Posts Tagged Brad Hunt

Letter to my alienated daughter #7

Cute comment on my blog by my loving faithful daughter when she was just 13 – weaponized by her in court 3 years later!

Dear Sakshi,

In November 2012 I wrote a blog (see:
https://venkyvenkatraman.com/2019/04/letter-to-my-alienated-daughter-7/ ) after being part of a jury as if I was actually addressing you and your sister. You were smart enough even then, when just 13 years old, to write a nice comment which was even appreciated by the now CISD Superintendent, Brad Hunt (see above).

Then just 3 years later, you used what I wrote in my blog and what I might have told you in private (don’t recall ever telling you that a jury panel was “12 idiots picked off the street”, though) to effectively weaponize that against me in court (see above), along with your testimony that followed, to pretty much torpedo my quest to bring you and your sister back home.

Clearly, that ingenious idea was entirely yours as neither your mom nor her lawyer would have known about this blog from 3 years ago and what I may or may not have said to you in private.

Now that another 3 years have gone by since your testimony, do you have any regrets about doing this? If you do, then I will forgive you as you were just as a (precocious) child who did not understand the long term ramifications of what you were doing. On the other hand, if you have no regrets even now at age 20 for what you did when you were still 16, then I can only say, Beware of Karma. One fine day, someone who was close to you and to whom you confided private matters, will spill those confidences (even distorted) in open court causing you great embarrassment and consternation. And that person could even be your own child! And on that day you will remember and regret what you did in November 2015.

As always, I am waiting for your eyes to open and if and when that day comes, if I am still alive and kicking, I will welcome you back with open arms.

Best wishes.

Venky Venkatraman
B.Tech, MBA, JD

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WHY I WILL NOT VOTE FOR MY OLD “FRIEND” TRACY FISHER – over $250,000 of our kids’ money wasted ….

Recycle Tracy Fisher

President Harry S. Truman once said, “The Buck Stops Here”.  The phrase refers to the notion that the President has to make the decisions and accept the ultimate responsibility for those decisions.

Based on this, for what I am about to tell you, the buck stops with Board of Trustees President Tracy Fisher.

In a nutshell, Coppell ISD interfered in my child custody matter.  Coppell ISD did so by getting its attorneys to file a Petition in Intervention in my child custody case.  According to an Administrative Law Judge based in Austin, he had never seen this type of action by a school district, interfering in a custody matter, in his 25 years on the bench.  And that too regarding a trivial dispute over how many emails I should be allowed to send (then) Assistant Superintendent, Brad Hunt (see link at the bottom for details).

Thus far, Coppell ISD has spent more than $250,000 in legal fees in this matter (based on information obtained via Open Records and estimated to date).  This figure will continue to grow as the legal matter is still ongoing and could reach the half a million dollar mark before the legal matter concludes.  This is money that should be spent educating our children.

To put this amount in perspective, $250,000 could have paid the salaries of 5 Coppell ISD teachers for a year

Why is “Coppell ISD” taking money that should be spent on our teachers and our children and handing it over to a law firm?

We all know “Coppell ISD” is not a real person.  So, who made the decision to give Coppell ISD’s lawyers a blank check to spend unlimited amounts of money to interfere in this private matter? Who made the decision to divert sacred public education funds to a private law firm?

There are only 2 suspects – the Administration (headed by Brad Hunt) and the Board of Trustees (headed by Tracy Fisher).

I have known both Brad Hunt and Tracy Fisher for almost a decade and have had excellent relations with both of them.  I even regard Tracy Fisher as a friend! 

I have repeatedly tried to reason with them to stop this madness, reach a settlement (non-monetary, involving just resolving some communication issues between me and Coppell ISD personnel) and end the bleeding (of dollars) from Coppell ISD – and from Coppell families and taxpayers.

Amazingly, both of them, in addition to contending that they are not responsible for making these type of legal decisions, also act blithely unconcerned that massive amounts of public funds intended for our children are being wasted

So, from the look of it, the lawyers are now in charge of Coppell ISD and essentially have a free rein to bill at their own discretion with little to no oversight from district management or the Board of Trustees.

Then what can be done to stop this continuing bleeding of taxpayer dollars which should be spent on education, not litigation?

For the solution, once again I go back to Harry S. Truman’s saying, “the buck stops with the President”.  In this case, whether she will accept responsibility or not, the buck stops with Coppell ISD Board of Trustees President Tracy Fisher.  And since she seemingly has no clue how to stop this hemorrhaging, she has to go and make room for someone else who can take charge of the situation and stop this obscene waste of our tax dollars, money that has been diverted from our children’s education.

