The Chronicle ran a story last week in which Harris County DA Chuck Rosenthal criticized HISD for conducting its own investigation into the Margaret Stroud mess. According to Jason Spencer’s story (uh oh), Rosenthal said that HISD should have gotten the DA’s office involved as soon as potentially criminal acts were uncovered. The dramatic headline for the story says, “HISD wrong to probe case itself, DA says.”
Today the Chronicle is running this letter to the editor:
SO Harris County’s District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal thinks that the Houston Independent School District shouldn’t have performed its own investigation of charges against Darren Fulton, the son of Chief School Administrator Margaret Stroud?
In the Chronicle’s June 3 article “HISD wrong to probe case itself, DA says,” Rosenthal said HISD should have requested help from an outside law enforcement agency as soon as its investigation into consulting contracts uncovered potential criminal acts. And this is the same district attorney who refused for months to agree to an independent investigation of the Houston Police crime lab? How many people have been wrongly imprisoned due to the lab’s shoddy work?
I see a double standard here.
LEE L. KAPLAN, Houston
No, what we see here is a misleading story.
According to HISD spokesman Terry Abbott, HISD has had a good working relationship with the Harris County DA’s office for 20 years, and HISD has its “own investigators with the Office of Inspector General who are certified fraud examiners and who are former police detectives, and we have our own fully certified police department with more than 160 uniformed police officers. In fact, HISD’s Police Department was the first school district police department in the country to be certified.”
Also, HISD contacted Harris County DA Chuck Rosenthal to ask him if the Chronicle‘s headline from the original story (saying HISD was wrong to conduct its own investigation) was accurate. According to Abbott, Rosenthal indicated that he did NOT say HISD was wrong to have conducted its own investigation, and he said he wanted HISD to continue to bring investigations to his office in the same way they’ve always been brought to the DA’s office.
I emailed Rosenthal for a comment and he responded that there is not a problem between his office and HISD. He said he understands HISD has been in regular contact with the Public Integrity office regarding investigations.
Please allow me to share a personal story: I majored in journalism in college and during my internship with a newspaper (I did sports reporting) I was assigned what was supposed to be a routine interview with a USFL team owner (no wisecracks about how that dates me). During the interview, the owner said something about a player that left the other sports reporters and the sports editor open-mouthed. And it was on-the-record.
Before the editor would allow a story to run with that quote, he had me call the owner back to repeat the quote, and the editor sat alongside me as I transcribed the conversation.
At this point in Jason Spencer’s Chronicle career, shouldn’t his stories be double-checked BEFORE they run in the paper?
