptions that you might have thought they’d come straight out of a Moms for Liberty convention. But it was the opposite. These were constituents who’d had enough of this crusading anti-woke school board’s antics, notwithstanding the fact that Douglas County is a very red county where Trump beat Biden by a 2-to-1 margin in 2020.
Constituents as young as sixth grade said none of it was right: “You as a school board, you’re supposed to make the kids and the staff safe.” A woman named Cheryl Blomstrom said: “I would be freaked out absolutely. I don’t know what I would do about having kids in school right now. I think I’d consider home schooling; I’d consider placing my kids in another school district, I would think about private school, or a charter school.”
The board meeting kicked off with the president of the board, David Burns, introducing Megan Barth, the founding editor of a right-wing news site called The Nevada Globe. Barth explained that they had “hired an experienced private investigator” who looked into Ramirez’s background and basically gave him a clean bill of health. Yes, the 2022 DUI conviction that helped get him canned from his last job really happened but everything else was just allegations. When I first wrote this I couldn’t quite make sense of why on earth Barth was there. Like … this is a public meeting where constituents each get a minute or two to vent or make their case. But it starts with this website editor making a public presentation? WTF? So I actually found the video of the meeting and watched it myself. (You can watch it here.)
Holy crap.
It turns out it seemed pretty weird to everyone else too. Board President Burns opens the meeting and he’s clearly already pretty pissed off. I guess it’s understandable. There’s already been a pretty big community backlash and hundreds have shown up for the meeting. So even at the beginning he’s warning people not to try anything. He’s not in any mood to mend fences. As noted, this is a meeting for public comment. He introduces Barth and the board member next to him basically says, what is this? Why is this editor woman here? Why does she get unlimited time? Does everyone else get unlimited time?
Burns basically says, my board my rules. Then they call in Joey Gilbert, the anti-woke lawyer who I mentioned yesterday and who is now costing the board hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Gilbert says, yep, it’s kosher. So now we’re off to the races.
Barth starts off basically saying a recent, big expose article is fake news and encourages Ramirez to sue the paper for libel. Barth’s defense of Ramirez essentially has two prongs. She says her private investigator did a public records search and didn’t find any record of the hit and run no contest plea and, if I understood her right, they didn’t find a record of the DUI either, though they concede the DUI did happen. Presumably there’s no getting around that because Ramirez admitted it. The crack private investigator didn’t find the hit-and-run in a public records search. But just me and my Nexis account found press reports about the 2004 hit-and-run, for which Ramirez got a formal censure by the California teacher’s commission, and even Ramirez’s comments saying it was no big deal. “It hasn’t affected my ability to lead,” Ramirez told the local paper in April 2010. “It was a traffic violation, but the CTC felt the need to reprimand me on it.”
For the various sexual harassment, fraud and misuse of public funds allegations, Barth essentially argued that the two California school districts that Ramirez was fired from were total shitholes where the school boards were filled with crooks and sexual harassers. So who are they to judge? And anyway, Ramirez was never convicted of a crime tied to any of the alleged wrongdoing. So what’s the problem?
It’s true that Ramirez was never convicted of the various alleged frauds that led to his terminations from other jobs and it’s not clear what happened to the sexual harassment complaints against him. In any case, when someone gets canned for fraud and using school credit cards for personal expenses, that’s usually considered a mark against them even if they don’t get convicted or do time.
This bizarre stunt obviously didn’t get the meeting off to a great start. And it didn’t seem to convince anyone either. What it did do was get everyone who was there to protest even more upset. Sensing this, Burns opens up the public comment portion of the meeting by telling the crowd that they need to be careful what they say. If they say anything that leads to them getting sued for defamation, they’re on their own. The school board won’t be there to defend them. So now he’s threatening the members of the public. The crowd now gets so unruly that he calls the board into a 30 minute executive (i.e. private) session. When they get back everyone’s still pretty upset and they get feral from there.
By the end of the meeting, Ramirez’s support was collapsing even on the board. A different member of the board calls for a vote to rescind the offer and that vote wins 5 votes to 1. So Ramirez’s is out of luck and possibly off to yet another state. Burns was apparently so, well, burned by this public rebuke that he didn’t even vote. He abstained.
At the next meeting in March the board will go back to square one and start a new search for a superintendent.