Baltimore, Maryland

Few school districts are as dysfunctional as the Baltimore School District that is little more than a cash ATM for a designated minority that by way of payback guarantees that minority children stay black and poor. And Democrat.

April 28, 2011 - Kevin Seawright, deputy chief operating officer with the Baltimore Public School system resigned. The Baltimore Sun reported that

Seawright was hired as a special assistant in the Office of the Chief Operating Officer on Jan. 24, 2006, at a salary of $96,000. Seawright had previously worked as the chief fiscal officer for Baltimore City's Department of Parks and Recreation for about six years.

In 2008, he was promoted to the deputy chief operating officer at a salary of $130,000 and received a cost-of-living adjustment that brought him to his current salary of $135,200, city school officials said. City school officials said that Seawright was promoted based on his performance, not his credentials.

It's a good thing because the newspaper found that his degrees were from unaccredited universities.

Amazingly, the Baltimore Sun did not previously know this.

He's not the first school administrator with dodgy credentials.
Two years ago Brian Morris, then 38, was chairman of the Baltimore City School Board. Morris was the CEO of Legacy Harrison Enterprises. The board out of gratitude, one supposes, created a $175k a year school system job that was never advertised and did not previously exist. Two days before he was scheduled to start as deputy CEO of Operations, he abruptly resigned. He was supposed to provide oversight of school system operations, but the Baltimore Sun discovered that he had a 15-year record of lawsuits and bad-debt claims, including foreclosures, garnisheed wages and unpaid taxes. He, too, had no degree as the one listed from the University of Maryland, College Park was "incomplete."

You'd think someone would have noticed before.

In 2000, then Mayor O'Malley appointed Morris as interim director of minority business for the city. Morris served six years on the school board. He had been appointed by Mayor O'Malley and Gov. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. with whom he has "close ties," according to the Baltimore Sun. Three years later Morris was the Board Chairman. Shortly after he resigned as Board Chairman, he was given the lucrative $175K job.

Mayor Sheila Dixon was highly critical of his hiring. Yes, that's the same Mayor Sheila Dixon who resigned after being found guilty of embezzlement charge relating to her use of over $600 worth of retail store gift cards that were intended to be distributed to needy families.