Memo Madness Re: Philly Schools Report

You might remember Ellen Green-Ceisler from such posts last week as this one. She’s a lawyer who is running for a judgeship this year, but she also monitored the police department as head of the city’s Integrity and Accountability Office and prepared a report on discipline in the Philadelphia School District released earlier this month.

But whoops! Gar Joseph reports today on a memo accidentally attached to the report when it went out. It was penned by Green-Ceisler, and she wrote about how she felt the commission she did was simply a way for Paul Vallas to attack ex-school safety head Harvey Rice.

Accidentally stuck to the end of the report (”a large, stupid error,” said a schools spokeswoman) is a June memo exchange between Ceisler and Heather Frattone, the district’s director of policy and planning.

In it, Ceisler writes, “At different points during this project, Paul and [other] personnel expressed significant consternation about the OSSA [Rice's Office of Safe Schools Advocate]… . As my study progressed, I sensed that Paul and [others'] main concern was that I discredit the OSSA. In fact during one session with an… employee, I requested some data regarding student arrests. That individual, in my presence, called an employee from the School Police and stated something to the effect that I needed this information because I was hired to ‘trash Harvey Rice’s Office.’ ”

Ceisler goes on to say, “If I had reason to believe, at the outset, that the sole purpose of my contract was to ‘trash’ a critic of the School District, I never would have agreed to undertake this study.”

Even though the woman who authored the report admitted in a memo the district was mainly concerned with trashing Harvey Rice, a school district spokesperson lied, “To suggest that we would go to those lengths is a little absurd… the agenda was clearly not to trash Harvey.”

In other news, whoever accidentally attached that memo to the report has totally been fired.

Gar Joseph | Memo says Vallas hired consultant to fry Rice [Daily News]
[Photo via Al Día]
March 3: Ellen Green-Ceisler Will Attempt To Reform City’s Institutions One-By-One If She Has To