Bice has an interesting piece over at the MJS about the petulant Charlene Hardin. Seems as though Ms. Hardin likes to use taxpayer dollars to go to conventions without actually going to conventions.
Even with the district’s financial troubles, Milwaukee School Board member Charlene Hardin could probably justify taking a taxpayer-funded jaunt to a school safety conference in Philadelphia last month.
Violence in Milwaukee Public Schools has been on the rise, and she might learn something at the conference.
But for that to have happened, she would have had to actually attend the event while in the City of Brotherly Love.
She didn’t.
Officials with the National Association of School Safety & Law Enforcement Officers say Hardin, a three-term board member, and Lolita Pearson, a data processing secretary at the Milwaukee High School of the Arts, were MIA during the three-day gathering on July 14-16.
“I didn’t see her (Hardin) at all,” said Peter Pochowski, the executive director of the national school safety group who used to work for MPS and knows Hardin. ““It would have been hard for me to miss her. I was the guy who ran the conference.”
Joe Ricci, a Philadelphia school administrator who helped plan the event, was at the registration table when Hardin and Pearson arrived on the final day of the conference.
At first, Hardin complained loudly that the staff had run out of conference bags, which contained zoo passes, city information and discounts for various items, Ricci said.
“Then she proceeded to go into the vendors’ area, get some plastic bags from them, help herself to a ton of food and cookies and candy and all that stuff from the snack tray, and proceeded to walk out the door again, making another big stink about the thing, and left,” Ricci said, estimating that the pair were there for all of five minutes.
“She never checked in . . . or showed up at any conference functions at all, her or her assistant.”
In the real world, actions like this are most likely a firing offense. In the world of MPS, actions like this are punishable by a “bad girl, don’t do it again”.
Now, since Hardin is a member of the School Board, she can’t be fired. But at the very least, she should reimburse MPS for the costs involved. Here’s another thing…why is a data processing assistant going to a convention on school safety?
