Broward Palm Beach News Blog

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Lunsford: Somebody give that girl a cigar

​The Juice just received this email from Michael Koretzky, whose November 19th coup attempt at our local Society of Professional Journalists chapter caused what one local observer has dubbed a "kerfluffle." Looks like Koretzky has stepped down and Darcie Lunsford is the new president as of this a.m. Good Luck Darcie!

And yes, after consulting our textbook, we put a call in to Ms. Lunsford to get a comment about her sudden, meteoric ascent  -- aren't we supposed to do that? We await details and will post as necessary.

Koretzky, we hardly knew ye. Here's the email in full:

Kay: This is not a swan song.

​Yesterday we told you about the coup staged at our local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists by one Michael Koretzky -- student advisor to FAU's newspaper. Koretzky marched in to the elections on November 19th with a posse of pissed-off students and friends and voted in a number of new board members, including Koretzky himself, who will be replacing past President Julie Kay -- maybe.

We didn't have time to give Kay her say yesterday -- we were too busy trying to find our old Journalism 101 textbook to look up the rule about that (sounds like it might be rule #4?). But while we were brushing the dustbunnies off that musty tome, several commenters and emailers pointed out that we are supposed to give both sides of the debate some space. Thanks Harris! Thanks Stacey! So here goes:

Koretzky: A revolutionary approach to elections

​Members of the South Florida Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists hardly knew what hit them.

On November 19, student adviser Michael Koretzky of Florida Atlantic University's student paper, The University Press, led four of his students along with a merry band of admirers to the wine bar Hollywood Vine. That's where the meeting for the local chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists was holding its elections for board and president.

Koretzky managed to oust current SPJ president Julie Kay (read Kay's response here), and he may or may not be taking up her post as president when the dust settles. (Koretzky resigned this morning, click here)

Koretzky had been on the SPJ board a couple of years ago and he was fed up with business as usual. "They've violated the bylaws -- they didn't even hold an election last year," he says. "They put one woman on the board who had never been an SPJ member, another violation. They don't do any programming. But they do eat a lot of food."

School Board Member Beverly Gallagher faces corruption charges.

​No more dragging a stack of papers home to grade at night while watching Glee. No more late afternoon conferences with parents, or volunteering to chaperone the math team's car wash -- at least not until after Thanksgiving.

For the next couple of weeks, the Broward Teachers Union is asking its members to stop all unpaid, after-hours work, and instead "work to the rule" of their contracts, pressuring district officials to give them raises.

"The point of 'work to the rule' is to show the community all of the extra things that teachers contribute," says

courtesy euthisnthat.com

ACLU wants graduation day to look more like this.

​ The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit Friday on behalf of Palm Beach County students and parents, naming Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, House Speaker Larry Cretul, Senate President Jeff Atwater, and Florida Commissioner of Education Eric J. Smith as defendants. The suit charges that the State of Florida has failed the county's students, citing as evidence abysmally low high school graduation rates. One-third to one-half of Palm Beach students fail to graduate high school, the suit says, and black students lag far behind whites.

The suit is the first of its kind in the country, said  Chris Hanson, ACLU staff attorney, when we spoke to him by phone on Friday. "This is still the only case in the country that makes the argument based on low graduation rates," he said. "We looked around to find a place where the state admitted a constitutional right to adequate education, plus a school district with low graduation rates, and Palm Beach County was one such area."

Flickr

Jeb Bush

​Your former governor was in Atlanta recently, earnestly pretending to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination for president. Or maybe he was testing a theory about mind control: that if you keep telling people something that's false, maybe they'll come to believe that it's true.

If so, Jeb Bush should take a cue from those windowless, clockless casinos -- the key is to contain the encroaching forces of reality. That's what appeared to break the spell for an Atlanta columnist, Maureen Downey, who had just finished enjoying enduring a replay of Bush's Power Point presentation (Can you possibly imagine how stultifying that was?), when she was bombarded by an email from the ACLU, which just happens to be filing a suit against the same utopian education system that Bush left in his wake.

Clearly, one of the two was full o' shit. But which will prove more convincing to the education columnist?