Pot meet a possible kettle. In what surely has to be one of the most ironic moves in this campaign cycle, Congressman Raul Grijalva and his daughter, Adelita Grijalva, the president of the Tucson Unified School District governing board, sent a letter to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan complaining that Arizona Superintendent of Education John Huppenthal violated laws.
The duo, who have used TUSD’s resources and its students to promote both of their political careers, are now complaining that Huppenthal gave school choice advocacy groups the names and telephone numbers of students to be used in a robocall campaign about Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is demanding that Secretary Duncan investigate whether Huppenthal violated FERPA. FERPA is the federal law that requires schools to get parents’ permission before releasing student data.
Huppenthal issued a statement this week denying the claim. “There are many false statements being made in the media about why I recorded a phone message for the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program and how the Alliance for School Choice gained access to phone numbers,” stated Huppenthal. “First and foremost, I agreed to lend my voice to this effort solely because of my support for school choice options for Arizona parents. I felt this would be an effective way to inform people about the scholarship program, which is administered by the Arizona Department of Education. To infer otherwise is completely disingenuous and misleading to the public.”
“Second, the Arizona Department of Education did not provide any contact information to the Alliance for School Choice for this effort,” continued Huppenthal. “Student privacy is of the highest priority for my administration, and we work every day to ensure all student information is protected.”
The Yellow Sheet caught up with lobbyist Sydney Hay from the American Federation for Children, which is the group that funded the robocalls. Hay told the Yellow Sheet reporter the group bought the numbers from a company which “specializes in providing telephone numbers for targeted areas. She said the calls targeted neighborhoods with schools that have Ds or Fs in the state’s ranking system and were part of proponents’ $250,000 campaign to pump up enrollment in the ESA program, which so far has only attracted 692 students,” reported the Yellow Sheet.
The Grijalva’s have been conducting an orchestrated attack on Huppenthal in an effort to push their candidate for Arizona’s Superintendent spot. According to very close sources, Grijalva has been trying to push Huppenthal to take any action against the district so that she and the supporters of David Garcia can call Huppenthal a racist oppressor.
On the other hand, according to the Yellow Sheet, “The American Federation for Children’s 2010 IE report showed that they spent $63,000 on behalf of Huppenthal.”
This not the first time Grijalva’s daughter has called on the feds against a political opponent. After a Tucson resident said at a TUSD Governing Board meeting that her father would like to see blood in the streets, she claimed she heard an implied threat. In no time, the man was visited by the Capitol Police and questioned at length about his comments.
For his part, a complaint was filed against Representative Grijalva when his aide used official TUSD emails addresses to solicit support for the “Whole lotta people for Grijalva” event during the last election cycle. One class of Tucson High School math students then received the invitation from their teacher, who encouraged them to participate in the political process.
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