School Address and Phone Numbers 144 West Carpenter Lane Philadelphia, PA 19119 215-843-3527, 215-843-1700 Website

News Log Posts on Carrie Bailey's and Rachel Randolph's cases

Key & Recent Posts
Mar 26, 2006	Carrie Bailey had her day in court. She was granted a judgement for the full allowable amount. The ruling affirmed the fact that it is wrong for public officials to use a false accusation, a bogus investigation and kangaroo court procedures to appropriate the fruits of someone's labor. Many thanks to Attorney Leon Williams - The People's Champion in Philadelphia!!
Sep 29, 2007	Rachel Randolph's case has been settled. A link to an excerpt of the case's civil docket is above. Note how after losing two motions for summary judgment, the board filed a flurry of motions in attempts to squelch from the pending trial the evidence of their clear intent to appropriate the work of the founders.
Sep 30, 2007	Carrie Bailey's and Rachel Randolph's suits brought a number of positives to the cause of decency. But most positive was dragging the board kicking and screaming into the sunlight from the shadows of what the board had counted on to be the protective cover of bureaucracy. The founders got the opportunity to face the board members as they responded to questions that sought to understand how these four men reached the conclusion that it would be a good idea to eliminate the founders and appropriate their three years of personal sacrifice a mere two months after the school's opening. As might have been expected, the depositions of the board members produced no clear picture; instead they produced a flood of incoherencies. See for yourself. Please review, via the link above, the discussion of the termination letter sent to Carrie Bailey. The board seized upon the opportunity to act on a false accusation lodged against her. The letter was a result of a meeting that was conducted outside of Carrie Bailey's and the public's knowledge. Also please review the depositions associated with Rachel Randolph's case. In particular note the secretary's response to the question of what compelled him to put forth a motion to terminate Rachel Randolph. This motion was recorded in minutes that presumably he wrote. The board lodged numerous complaints about this website throughout the litigations. But those complaints were misplaced. If they had not trampled over laws regulating public officials in their rush to eliminate the founders, and if educating students was somewhere in their list of priorities, they would not have handed us such a wealth of material to report. The board's discomfort with a communication forum beyond the control of public officials points to striking parallels between the board's modus operandi and stewardship, and despotic regimes of the twentieth century. Students of history will recognize the following shared characteristics. Crackpot Vision At Odds With The Way The World Works - Despotic regimes sold the notion that ideal societies could be engineered through central planning. Their policies inevitably included assaults on core human needs such as (1) personal dignity and (2) the opportunity to benefit from one's own labor. Disillusionment and unrest led to a cascade of collapses at the end of the twentieth century. - Beyond the prima facie intent to gain unfettered control of a two million dollar a year budget, the Khepera board was peddling a similar crackpot notion. They contended that a group of men, with no skills in education and no clue of the effort it took to establish the school, could run a successful learning institution after eliminating the people with all the education, talent and corporate knowledge. Conviction That Ends Justify Means - Despotic regimes sold the notion that eliminating people that they deemed to be obstacles was necessary for the achievement of their vision of an ideal society. This conviction suppressed impulses for principled resistance. - The Khepera board somehow reached the conclusion that eliminating the founders was necessary for the realization of a - to date - yet to be unveiled vision. To anyone with moral substance, the idea of eliminating the founders just two months after the culmination of their three year effort was wrong. It is hard to believe that this thought did not occur to at least one of the four board members. The purpose of a public board is to bring multiple viewpoints to subjects of public interest. Failure to do so constituted negligence by these public officials. Negative Selection -Despotic regimes characteristically purged those who showed the most initiative, the most creativity, the most imagination, and the most decency. - Khepera Charter School's profile fits this description exactly. Mobster Elite - The reality of life for the "people" in a despotic regime stood in stark contrast to the sham vision of an egalitarian society. The ruling party drained resources from the society and enjoyed privileged lifestyles. The "people" subsisted under