
by Marc Albert After an unscrupulous grifter bankrupted the Emery Unified School District seven years ago, logic suggests the school board would do everything in its power not to be played like a bunch of small town rubes all over again. Well, logic is apparently in short supply. The San Francisco Chronicle says it spent a total of $40 uncovering what the District’s $7,000 background check could not. That most of the degrees and credentials claimed by Stephen Wesley, hired in November as Superintendent of Schools in Emeryville, were made up out of whole cloth:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/03/BASK12IO7K.DTL Within hours of the story hitting the streets, Wesley was hitting the bricks. The school board accepted his resignation: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/04/BA0O12O1UM.DTL The current “reform†school board, elected after the former board was purged, has proven itself as incompetent as those they replaced. While Wesley didn’t have the District pick up the tab for a trip to China, leather furniture, or daytime hotel lodging, as his predecessor, J.L. Handy, is alleged to have done in published reports, (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/09/22/MN28570.DTL) it is inexcusable that the current board gave the District’s $150,000-a-year top job to a fraudster. When they ran for office, the reformers said they knew better. Now they