The Joplin Globe, documents, Joplin City Council, and Joplin Schools

At some point, we are going to know the contents of the 10 pages that were omitted from the publicly released version of Osage Beach lawyer Tom Loraine's investigation that led to the firing of City Manager Mark Rohr.

I have no doubt about that.

The Joplin Globe has been at the front of the effort to get the complete document, going as far as filing a lawsuit.

The Globe does a lot of that, posturing and bellowing about the public's right to know. In this case, I agree. The public has every right to know why Mark Rohr was fired.

It is the motivation of the Globe I suspect. When you consider that Rohr and Globe Editor Carol Stark are good friends and that Rohr has been a source for many Globe stories, sometimes on the record, sometimes not, that brings into doubt the purity of the area newspaper of record.

After all, this is the same newspaper that stopped reporter Greg Grisolano from filing Sunshine Law requests about problems at Missouri Southern State University during the Bruce Speck era. It was Globe Publisher Michael Beatty who advised Speck on how to manage the media and encouraged him to meet with Mrs. Stark to come up with ideas for "positive" stories, ones that could improve Speck's image in the community.

That information came from a Sunshine Law request made by Missouri Southern's newspaper, The Chart,

Documents are extremely useful when it comes to reporting. It is the Globe's selective use of them that has brought the newspaper's motives into question.

Consider the city's master developer Wallace-Bajjali. The documentation on this company is extensive. The Turner Report has provided details of three bankruptcies involving Wallace-Bajjali subsidiaries, an SEC investigation which ended with partners David Wallace and Costa Bajjali having to repay $1.2 million to investors and pay $60,000 fines, a lawsuit in which investors refeer to Wallace-Bajjali's project as a Ponzi scheme, and a bankruptcy court lawsuit in which a former partner claims David Wallace cheated him out of nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

All of this information is in public documents. None of it has been written about in the Joplin Globe. The only mention the newspaper has made about Wallace-Bajjali's difficulties has been an assurance by Mark Rohr that he looked into it and it didn't amount to anything.

The information the Turner Report found, combined with Tom Loraine's recommendation that the city drop Wallace-Bajjali should have been a potent combination.

Since the Globe's decision makers are aligned with those who are wanting bigger and better for Joplin, no matter what the cost, it is still full speed ahead for Wallace-Bajjali.

Even more pernicious has been the Globe's coverage of the Joplin R-8 School District. The Globe played tough on about two stories concerning the school district over the past several years. One was the infamous trip to Germany by former Assistant Superintendent Angie Besendorfer. The other was the story about C. J. Huff's thank-you trips all over the country. Even those were powderpuff stories in which the reporter was clearly played by Huff, perhaps with the help of the Globe editor.

Meanwhile, the Turner Report has documented one problem after another with the school district, some involving clear financial mismanagement, some regarding ethical violations, others making it clear that the public is being deceived on many matters.

The Globe has ignored nearly all of those. The only times I can recall the Globe jumping on stories that first appeared in the Turner Report are the DWI arrest of R-8 Board Member Phil Willcoxon and the lawsuit filed by former Royal Heights Principal Larry Masters against Besendorfer.

Those stories would not have been touched had they not been picked up by the local television stations. Carol Stark has played along with C. J. Huff's claim that even documents cannot be believed because everything is coming from a disgruntled former employee (me). Let's face it. The Globe has not been the only media outlet that has played at that game.

I have heard that Huff talks about my anonymous sources (the Globe, as Mrs. Stark piously pointed out in a recent column, does not use anonymous sources, even though it has been clear that it does, it just never refers to them as anonymous sources, it just prints information that miraculously sounds like it came from a city manager, or a superintendent, or God help us, a master developer) . Yet anyone who has read the Turner Report for the past several months has noticed that most of my stories, just like the ones on Wallace-Bajjali, have been based on documents- documents that, for the most part, have been easily available to the Globe.

Consider the following:

-German Furniture- Though the Globe initially wrote about the Germany trip that was paid for by a company that wanted to sell furniture for the new school buildings, it never followed up when that company received a large contract to supply the furniture.That can be found in the R-8 Board of Education minutes.

-Race to the Top- The R-8 School District's application for the federal Race to the Top grant, outlines $10 million worth of spending plans with no connection to the classroom. Reasonable people can argue about the quality of that plan. What they can't argue about is how C. J. Huff and the Board of Education signed off a plan to ask voters for a tax levy increase, less than six months after voters approved the largest bond issue in district history. The levy increase would have been used to pay teachers for working before and after school. This has never been mentioned in the Globe.