That is why I am dumping my old friend Tracy Fisher and will not be voting for her in this coming election.

Post Script:  If those of who have read this far and are curious as to what in world happened between me and the powers that be at Coppell ISD that led to this situation, this link should give you an idea: https://venkyvenkatraman.com/2017/04/my-secretary-brad/

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Land of the free and the home of the brave?

FreenBrave

Growing up in India when we had one radio station (All India Radio) and one TV station (Doordarshan) both of which mostly served up government propaganda, we used to listen to the BBC to get the “real” news (and I must confess I tried to model my English on some of those great newsreaders!).

During those days we marveled at the freedom that Americans seemed to have to say whatever they pleased without any fear or favor.  We saw them even toppling a president (Nixon) whose Watergate cover-up was worse than the crime.  Truly the land of the free and the home of the brave, we thought.

A couple of recent incidents made me wonder whether America today was that much different from India of the past when it came to freedom of speech and expression (guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution).  And following are those episodes.

My multi-talented daughter, Sakshi, even when only 12 years old, combined her skill using technology and her flair for drama to make and post on YouTube several short, entertaining videos on various topics – you can see one of them at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkUMpvzEwB0 ).

Then in December 2012 she made a fateful video that brought her video producing “career” to an abrupt end.  Below is the video she posted on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-wbwR209Pk&feature=youtu.be

But oops – there is no video – because it got “censored”.  And why did that happen?  In that video (posted in a Youtube account controlled by her mother), Sakshi had depicted one of her elementary school teachers (without naming either school or teachers) as crazy enough to have mood swings and verbally abuse the children and another teacher putting her feet on the children and twisting their arms during PE class.

When the video was first posted, I was in India along with my mother and she and I had a good laugh at the video which we thought was clearly a parody (like a Saturday Night Live skit).  But what followed was unbelievable.  An EMail from the principal, Pam Mitchell, asking that the video be immediately removed and hinting at dire consequences if that was not done.  And in the course of arguing that the school could not demand removal of a video that did not mention the name of the school nor the teachers and was not made during school hours nor using school equipment, I filed an Open Records Request and found a whole army of school officials (including Assistant Superintendent, Brad Hunt), seemingly alarmed by the video, were writing conspiratorial EMails to each other about how to deal with the “situation”.  Clearly this video was not being treated as a childish parody – which suggested to me that something more serious was going on.  Or possibly the cover-up was just worse than the crime – shades of Watergate!

Cutting to the chase, Sakshi caved in to the pressure (despite my total support, telling her to stand her ground) and wrote a letter of apology to all and sundry and the video was taken down.  And, as I feared, Sakshi did not make another video in this series – and her budding video “career” came to an abrupt end.

Fast forward to several years later.  Sakshi, now several years older, is in Newspaper class where she is a “reporter” writing articles online on various topics.  One of them is titled “Kids in Asian families forced on to unwanted career paths” which as the title suggests is not flattering towards “Asian parents” in general and me (as her father) in particular.  In her bid to make a point and add some drama, she had crossed over from reporting/opining  on facts to writing fiction – and here is the link to that article posted on the school’s website:

http://www.coppellstudentmedia.com/2014/09/12/kids-in-asian-families-forced-on-to-unwanted-career-paths/comment-page-1/#comment-3274

But oops again – there is nothing there!  So what happened this time?

This is the sequence of events.  I posted a comment disagreeing with Sakshi’s contentions.  Sakshi promptly deleted my comment.  I took this up with her teacher suggesting that if any of his student “reporters” wrote and posted online anything controversial, then readers should be given an opportunity to respond on the same page and disagree.  However, rather than allowing that, the teacher promptly had the article itself deleted.  And that, in my opinion, was a pity because what could have been teaching moment was lost and Sakshi suffered the ignominy of one more her products (resulting from some hard and dedicated work) being “censored”.

And the irony of all this is when I brought this article to the attention to Brad Hunt (the Assistant Superintendent, who behind the scenes was doing his best to get Sakshi’s video deleted because “it would upset the teachers who are sensitive people”), his comment surprisingly was “Sakshi is a strong writer.  I think given that this article is in the “opinions” section that it should be treated as such, her opinion.  “.

Apparently what is not good for the geese is good for the gander!

And the unfortunate lesson Sakshi probably learnt from all this is that she lives in the land of the (not so) free and the home of the (not that) brave!!

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