Stepping on toes is part of this job

It seems I’ve become pretty good at stepping on toes.
I knew last week’s edition of the Waller County News Citizen would get my phone to ring. It did, but not nearly to the degree that I thought it would. Still, that the paper got any reaction at all says something.
It tells me that people are still reading the newspaper and they really do care what’s going on in their community. That’s very refreshing compared to the apathy I met when I first came here just over a year ago.
It’s actually interesting how last week’s paper came together. Coming into Tuesday, I only had a couple stories and a lot of stress over how I was going to get the election guide done. Wednesday is the day I do layout, so Tuesday was my last day to compile information and upload it to the layout system on my computer. I was prepared for a long, hard day when I got to work. What I wasn’t prepared for was the volume of breaking news that came rushing at me.
By noon on Tuesday I knew that my busy day was about to become a busy night as well. As I spent the afternoon hammering away at my keyboard, cranking out one story after another, I couldn’t help but feel there was an eruption of news. Most of it had to do with public officials and law enforcement officers who had corrupted their duties in some way or were otherwise engaged in questionable practices.
Fields Store Elementary principal Mary Davis was suspended for allegedly stealing money from an activities fund. Former Waller Area Chamber of Commerce office manager Rhonda Vickery was indicted for allegedly stealing money from the chamber. Grimes County State Trooper David Wayne Hartley, who lives in Hempstead, was charged with causing a five-vehicle accident while driving drunk.
Hempstead ISD police officer Joey Williams was suspended two days for calling a student a name. It became known at the Waller County Commissioners Court that constables have engaged in a practice of hiring volunteer reserve deputies who are or have been in trouble with the law.
The whole thing started a few days earlier for me when former Fields Store Elementary nurses aid Candy Snow and her husband, Parm, told me about her firing last year because she used her WISD e-mail account to complain about baseball coach Kyle Humphreys telling her son that he wasn’t worth the coach’s time. About the same time I was dealing with that, a former FBI agent from Houston took her life in rural Waller County. While that was tragic and not a scandal, for a while we had to look at it as a suspicious death – especially in the hush-hush way local law enforcement handled it.
As the evening wore on into night, two words kept floating through my mind: “eruption” and “corruption.” As I cobbled the stories together and thought about designing the front page, I knew I had to work those words together into the main headline. But which story should lead?
To me, the best way to handle it was to do an overarching headline with the five main stories under it. So that’s what I did. Having worked 35 hours straight, I put the paper to bed and went there myself. It wasn’t long before supporters of Joey Williams contacted me to tell me how disappointed they were that his story appeared under the “corruption eruption” headline.
They said his case was purely politically motivated, as he was running for justice of the peace in precinct 1. Granted, calling a student a name isn’t up there with the degree of the other alleged crimes, but it was a public person – a person charged with the protection of students – violating that trust in a moment of lapsed judgment. I’d call that a corruption of his responsibilities. Apparently his employer thought so too by suspending him for two days.
To Williams’ credit, he did come into my office this week and let me know that while he was disappointed, he had no hard feelings toward me. He accepted full responsibility for his actions. The timing of it may prove costly at the polls, but this showed me the incredible depth of his integrity and I highly respect that.
Through all of this I was increasingly disappointed with the complete lack of openness and transparency in the local school districts. Both HISD and WISD public information officers gave me “no comments” about their respective cases. There were no press releases issued. In Waller, Supt. Richard McReavy sent home a letter with Fields Store students explaining that “a Fields Store Elementary School administrator” was suspended for “alleged inappropriate use of school district funds.”
He wasn’t even open enough to call Davis by her name or position. He left that up to speculation, even though everyone already knew who he was talking about. That to me is just not being up front and honest with people.
Come on, if you’re going to accuse someone publicly of a crime, at least have the brass cojones to call it what it is. The way it was handled makes it seem to me they either don’t have confidence in their case or else they have something else to hide.
I’d sure hate to have to go step on more toes to find out what that might be.