DeKalb County, GA – The DeKalb County School Board met for hours on Friday, May 8, and were expected to end that meeting with the hiring of Rudy Crew, the sole finalist to be the district’s next superintendent.

The meeting ended, but the board took no action on hiring Crew, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The AJC also reports that the board didn’t announce the end of the meeting to the public beforehand, which isn’t allowed under the Open Meetings Act. To read the full story, click here.

The School Board chair did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Crew has an impressive resume. He was chancellor of New York City Schools and the superintendent in Miami-Dade County. He currently serves as President of Medgar Evers College in New York.

But he also came with “baggage,” as School Board member Stan Jester put it.

In his career, he butted heads with officials tasked with holding him accountable in New York and Miami.

According to the New York Times, Special Commissioner of Investigation Edward Stancik wrote a “withering report” that officials at a high school in Queens could have prevented a gang rape from occurring in a classroom if they’d listened to a warning from a teacher that a room was being used by students for sexual activity. The New York Times wrote that Stancik, “called on Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew to dismiss two administrators at the school and to discipline three others, including the school principal, Richard Ross.”

“In response, Dr. Crew reassigned three of those officials to administrative posts elsewhere,” the New York Times wrote. “The principal, who has tenure, remained in place, pending a decision by the Chancellor on whether to file formal disciplinary charges.”

According to the Miami New Times, “Although he reassigned the assistant principals after the scandal, Crew refused to remove Principal Richard Ross despite Stancik’s recommendation and parents’ outrage. According to news articles, Crew personally investigated the incident and found that ‘sufficient additional information’ convinced him firing Ross was inappropriate.”

Crew ran into a strikingly similar controversy in Miami. An 18-year-old star running back was accused of having sex with a 14-year-old inside a girls’ bathroom at a high school there. The girl’s mother complained to the school’s staff and got nowhere, so she filed a police report. The football player was arrested. The Miami New Times article alleges that “Crew’s office knew what the star football player had done” but he was allowed to play in a state championship game. After the controversy erupted, Crew put the varsity football players at the school on probation and fired the coaches. He vowed to fire 21 employees who didn’t report the crime.

The Miami New Times article says, “Despite the impressive display of authority, Crew’s reaction to the Northwestern affair is much like his response to scandals that plagued him in … New York: too little too late.” The story accused one of Crew’s direct reports of at the time of trying to interfere with the criminal investigation into employees accused of covering up the crime.

In Oregon, where Crew worked as the state’s chief education officer, he made trips that had nothing to do with his job. The Oregonian wrote, “Most of that travel had nothing to do with his $280,000-a-year job. Instead, again and again, he flew first-class to give speeches, often for pay, to audiences drawn by his charisma and the national reputation he built when he ran New York City and Miami schools.”

An audit of Medgar Evers College found that $32,421 in tax levy funds were spent furnishing Crew’s residence and $2,088 was charged to the college’s corporate credit card to pay Crew’s personal bills.

Crew responded to some of these concerns during a virtual press conference Decaturish attended. On April 30, Decaturish published an editorial questioning whether the board should hire Crew, given his problematic past. To read the editorial, click here.

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At The Daily Beast, writer Kelly Weill has written a story that seems tailor-made to make its readers do a series of doubletakes — particularly if they followed the Green Bay Packers in the 2000s. It has a lot: fringe religious groups, a Christmas pageant gone wrong and references to the “sovereign citizen” movement all make appearances. And at the center of it is former Packers player Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila, who was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame in 2013.

It started in mid-December, when two men in their early 20s, Jordan Salmi and Ryan Desmith, were charged with “trespassing, disorderly conduct, and carrying concealed weapons” after showing up at a Christmas pageant held by Providence Academy in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Salmi and Desmith said that they’d been asked by the leader of the religious group they both belong to — Gbaja-Biamila — to record the event.

Their subsequent defense involved invoking ideas associated with the “sovereign citizen” movement — one which Gbaja-Biamila also cited in interviews quoted in Weill’s article.

As Weill describes it, Gbaja-Biamila’s time as a religious leader hasn’t been without controversy — to put it mildly.

Gbaja-Biamila is the leader of Straitway Praiseland, a Wisconsin offshoot of Tennessee’s fringe Straitway Truth Ministry. The church calls itself “Hebrew Israelite” and claims to preach a literal reading of the Bible.

The school that was holding the pageant? Gbaja-Biamila’s children are enrolled there; his ex-wife is Catholic. But Gbaja-Biamila’s religious beliefs contend that women should be subservient to men — his Instagram presence features a few posts espousing this belief. And thus, his objections to his children’s participation, which led to the events that prompted two armed men to attempt to record a Christmas pageant.

Gbaja-Biamila’s time as a religious leader is not the former player’s only foray outside of football; he also spoke at an event in support of then-presidential candidate Ted Cruz in 2016. This current case is an unnerving glimpse at the place where fringe religious beliefs and dubious political theories converge; it’s one with numerous threads, none of them easy to untangle.

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Read the full story at The Daily Beast

New Arsenal defender Stephan Lichtsteiner has been charged by FIFA for a similar goal celebration to that of Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka during their 2-1 against Serbia on Friday.

The 34-year-old could face a two match ban alongside his teammates after they formed an Eagle with their hands – the symbol of the Albanian flag.

Both Shaqiri and Xhaka have Albanian or Kosovan roots and consequently have a difficult relationship with Serbia who do not accept Kosovo as a nation.

A statement via the Richard Conway said: “The FIFA Disciplinary Committe has opened disciplinary proceedings against the Swiss player Stephan Lichtsteiner for a goal celebration during the match Switzerland vs Serbia. In relation to the same match, disciplinary proceedings have been opened against the President of the Serbian FA Slavisa Kokeza as well as the national coach Mladen Krstajic for statements made in the aftermath of the said match.

The Serbian football association lodged a formal complaint over Shaqiri and Xhaka’s celebrations on Saturday and FIFA later confirmed that both would be investigated.

Secretary general Jovan Surbatovic has raised his grievances to the world governing body over falling foul of regulations against ‘provoking the general public’ based on “the case of the boots, a question of several controversial flags and the celebration of both goals for Switzerland”, according to the Guardian.

It seems the Swiss players could have fallen foul of ‘Provoking the public’ and the suggested punishment is ‘Anyone who provokes the general public during a match will be suspended for two matches and sanctioned with a minimum fine of CHF 5,000.’

The bans would not affect the availability of either player at club level.

Full-back Lichtsteiner defended the celebration of his compatriots after the match.

He said: “”We had a lot of pressure, it was not an easy game for us.

“We have a lot of Albanians, so there is a lot of history between Serbia and Albania. It was a very tough game for them mentally.

“It was good. Why not? This is the history for them. The war between them was so difficult. I spoke to the father of one of our players who is Albanian, and he told me about this history. This is more than football. This is more than football because they have this period, this war that gave them both big problems.

“I understand them. I think it’s normal, it’s part of their life. There was also big provocation ahead of the game from them [Serbia], so I think it’s normal.”

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