Edition No. 261L | March 22, 2007

The very next week, Omaira Mejia got her payback with a job for her two brothers: one works as a custodian at the General Donovan School and the other is a School Safety Officer at the Oliver School. She also has another brother, Claudio Camacho, who was a school safety officer and is now a police officer.

Meanwhile, it is a wonder how people can get in contact with some of their representatives before the school system when their telephone numbers are not listed on the telephone book and they are not shown on the school department’s website. Omaira Mejía, Patricia Sánchez and Peter Larocque have the school department’s telephone number listed on Channel 10. That’s a clear indication that they are not interested in hearing about the many problems plaguing the public school system.

For example, the roof at the Bruce School is leaking. The roof leaks into classrooms, not water but this brown coffee color stuff. It smells, too. It drips through light fixtures and on to classroom desks. Children are in danger. Complaints have gone unanswered.

This past Monday, Assistant Principal Ed Reynoso was severely beaten by a student at Lawrence High School. He is not pressing charges because he owes too much to Laboy and Chief Romero. Not only that Laboy holds him up to other administrators as a benchmark and has lavished him with praise when, according to his peers, none is due, but Laboy saved his job after a scandal published in the Eagle-Tribune on October 12, 2006, page 12, when his 17-year-old son was arrested for discharging a firearm within 500 feet of the Oliver school. At that time, Chief Romero said to the Eagle-Tribune, “Part of the problem is that there are a lot of guns in the hands of young people in the city.”

According to the teachers, the Oliver School requires more rehabilitation and protection than the Arlington School which was supposed to be the most troubling in the city.

Meanwhile, Superintendent Laboy announced that he will be going to Scotland to deliver yet another keynote address on his accomplishments with small schools in Lawrence. He hardly spends a week in Lawrence, always jet-setting all over the country on our dime but, is he looking at different statistics from what we all get and what the Department of Education shows on the Internet? Lawrence is third from the bottom among the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts after seven years of his administration.

He has instituted such a sense of fear among his employees that they blindly obey his orders from the silly ones of not to be caught with a copy of Rumbo on their desks or will face disciplinary action, to lying and covering up when things go wrong at any of the schools.

Last Tuesday, March 20th, I appeared before the City Council blaming them for such cover ups. On Friday, March 16th, an Oliver School male 10-year-old student suffered an attempted sexual abuse at the hands of three older students. He managed to get free from what they were trying to force to do and ran crying into the principal’s office. From that moment on, the downplaying began.

When his parents found out, they threatened to sue the school system and demanded that the other three be expelled for they represent a threat to the rest of the students there. Radio show personality and former City Councilor Barbara Gonzalez got involved by calling the school principal and learned that not only they will not be expelled, the principal downgraded the issue to the point of calling it “a case of bullying.”

By law, teachers are mandated reporters whenever they encounter a case of abuse of any kind with a child and they choose protecting the superintendent and their jobs over the safety of a child in such a situation.

The same goes for the police department that covers up and protects the lies coming from the superintendent’s office. Whenever Chief John Romero is confronted with a complaint, his standard answer is, “That never happened.” Well, in this case, knowing that the School Resource Officer Marlene Bistany responded to the call at the Oliver School, it was prudent to assume that a report had been issued and he could not deny it. Chief Romero never answered to my call, even after my appearance before the City Council.

As long as we remain silent, the School Department will continue hiding incidents in the schools and the Police Department will persist in assisting them by not reporting these cases. We have a School Committee made up of spineless, worthless beings who sell their souls for a job, and the City Council, by allowing all of them to do it saying that school issues don’t belong in the City Council, is responsible that we are creating the next generation of criminals.