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Thursday, July 6, 2017

NYC Admins: Hide What Cannot Be Changed, Deny What You Did Change

The current administration of NYC, and I mean the Mayor, Deputy Mayors, Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, and all other agencies,  work under the umbrella policy of secrecy - i.e. hide everything you can't change and deny everything you did change - lie, destroy and undermine. ...stomp on anyone who gets in your way, they say, because you may have an arbitrator/judge/big media publisher who is paid to believe you rather than any tenured teacher/Guidance Counselor/other.

Kind of frightening when you work on finding out what is really going on, as I do at 3020-a Arbitration. At 3020-a, the Department of Education Attorneys argue that no one can argue WHY the charges were filed or HOW the charges were processed, or WHAT the investigator did not do right. All these issues are "not relevant". Of course we argue for transparency and factual evidence (which 3020-a hearings severely lack) because everything we - the lawyers I work with and myself - bring up is put onto the record for the case before the arbitrator as well as any Appeal or lawsuit brought later to State or Federal Court. We always try to cover all future actions, should they be necessary.

And the Respondent is always informed about everything, including getting all the transcripts the minute they are available on TEACH, the electronic filing system for all 3020-a cases.

I dislike people who lie to harm someone else but at least the people who come in and lie at 3020-a to save their jobs are not very good at lying. If you read the entire testimony of a person who lies, you can see such extreme inconsistencies that the person made under oath which, when pointed out in closing argument, should persuade the arbitrator to find the person not credible.

This is important, because no Court will vacate a determination of credibility unless there are extra-ordinary circumstances.

Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials



De Blasio’s real homeless policy: Hide the bad news

, July 5, 2017


With its belated posting of the grim results of this year’s street-homelessness census, City Hall just exposed Mayor de Blasio’s real homelessness policy: Hide the bad news.

The count was done back in February, but didn’t get posted until Wednesday — after Politico had published it.

It’s obvious why Team de Blasio didn’t want you to see the numbers: They show 3,892 people living on the streets, up 40 percent from last year and the highest rate since 2005.

The mayor’s minions were quick to note how misleading that may be: The night of the count was unseasonably warm, so fewer folks felt compelled to find shelter, and so were easier for census-takers to find.

Then again, the shelter homeless population is also at a high under de Blasio, having crossed the 60,000 mark last October.

Plus, the mayor himself once made a big deal of the street-census figures — during the summer of 2015, when he was citing them as “proof” that The Post’s reporting on soaring homelessness simply wasn’t true.

And never mind the photographic evidence, or the metastasizing encampments that the NYPD was belatedly taking down nearly as fast as The Post was pointing them out.

It wasn’t ’til that fall that de Blasio finally began admitting the truth, and months later that the public learned City Hall had been holding emergency meetings on the homeless crisis all year.

Eventually, the mayor announced “new” policies that amounted to more of the same: more spending on services, more plans to build new shelters, more promises to bring the homeless population down . . . eventually.

The only change has been to put lifelong activist Steven Banks officially in charge of homeless policy, though he’d plainly been calling the shots from the start.

Clearly, though, the overall de Blasio strategy is still to keep the public in the dark.



Number of homeless people in city up by 39% in just one year