totalitarian control. - The Khepera board trampled over laws regulating public officials in their rush to gain unfettered control over a two million dollar a year budget. Khepera Charter School's horrid performances on standardized tests belie the board's sham vision of an authentic learning institution. With the School District of Philadelphia in a financial deficit, perhaps one day there will be an examination of how the public's six million dollars (and counting) was spent. Are there minutes of board meetings that record how financial decisions were made? Did contractors undergo a required open bidding process? How were consultants selected, and what measurable contribution did they make to the academic process? The Big Lie - Totalitarian control of communication media permitted despotic regimes to prop up false images of success, progress and contentment, while simultaneously sapping the lifeblood out of society and citizens. The cascade of collapses of totalitarian regimes in the late twentieth century was due in part to the free flow of information made possible by fax machines. - The Khepera board attempted to give life to a Big Lie constructed upon (1) a false accusation against Carrie Bailey and (2) the fabrication that the extra duties Rachel Randolph voluntarily assumed constituted an assignment to an unauthorized position. In the twenty-first century the internet gives voices to the "people" and makes Big Lies such as this difficult to maintain. Glaring contrasts between The Big Lie and reality of everyday life created a fertile environment for political jokes in totalitarian societies. See how well the following two adapted jokes apply to the Khepera situation. Joke 1 - Khepera board's governance must be working, because the school is still open. With the kind of mess going on there, if any other group was in charge, the school would have been shut down some time ago. Joke 2 - Khepera Charter School's vision of an authentic learning institution is like the horizon. It always recedes into the future. There is an overarching message that must be drawn from this Khepera Charter School situation. It is that responsible citizens, who feel the loss of essential institutions that get undermined, must recognize, expose and confront public officials with mobster mentalities seeking power.
Aug 31, 2008	A link to the Khepera Charter School 2004-2005 Annual Report is above. This is the report that should have provided insight into the board's reasoning for eliminating the founders immediately after the school opened. State evaluators use the Annual Report - an accountability document that is due on August 1 every year - to assess a school's performance. We were forced to get a court order to gain access to this public document. We were interested in how they spun the following. - Their watching Carrie Bailey and Rachel Randolph expend a 3 year effort to establish the school. - Their watching Carrie Bailey and Rachel Randolph work 12 hour days and risk personal finances in summer 2004 to prepare the school for its September opening day. - Their moving to take unfettered control of the school and its 2 million dollar a year budget at their first opportunity. - Their using the false accusation that Carrie Bailey choked a child as a pretext for dismissing her just two months after opening. - Their claiming that the extra work that Rachel Randolph was doing put her in an unauthorized administrative position, and their using that claim to dismiss her the same day they dismissed Carrie Bailey. - Their denying the founders the due process expected from public officials in a civilized society. Parasitic indifference to the arduous labor and personal sacrifices that the founders put into establishing the school led the board to argue that since the founders were contracted workers, the board did not have to give them due process or justifications for dismissal. That attitude along with their failures to hold open meetings and to generate minutes implies that they believe that they are not accountable to anyone. They are however accountable to the public and to the state. And that accountability obligates them to give genuine responses to ALL items in the Annual Report. The link includes the 2004-2005 Annual Report template. The template contains questions that they were obligated to answer. Compare their report with the template to see how it is filled with empty rhetoric and is devoid of information. To show how the board continued to leech off of Carrie Bailey, the link also includes an excerpt from her Charter School Application. See how they used her material as a substitute for original content. At the time of this report, Khepera Charter School had squandered 2 million dollars of the public's money. To date they have squandered 8 million. Future posts will show that their subsequent annual reports were as content free as this one.
