Bright Futures schedules Election Day thank-you breakfast for volunteers

Superintendent C. J. Huff appears to be leaving no stone unturned in his effort to put the people he wants in the three open seats on the Joplin R-8 Board of Education.

When the filing period for the April election opened, a slumber party was arranged in the Administration Building at 32nd and Duquesne, circumventing filing rules and enabling Huff's favored candidates, incumbents Jeff Flowers and Randy Steele, Shawn McGrew, who has been heavily involved in Huff's Bright Futures organization, and Lynda Banwart, who spearheaded the successful bond issue drive that resulted in the construction of East Middle School, Irving Elementary School, Soaring Heights Elementary School, and the combined Joplin High School/Franklin Technical Center to receive favored places on the ballot. Studies have shown over and over that people who are uncertain about whom to vote for tend to vote for the first names. Thanks to the board members using their own keys to ensure they would be first in line, the order will read Flowers, McGrew, Steele, Banwart.

That was how the race for board of education began- with the Jeff Flowers/C. J. Huff group putting its thumbs on the scale of the election process.

It looks like the race will end in the same fashion.

The taxpayer-supported Bright Futures has scheduled a volunteer thank-you breakfast for 7:30 to 9 a.m. on election day, Tuesday, April 8.

The event not only will be funded by Bright Futures, but will be held in a facility that was also financed by the taxpayers, the new East Middle School.

It certainly has the appearance of a get-out-the-vote rally in everything except name.

Do these people have no shame?

Shawn McGrew: We have to be proud of what Bright Futures has accomplished

In an interview with KZRG from earlier in the week, Joplin R-8 Board of Education candidate Shawn McGrew says we need to be focused on "maintaining our best and brightest teachers," but never acknowledges that there is a teacher turnover problem in the district.

The same approach is used with a question on the financial problems facing the district. McGrew notes that it is important to make sure the students have the technology they need and that some of the older buldings in the district be brought up to date, but never acknowledges that the district has a money problem.

On the subject of Common Core Standards, McGrew says he has some concerns about them, including data collection and making sure that all schools have the technology to deal with the online testing Common Core requires. He does not say, however, how he feels about Common Core.

McGrew does get specific about the effect of Bright Futures on the Joplin school district. McGrew, who has been deeply involved with the program, noted the difference it has made to R-8 students, and that the program has expanded to include 22 districts in six states.

"We have to be very proud of what we have accomplished."

Alone in his bunker- the C. J. Huff story

It is  not a problem most of us will ever have to face.

Alone in his bunker at 32nd and Duquesne, C. J. Huff had a serious decision to make- Should he put "hero of the Joplin Tornado" at the top of his resume or should he put it somewhere slightly lower on the first page and show that he has remained a modest man in spite of all of the acclaim that has come his way since May 22, 2011?

People had been telling him for the past two years that he needed to cash in while he was still a hot commodity and they were not just talking about the frequent speeches he has made all across the country.

Other jobs were out there, other school districts, business possibilities, maybe even becoming a full-time motivational speaker. He had enjoyed the interaction with those who attended his presentations and the news clippings, all of which mentioned either that he had been brought to tears or he was at the brink of tears as he related the events of May 22 and the days afterward.

But C. J. Huff stayed in Joplin where he was loved. He had to be loved; his Bright Futures partners told him so.

Little by little, the hero facade that was erected around C. J. Huff after the tornado began fading away as he said things that reminded people of the days before May 22 when he was a mortal just like the rest of us.

-When more than 200 teachers left the district in two years, he said it was because their spouses had found jobs in other communities. That made sense. When the husbands get jobs, the little women have to follow.

-When he spent thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on a thank you tour at a time when district funds were dwindling. The people who helped Joplin would have appreciated phone calls and sincere thank-you letters just as much.

-When he, with the unanimous stamp of approval of the R-8 Board of Education, submitted a five-year strategic plan that called for the district reserves to fall to as low as eight percent, but to miraculously climb back up to 25 percent, even though no efforts were being made to curb spending.

-When he made a call to an employer and suggested it would not be a good idea that if an employee decided to run for Board of Education.

-When he made references to being a conservative and about conservatives having pitchforks and torches.

It has been one thing after another and it has not helped that during the past few months, he has had federal and state officials on his back about nagging paltry little things like proper use of Title I funds and questionable practices that led to higher graduation rates.

How could anyone question the graduation rates? Would the Joplin R-8 School District have spent $3,000 for a party for local businessman to announce an 85 percent graduation rate if it were not so?

C. J. Huff may have missed the best time to leave, but signs that he should be looking have been all around him for the past few months.

