By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

 “I’ll look to like if looking liking move,” young Juliet alliteratively tells her mother in the Shakespeare play, promising to give her cousin Paris serious consideration as husband material.

But Sandy Addis, director of Pioneer RESA (Regional Education Service Agency) resents any implication that he has ever, or will ever, “look to like.” "I have no eagerness to rule in a certain way,” he told The Sentinel in a Nov. 5 telephone interview.  “My duty to maintain my reputation in this kind of role, as an unbiased professional, is much more important than any duty I might have to report kind things about my fellow administrators.”

Dr. Addis was angrily defending his integrity in the face of observations that, hired by the school system this summer to look into possible mistakes of the school system, he had filed a report July 30 to the school system that markedly failed to find that the school system had done anything wrong.

“I don’t have any allegiance or dislike for Dade County,” he said.  “I had never met any of those people I interviewed before I interviewed them.” 

As previously reported by The Sentinel, Dr. Addis, of Cleveland, Ga., was hired this summer by Dade County Superintendent of Schools Patty Priest to investigate a complaint brought by Donna Thornton, the assistant high school principal fired at the end of the 2008-9 school year, to the state Professional Standards Commission (PSC).

Ms. Thornton says she was axed because she filed the complaint; Ms. Priest maintains she had no knowledge of the complaint when, at the May 2009 school board meeting, it was decided not to renew Ms. Thornton’s contract.

And as for the complaint itself, the PSC threw out some of the charges and remanded the others to the school board to examine on its own.  The school board hired Dr. Addis to investigate, and Addis not only found no wrongdoing but concluded his report by filing a PSC complaint against Ms. Thornton herself, on the grounds that she was in improper possession of the student records she had used to make her case against the administration, which involved grade-changing and manipulating graduation rates.

This move Dr. Addis also defended, saying that as a mandated reporter he had no choice but to turn Ms. Thornton in. “If you had children in school, how would you feel about a former employee of the school system having in their home or in their personal possession, or in their garage or somewhere, your child’s transcript?” he said.

Ms. Thornton, commenting by email, said that she will respond to the PSC complaint against her accompanied by her attorney, but meanwhile denies she did anything wrong.  “I took the copy of the records home with me when I was employed, I was advised by my attorneys to do so, and I had no idea that I was going to be unemployed,” she writes.  “I was still on Dade County Schools’ payroll when I gave the copies of the records to Dr. Addis and I was not under contract with any other system at the time.”

Anyway, she notes, the availability of student records online these days, with teachers able to access them from their home computers, muddies the whole notion of improper possession. 

“I firmly believe the complaint filed against me is them striking back and attempting to wear me down (just like them firing me for reporting it to begin with),” she writes.  “It is typical for school attorneys to try to make the whistle blower go away.”

Patty Priest, interviewed Friday, defended the Addis report – “He was an independent, outside investigator” – as well as the fairness of asking a school system to examine itself to determine if it had done anything wrong.  “Obviously, the PSC, which is one of the top components of the whole state school system, the Professional Standards Commission, felt that it was appropriate, or they would not have done that,” she said,

In any case, it now seems that Dr. Addis will get a second chance – whether to look to like, or just to look – at Dade’s school system.  Ms. Priest confirmed Friday that she has hired Addis to examine a longer and more detailed complaint Ms. Thornton made against the system to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) in September.  “I have sent the document to him, since he did the report before, and asked him to investigate,” she said.

Like the PSC, SACS declined to investigate Ms. Thornton’s allegations and sent her complaint back to the county for consideration.

The SACS complaint reiterates the substance of the PSC complaint, then adds charges of favoritism in awarding contracts as well as in admitting students into the high school’s special education program.  The Sentinel will explore these charges, and Ms. Priest’s response to them, in a separate article.

Meanwhile, Sandy Addis says the main business of Pioneer and other RESAs – again, regional educational service agencies – is not investigations like these.  “Our main emphasis is things like teacher training, administrator training, salary studies and analysis, delivering teacher recertification and administrator recertification courses, all those kinds of things,” he said.

RESAs, said Addis, are governmental bodies, staffed by professional educators – he personally has been a guidance counselor, coach and school and central office administrator – and funded through county, state and federal sources.

School systems subscribe to their local RESA.  Pioneer is not Dade’s RESA, said Addis, but was presumably hired to avoid any real or perceived conflict of interest, as local RESAs are often ruled by the same board members as may preside over a county’s board of education.

Asked to recall any instance of his finding against a school system he was investigating, Addis declined to do so, explaining that problems like this one are not the usual substance of his work.  “When I investigate something, it’s not usually a matter of employee versus administration,” he said.  “This is an unusual situation.”

Ms. Priest did not have a timetable for this new investigation of Ms. Thornton’s complaint against the schools, or, for that matter, of any investigation of the complaint against Ms. Thornton.  The Sentinel, in any case, will furnish any information regarding either as it becomes available.