Oct 12, 2008	A link to the Khepera Charter School 2005-2006 Annual Report is above. The link also contains the state's template for the report. As with the 2004-2005 report, it took a court order to get the Khepera board to release this public document. You can see for yourself that Khepera was less than forthright in providing genuine responses to each and every item. For example, consider the following item: SECTION VI. GOVERNANCE REQUIREMENTS 3. Describe the professional development provided or taken regarding governance of the school (including the Sunshine Law and the Public Officials Act) for the Board of Trustees. Their response was: Through out the year, the Board members participated in several kinds of professional development. This participation happened on the State, local and internal level. On the state level, trustees attended the annual Pennsylvania Charter School Conference on May 2006. Members attended the following workshops: 1. Duties and Responsibilities of the Board 2. The importance of collecting timely and accurate attendance 3. New legislation that affects governance of charter schools The following excerpts from depositions belie the claim that the board received professional development: PRESIDENT (page 23) Q: Do you know why there's a requirement for an annual report to be filed? A: No.   VICE-PRESIDENT (page 17) Q: Were you involved at all in the drafting and filing of the Khepera annual report? A: I wasn't involved in it.   SECRETARY (page 12) Q: As your position as secretary, were you involved at all in preparing or filing an annual report? A. No. Q: Did you read the 2005-2006 annual reports or the 2004-2005 annual reports? A: No.   TREASURER (pages 18, 48) Q: Did you read it (2005 Annual Report)? A: No. . . Q: Did you participate in any of these (professional development) sessions? A: No. At the time of this report, Khepera Charter School had squandered 4 million dollars of the public's money. To date they have squandered 8 million and counting.
May 23, 2009	A link to the eight items that Khepera Charter School must fulfill as conditions for a renewed charter is above. Anyone reading this who has interacted with Khepera's board knows that (1) the board embodies the antithesis of good education and (2) it would not know how to begin to address these conditions. However for five years that did not matter, because the board knows how to game Pennsylvania's well-intended charter school initiative. The game has been played as follows. Once a charter and thereby unencumbered access to public money has been obtained by hook or by crook, those pesky regulations and obligations can be ignored or turned over to a consultant shop to handle. This game undermines the intent of the charter school initiative to put our children's education in the hands of people who themselves possess the knowledge and skills to conceive, implement and administer education programs. Please review the contents of the link entitled "Articles 2009" for other examples of how the game is played. Of the eight conditions, the board can pay a consultant shop to produce boilerplate responses to six of them. Condition #6 requires mandatory training, but a consultant shop can also handle the setup and associated paperwork. It is going to be interesting to see how the board circumvents condition #7. It requires all of the school's teachers to be qualified. But no qualified teacher dedicated to education can suppress his or her dignity low enough to accept having the board as a boss, once he or she meets it and recognizes its incompetence. The board gained control of the school and its $2 million annual budget by eliminating the founders two months after the founders completed their arduous three-year effort to establish the school. The following link contains a summary of that effort. Three-Year Work Summary The following link contains documents of some of the effort that Carrie Bailey expended in the summer before the school opened. That effort included risking $50,000 of personal money and obtaining a large construction loan to fund a major construction project that she managed. The construction project was needed to meet mandatory building codes. Documents From Summer 2004 Note that all the documents in the previous link were from the month of July 2004. The following link contains an official state document in which it was claimed that Carrie Bailey was not working for the school in July. Denial Of Carrie Bailey's Work The founders established a thriving childcare and tutoring center in September 2006. The following attest to the quality of their work. SES Tutoring 2009 Keystone STARS Childcare Imagine how many more children could have been positively influenced, if Carrie Bailey was able to establish her learning institution in a framework that was not so easily corrupted. In the big picture, it may seem like the Khepera Charter School scandal should not be too damaging. But multiply this case numerous times, and you end up with the crisis in public school education that America is experiencing.