Though he was never really that close with Angie Besendorfer, she had been able to take care of the day-to-day management of the school district while Huff busied himself with the herculean tasks of increasing the graduation rates and continuing to build a Bright Futures empire.

When she resigned, all of a sudden Huff found himself surrounded by people whose chief loyalty was to Besendorfer and not to him. Even worse, many of the people were not qualified for the positions they held. Some lacked the proper degrees; most had little, if any experience, and many of the people who were there had not been hired because of any management ability or any outstanding knowledge of education, but because they were willing to do, without question, anything Besendorfer asked them to do. Huff needed a bulldog to do the kinds of things that Besendorfer had done and fortunately, he had one in human resources director Tina Smith. She was not really qualified to be a chief operating officer, but that approach had worked for Besendorfer, and this would enable him to continue to concentrate on graduation rates, Bright Futures and spreading the gospel of the Joplin Tornado across the nation.

Still, despite having someone else to handle the day-to-day operation of the school district, C. J. Huff has been a worried man. There are people running for the board of education who want to change the way he does things, maybe even force him out.
\
How can you force out the hero of the Joplin Tornado?

The sunset of C. J. Huff's time with the Joplin R-8 School District seems to be at hand. He sits alone in his bunker, surrounded by people who have never been loyal to him, guiding hundreds of people who have been in fear of Angie Besendorfer, Mike Johnson, or Tina Smith.

The idea that he was a man of the people, who just happened to be surrounded by autocratic administrators who have ruled by keeping the district's employees in fear of losing their jobs, is no longer held. Even those who have been long-time supporters of Huff know that it is he, no one else, who is ultimately responsible for the waves of teachers and staff members who have left the district.

Huff can look out his door and see Bright Futures, but there are no bright futures on his horizon.

McGrew, Flowers, Steele form committees; prepare for record amounts to be spent

The three Joplin School Board candidates endorsed by the Joplin Progress Committee have all formed campaign committees now, enabling them to accept the committee's money.

This should ensure that the same kind of spending the Joplin R-8 Board of Education has been indulging in for the past several years will be seen in a local board of education race for the first time in the district's history.

Both Board President Jeff Flowers and Shawn McGrew of Freeman Hospital, who has appeared in commercials for Bright Futures, formed their campaign committees today, according to Missouri Ethics Commission documents. The other incumbent in the race, Randy Steele, formed his committee earlier.

The documents indicate that one of those who has contributed to the Joplin Progress Committee, Nancy Good, is serving as McGrew's treasurer. Ms. Good is also on the Bright Futures advisory board.

2013 in Review- Bright Futures or dark past- CEO's $30K in credit card debt led to bankruptcy

(From September 10, 2013)

The twin towers of C. J. Huff's tenure as superintendent of the Joplin R-8 School District have been higher graduation rates and the innovative Bright Futures program.

The program, which had already made a difference in helping deal with the poverty in the district, became something almost completely different after the May 22, 2011, Joplin Tornado.

At that point, Bright Futures became the hub around which charity for the school district came from around the world. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were funneled into the district from people all around the world who had seen the heart and determination of the people of Joplin. Many were enticed into giving by the bold statement Huff made when he said that school would start on time, even though that time was less than three months away.

Bright Futures was a creation of C. J. Huff and to ensure its success he made sure to put someone he trusted in charge of the program. The CEO of Bright Futures and now of the ever-growing Bright Futures USA is Kim Vann, a former employee of the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce.

It was a bold move by Huff. Not many in his position would have trusted the disposition of millions of dollars in contributions to someone who only six years earlier had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and who, less than three weeks before the Joplin Tornado, was served with papers at the administration building on 15th Street for a lawsuit claiming non-payment on an account.

Joplin Globe: We know what is good for Joplin- you can't handle the truth

For those few remaining Joplin Globe reporters who remember the days when the Globe, in its own fashion, attempted to report on the problems in Joplin, these last few years have been torture.

The newspaper made no effort to dig into the background of former Missouri Southern State University President Bruce Speck, opening the door to a five-year nightmare for those who were able to remain employed after Speck had done his damage.

It is not as if it was difficult to find the warning signs. In five minutes of research, I was able to dig up enough to know that the Board of Governors should have interviewed more than one candidate for the position.

The Globe finally got its act together for a brief time and tried to investigate the Speck Administration, then Publisher Michael Beatty and Editor Carol Stark not only pulled off the only reporter who was trying to investigate what was going on at the university, but they even offered Speck advice on how to control the media and offered him ideas of puff pieces they were willing to write for him.

That made the veteran reporters, the ones who know what journalistic ethics are, question just what was happening to their newspaper.

