Felonious Junk

The courageous Mercelo and Carolyn Ferrari. Courtesy WXIA-TV

The very same Gwen Stokes who is indicted by her own words and inaction in the posting just below this one has had major troubles in the past, and not too long ago.

In this article by WXIA reporters, Stokes accuses the parents of a physically abused autistic boy named Stefan Ferrari of a felony when she finds out they secretly recorded the abuse their son endured. (Carolyn, the mom, sewed a microphone into the shirt of the little boy as he trundled off to the state-run facility where he had been placed by the APS Program for Exceptional Children).

Here's an excerpt:

"...just three weeks after the incident, Atlanta Public School employee Gwen Stokes...told the Ferraris that their audio taping of Stefan's day at school was illegal. An argument started --

"It's a felonious taping," Stokes said.

"That's your opinion," said an unidentified adult's voice.

"Show me the statute! Show me," demanded Marcelo Ferrari.

"I'm sorry, you're saying it's a felony?" said Carolyn Ferrari.

"I didn't say it's a felony," said Stokes.

"You said felonious," the Ferraris both said.

"It is," Stokes replied.


No, it isn't. Georgia is one of the many states that permit one-party consent for video recordings, meaning that the Ferraris were well within their rights to record what happened to their 11-year-old boy.

So it's troubling that Stokes would accuse them of breaking the law.

It's even more troubling that she would say their act was felonious, but also say she didn't consider it a felony. That makes me think Gwen Stokes doesn't know what the word "felonious" means and was using it as a synonym for "criminal" or "against the rules."

Not only is she dangerously unaware of the law, her behavior in this incident and the one in the next post you'll read suggest she lacks the intellectual capacity to hold a position as important as "compliance coordinator" in a special-ed program, where the rules and laws are extremely complicated.

But let's put all of that aside for a moment. Isn't the most troubling part of all of this the fact that when confronted with irrefutable evidence the child in question was physically abused, Gwen Stokes' first reaction was to try to block the evidence from consideration?

How utterly unethical.

Let's Break A Deal!

When is a deal not a deal? When you make it with the PEC's Gwen Stokes.

This posting is a little "inside baseball," so unless you have a child with an IEP in the public school system, you probably will find it pretty boring. But if you are in the system, you should know how this stuff happens...


Last October, in a meeting you'll read about elsewhere on this blog, Gwen Stokes, Compliance Coordinator (remember that title!) for the the Atlanta Public Schools Program For Exceptional Children, met to talk about the dramatic impact a piece of computerized instructional software was having on our autistic son. We agreed this technology--or something very similar to it -- should be implemented in our son's IEP as soon as possible. The PEC Assistive Technology specialist at the meeting, Jennifer Holloway, refused to agree to a deadline--ANY deadline. But I refused to leave the table without one.

We threw some numbers around: five weeks? Six? Gwen looked wary, but I felt we were getting close. Then I made her my final offer: eleven weeks. (I realized it would take that long for our son to finish the current round of software, which he had just begun, and therefore we might as well just make a clean start of it on the first day of the new semester, 1/6/2010).

Ms. Stokes eagerly embraced this generous timeframe and we shook hands on a deal.

As I write this now, it's Feb. 23, 2010, and I'm sure you can guess what has happened. But it's worse than you might think. They didn't just miss the deadline, they gave us the big Eff You. As the deadline approached, came and went, the parties responsible for getting a single piece of software installed for a child ignored each other, refused to answer inquiries from me, and evaded responsibility and accountability with the lithe movements of Olympic gymnasts. I obtained 300+ pages of emails from APS under the Open Records Act and they show that Gwen Stokes did nothing to tell anybody about the deadline we'd agreed on, even after repeated polite reminders from me; that she never once told a single colleague via email about the plan we had agreed to, and that she never once asked why the deadline was missed or how the software acquisition process was coming along.

I pursued Gwen Stokes via email and phone for more than 2 1/2 months, never getting a single reply. Finally, last week I managed to catch her via phone at her desk. It was not a pretty conversation.

"Did you not feel you had some responsibility to inform other people about this?" I asked, citing her notable absence from the email trail. "Mr. Lockridge," she said, "I do not conduct all my business via email. I do most of it by phone." "Fine," I said, "so who did you talk to about this, and when, and what did they tell you?" "Mr. Lockridge, I do not recall."

"Did you not feel it was your obligation to tell somebody about the agreement we had made and the deadline we had set?"

"No, I did not."

"Let me be clear about this, Ms. Stokes--you say that even though you negotiated this agreement with me--you sat across the table from me and negotiated it--just you and me; and after that date, you were under no obligation to inform any of your colleagues about the deal we made nor follow up with any of them in any way?"

"That is correct. I have no control over what other people do. I can only do my job."

"But isn't part of your job to communicate to your colleagues the agreements you make?"

"Mr. Lockridge, I have another parent in my office right now and I am not going to discuss your case in front of another parent."

And she quickly hung up.

So there you have it. The compliance coordinator for the APS Program For Exceptional Children, explaining her philosophy on how compliance works: make a deal, tell nobody, ignore reminders to tell somebody, refuse to reply to emails and phone calls, duck the angry parent for 10 weeks, and then have nothing to say for yourself other than "I have no control over what other people do."

Friends, the PEC is not fixable so long as people like this woman occupy positions with titles like "compliance coordinator."