Readers Comments

2005

"Thanks Mama Carrie. I hope all is well. I know how you feel and what you're going through."

" I am so sorry to hear this, though you and I both know that the school can not possible function without your guidance, leadership, and dedication."

"Remember, the journey towards education for liberation can at times take on a rough road, meaning, the battle is unfortunately intense with our very own people (cultural confusion). Stick in there, you've always demonstrated resilience in circumventing the difficult obstacles. Also, remember khepera means birth, death, and transformation, according to the ancients in Kemet. Maybe you're experiencing one of the very aspects of the dung-beetle's reality of life. Meaning, your job is just to season this challenged through, with patience and discipline, and victory will eventually be yours to come."

"Ms. Bailey, from the bottom of my heart I'm sorry. I'm feeling this pain from three primary sources. One, it is sad that we still can't work together."

"Philly is known for the stealing of creative and original ideas (or trying to destroy those who are blessed with this), and/or attempt to front and corrupt concepts that are real and have substance. Philly, as with other places, have parasites and opportunistic lackey's who attempt takeovers; especially when one does not sell out or conform to the status quo."

"How can board members take the education away from children and call it their own when they never planned, organized or supported the Khepera Charter School Mission? The board members of Kephera are killers that came in from the dark with weapons of destruction and murdered the education of children. They think nothing of slaughtering the education of our children for their own gain. That is exactly what the board of Kephera Charter School did when it removed the Founder and Educator Carrie DM Bailey."

"I want to convey my sincere apologies for what you are going through. I too found myself out of my school that I have invested 5 years in. It happened the same way to me. I believe there is a better place for people like us that do a (great)good job. I hope to find it soon."

"The truth's persistence wears down a lie's resistance."

"Whenever there is something positive about to happen, especially when it come to the liberation of our people/children, there are always those who rise up to block and/or to destroy that movement. My prayers are with you and I trust if you stay the course and keep the faith, you will be victorious."

"We have read your e-mail several times and are very sympathetic in that it sounds very much like the situation we have "brewing" at our charter school. "

"We Thank God for this. Continue to fight for what is right."

"May the power of Ma'at continue to overcome Isfet and continue to bless you."

2006

"Well done; Carrie! It was proper to prevail, but, fairness and judicial proceeding are not guaranteed, even as the facts are presented. Matter-of-fact, it should not have happened in the first place; and, throughout it all, I felt your pain. Congratulations to you, your family and the great work of your attorney, you stayed focused. With elation, I am so overjoyed, you've won. Don't stop your mission and great work."

"Please send my congratulations to Carrie. Although our politics often crossed paths, I respect her for the professional she has always been. Teaching is the Profession that Creates All Others. If you can read this, thank a teacher!"

"Congratulations Carrie. For your redeeming, resounding, well earn lawsuit, against the forces of injustice."

"Congratulations, M/s Carrie you stayed the (course) and didn't give up. I'm happy for you, and also glad that you didn't give up. NOW, your (glow) should be 100%"

"Congratulations! Dr. Frances Cress Welsing talks about how we are all affected by racism and it's good to know that truth to power overcomes the madness. Kudos for your Kujichagulia and Imani. This venture was truly putting action to the Nguzo Saba."

"Congratulations, Mrs. Bailey. I sincerely wish you the best. I truly enjoyed working with you at Khepera Charter School. I hope that you will continue on with your dreams and touch the lives of more young people."

"Corruption at the top leads to hopelessness at the bottom."

"HIP HIP HOORAY. Yeah!!! Congratulations."

2007

"My good sister, I admire your resilience in this struggle for truth, justice, and righteousness. Maat will definitely prevail for you. Stay strong..."

"Thank you Carrie for your up date on the charter school progress. One sure thing in life is that you can't go wrong by doing what is right. Believe me all things work for the good. You can't lose with God on your side. So keep with your aspirations and goals."

"Dear Mrs. Bailey, I am so very happy to see that you are continuing on with your dream. I was driving down Broad Street and was elated when I saw your new facility. It was a pleasure working with you at Khepera Charter School. Things just were not the same after your departure. I am glad that you will be sharing your love and knowledge with a new School of students and staff. I wish you, your family, your school and staff all the best."

2008

"Richard Isaac has fired another principal. The old principal would not let him run the school."