Instead of playing the traditional newspaper role, the Globe was trading its integrity for access and a seat at the table.

The situation with this area's newspaper of record has grown even worse since May 22, 2011.

Since that day, Carol Stark and company have played the role of cheerleader for Joplin city and school officials. Ms. Stark has done everything except put on a skimpy uniform and shake her pom-pons to make sure that neither she nor the Joplin Globe can be accused of standing in the way of what City Administrator Mark Rohr and Joplin R-8 leaders C. J. Huff and Angie Besendorfer see as essential for the success of the governmental bodies they represent.

If something has the imprint of the school district, the city of Joplin, Bright Futures, Rebuild Joplin, or anything of the sort, the newspaper function of shining light to reveal to the public what is happening is shut down, and we are left with the idea that we must put our complete trust in the administrators who have been hired to lead our city and school district and the public-minded citizens who have joined in to boost their efforts.

In the days immediately following the tornado, that instinct was understandable; when two and a half years have passed and the hero worship continues, the newspaper is forsaking its primary responsibility of informing its readers.

Millions of dollars have passed through this city and millions more will be spent before our recovery is complete.

Take the case of the master developer Rebuild Joplin recommended and then Joplin city officials chose to handle the tornado-damaged portion of the city. While the Sugar Land, Texas, firm of Wallace-Bajjali has many accomplishments on its resume, it also has an involvement in two bankruptcies, an SEC investigation, which resulted in $60,000 fines for both David Wallace and Costa Bajjali, and a lawsuit which accuses Wallace-Bajjali of running a pyramid scheme. It has also run into numerous delays with its Amarillo project. With the exception of one paragraph in which the Globe quoted Mark Rohr as having looked into the SEC matter and not having any problem with it, the Globe has simply left the story untouched, as if the truth would somehow be anti-progress, or maybe printing it would cause the Globe to lose its seat at the table.

The coverage of the Joplin R-8 School District has been reprehensible. Michael Beatty, Carol Stark, and company decided early on that C. J. Huff and Angie Besendorfer's version of school progress would be the only one that would be covered in the newspaper.

It seemed like it took forever for the Globe to realize that more than 200 teachers had left the Joplin School District, something that had never happened here before. Then it allowed, apparently without any skeptical follow-up questions, C. J. Huff to blame the mass exodus on spouses finding jobs in other cities.

When R-8 technical department employee Ronny Justin Myers admitted that he had pornographic photos of 10 Joplin High School students on his laptop and it became apparent that Huff had known about this since February and never warned the public, the students, teachers, or even the Board of Education, in nearly every other school district in the United States, this would have been a scandal of epic proportions- a convicted sex criminal had access to Joplin High School students' computers and that fact, and the accompanying invasion of privacy, were simply brushed off by the Globe brain trust, mentioned only in passing when quoting from a news release issued by the U. S. Attorney's office following Myers' sentencing.

There are numerous other examples I could provide about the Globe's coverage of the Joplin School District, but I will limit myself to one.

On the first day of filing for Board of Education offices, Board President Jeff Flowers, former Board President Randy Steele and two other candidates circumvented (violated would be a better word) the rules, used the board members' own keys, something that non--board members obviously would not have, to give themselves the advantage of waiting inside a warm building for the opening of the filing period so their names would go at the top of the ballot.

Five days passed and not one word has been written in the Joplin Globe about this ethical breach. What is the big deal? After all, this is the Joplin Globe's version of Joplin, where a chosen few can choose to ignore the rules, create their own, and read Globe editorials and columns that praise their creativity and criticize those who dare question their policies. Those people, after all, including the ones who did not violate the rules and wait in a warm building for the filing period to begin, are the ones Michael Beatty and Carol Stark see as standing in the way of Joplin's progress.

To reward those who, wittingly or unwittingly, circumvented the rules, the Globe offered considerable space on today's opinion page for one of the candidates who waited inside to introduce himself and tell why he is running for the Board of Education.

It did not hurt, at least from the Globe upper hierarchy's way of thinking, that the candidate's beliefs could just as easily have been written by C. J. Huff or by whomever it is that write's C. J. Huff's words.

I hope the board will offer all other candidates the same amount of space, also in the more heavily read Sunday edition, to introduce themselves

I have sympathy for the hard-working veteran reporters at the Globe who have seen a paper that during the Edgar Simpson days was  a tough-talking tiger searching for the truth into the Michael Beatty/Carol Stark version, a toothless tabby that is reluctant to print the truth until their friends in school and city administration have signed off on it.

I have more sympathy for the people of Joplin.