-Dangerously Low Reserves- The Board of Education has continued to approve all kinds of spending and addition of one layer of administration after another at a time when district reserves are dangerously low, but then they already know that- the board members are the ones who approved a strategic plan for 2013-2017, which can be found on the district website, that says the reserves will dip to as a low as eight percent this year, but somehow will rebound to 25 percent next year. Nowhere in the strategic plan is there an answer for how this is going ot take place. The only suggestion for making money has been to sell naming rights to classrooms, gymnasiums and anything else they can slap a price on.

Lawsuits Against the School District- As I noted yesterday, there have been three lawsuits filed in which the director of the school's building projects and former director of Buildings, Grounds and Transportation Mike Johnson has been accused of racial discrimination, sexual harassment, violating numerous safety regulations, and offering crude sexual remarks about a principal. That is three lawsuits in three years and the district has had to settle two of them, one for $276,000. One lawsuit is ongoing.

Efforts to Keep Closed Door Dealings From Public- When the Joplin City Council wants to keep something behind closed doors, the Joplin Globe writes editorial and goes to court. When the Joplin R-8 School Board does it, the Globe ignores it. As the Turner Report noted earlier today, the board's attorney asked for a protective order preventing board member Jim Kimbrough from talking about what had happened in closed session. This intervention, which took place without a board meeting to authorize it, occurred in a case where fired Royal Heights Principal Larry Masters claims Besendorfer lied to convince the board to withdraw its contract offer and fire him. Judge David Dally approved the protective order....and the district is not a defendant in this case. It is all in the court file, a public document.

Pornographic Photos of Joplin High School Girls- One year ago, the Globe and other local media outlets ran quotes from C. J. Huff claiming that technology department employee Ronny Justin Myers worked in the administration building and had no contact with students. That was the story as far as we knew it at that point, but a sentencing memorandum placed in Myers' court file by the U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri made it clear that Myers said he had pornographic photos of 10 Joplin High School girls, and four of them had been verified...in February at the same time that Huff was telling the media that Myers had no contact with students. Huff never mentioned that one of Myers' responsibilities was overseeing the laptops given to every high school student. This was never mentioned by the Globe until the U. S. Attorney issued a news release following Myers' sentencing. Even then, the Globe simply ran that part of the news release verbatim. The news release made it clear that Myers was able to spy on the kids through their computers even when they are at home. The Globe never asked, can someone still do that (the answer is yes). The Globe never asked Huff why he had misled the public with his statement. Were parents ever warned about this. (No.) Does the contract parents sign with the students leave the door open for further spying (the answer is yes).

More than 200 Teachers Have Left in Last Two Years- This can be proven simply by going through Department of Elementary and Secondary Education documents. C. J. Huff has said, depending on his mood apparently, that many of them left because their spouses found jobs in other communities, they were traumatized by the tornado, or they were not able to deal with the high expectations he has. The fact that the Globe has not pushed him on those answers gives a clear idea of how much the newspaper is devoted to finding the truth. I don't know of any former teachers who have been asked. Of course, they probably are not going to talk to the Globe since Carol Stark made it clear how she felt about anonymity.

The Original East Middle School Did Not Need to be Torn Down- On the district website, the claim that was featured on the Turner Report that the original East did not have to be torn down because it only suffered "minor damage" during the tornado is attacked as whoever wrote the item notes that FEMA agreed that the building should be condemned. Partially, that is accurate, FEMA did condemn the building after much prodding from Joplin R-8 Administration, but I am not the one who said East suffered only minor damage. That information came from a report issued by scientists from the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology. Yes, by using FEMA funds and bond issue money we were able to come up with the palace that was built on the old East Middle School site. The insurance money, however, would have paid to replace East, a two-year-old, state-of-the-art building the way it was and the students would have been back in a regular school building (the classroom areas, as the report noted, suffered only minor damage) by August. Instead the staff and some of the students spent two and a half years in a warehouse on the outskirts of the district. And as I noted in my post, Besendorfer told principals at a meeting the building was eventually condemned because they couldn't find bricks that could match.

That is just a partial list of the stories that come from public documents. Someone should tell the Joplin Globe about these documents- they can use them without even having to file a lawsuit.