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Gus and CCA Are So Not OK

State Rep. Mike Turner has fired off a missive to Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner George Little about the spate of questionable practices and incidents that have landed Corrections Corporation of America in the news. CCA, as you'll recall, contracts with Tennessee (along with many other state and federal authorities) to run their prisons and jails.

In his April 16 letter, which Pith obtained this morning, Turner mentions the Time magazine story that alleges CCA counsel Gus Puryear allegedly whitewashed incident reports on escapes and unnatural deaths, so as not to alarm the company's clients. He also cites The Tennessean piece on an inmate at a Metro-controlled, CCA-run correctional facility who went nine months without a shower, as well as the recent Nashville Scene article that reported how guards at that same facility falsely claimed a jail-cell surveillance camera wasn't working—just one day after an inmate was found in her cell with a broken skull, according to the detective who wanted to review the footage.

In other words, it's just another day in the life of CCA and Gus Puryear—who, we should add, is called out in the upcoming issue of the National Law Journal for being one of Bush's most controversial judicial appointees.

Jameson Denied Judgeship

We should all feel sorry for Mike Jameson. Now he'll have to stay on the Metro Council for three more years.

This morning, Gov. Phil Bredesen's office tapped Joe Binkley to fill the 20th Judicial District Circuit Court vacancy, choosing the local attorney over Jameson and Marsh Nichols, who was already serving as Special Master with the Circuit Court.

When we called Jameson, he was characteristically bitter and snide.

“Now I look forward to voting on the Circuit Court budget,” he told us.

Actually, he was only kidding. The East Nashville council member, who could probably kill a toddler in Five Points and retain the adoration of his constituents, was gracious and generous about missing out on a judgeship. He told Pith that Binkley would make a fine successor to Judge Walter Kurtz.

”I would have to say he was the most experienced and is just a genuinely nice guy—calm and even-tempered,” Jameson said. “Other than my mother, I think just about everybody would agree this was a good pick.”

Art of the Insult

Last week, the folks developing Nashville's Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture proposed a partnership between the museum—slated to open in 2011—and Fisk University to showcase the school's coveted Stieglitz Collection. In return, Fisk would get “a steady stream of revenue” to help the school recover from financial purgatory. Seemed like a good enough idea.

But it sure didn't take long for Fisk officials to crap all over the first real attempt to keep the art local. If there was any question about what Fisk thought about the new proposal—or about how the promise of making a quick buck stacks up against the significant cultural value of keeping the collection local and intact—university president Hazel O'Leary has cleared it right up. The Fisk prez called the Nashville museum's proposal “ludicrous” and “insulting.”

Yeah, we get that Fisk is in dire financial straits and a $30 million offer from the Wal-Mart heiress to ship the art to Arkansas is mighty tempting. And, as exhibited during her tenure as energy secretary during the Clinton administration, O'Leary doesn't exactly have the best judgment. But what's with all the sass?

Does Fisk's near-rabid desire to turn art into dollars really merit insulting a group trying to honor the influence of African American culture in Nashville—not to mention, trying to help Fisk? Course, the Nashville museum is still in the formative stages. But last time we checked, the Wal-Mart museum still looked like nothing more than a hole in the ground in Bentonville, Ark.

O'Leary even chided the museum for not having an “expert” on board, apparently a reference to some sort of curator. It's an odd blow, especially coming from the leader of a university that thought it would be a good idea to house an art collection hand-selected by Georgia O'Keeffe in a dank, renovated gymnasium with zero climate control.

Dean Believes the Children Are Our Future

Well unfortunately, we promised we'd give you Mayor Karl Dean's reaction to David Fox's proposal. Here it is:

“I share Mr. Fox’s eagerness to see real changes made in our schools and I certainly appreciate his recognizing my commitment to improving our school system. Having entered into a new era of accountability under No Child Left Behind, I recognize the future success of our schools will be reflected by the need for more involvement between local government and the school district.”

In other news, Dean thinks mom bakes the best peach cobbler, kittens are adorable and Fred Thompson was a pretty shitty candidate. Hopefully, in the days ahead the mayor will have something more interesting to say about Fox's very specific and substantial proposal to improve the school system.

Crazy Like a Fox? School Board Member Urges Mayoral Control of Nashville Schools

Nashville School Board member David Fox wants out of a job. At least, that's one upshot of a proposal he made today in a speech before the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in which the former business journalist asked Gov. Phil Bredesen to allow Mayor Karl Dean to commandeer the city's struggling school system and appoint his own school board.

“I request that as soon as practically and legally possible, Governor Bredesen empower the mayor with authority over MNPS and support legislative efforts to give Nashville's mayor the power to appoint all members of the Metro Nashville Board of Education,” the first-term board member said.

Fox's proposal, though a radical one in Tennessee, reflects a growing trend toward more centrally run school systems. With abysmal graduation rates and dropping test scores, state legislators across the country have authored legislation handing big-city mayors the authority to call the public education shots. The thinking is they couldn't do any worse than the oft-corrupt and incompetent elected boards who've run their schools into the ground. Mayors in Chicago, Cleveland and New York have taken over their local school districts with largely promising results. Closer to home, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton has asked for control of his troubled school district. We'll have some comments from Dean later today. After the jump, Fox's chamber speech:

Pedro Watch

As we speak, your Metro school board is meeting with Metro legal officials after being suddenly summoned for a conference earlier today possibly to negotiate Garcia's exit from the district. District spokesperson Woody McMillan says he doesn't know if the board is discussing the future of embattled schools director Pedro Garcia, but certainly didn't seem surprised at the question.

UPDATE More details via Matt Pulle:

The City Paper is already reporting and we can confirm that Nashville schools director Pedro Garcia, whose annual salary is $216,000, has submitted a resignation to the school board this afternoon. At 4 p.m., members of the school board met with Metro attorneys to consider Garcia's offer. Sources tell the Scene that some local business leaders were aware as early as yesterday that the move was afoot, before even the school board itself. Metro educators got wind of the news early this afternoon, setting off a ping-pong effect of gossipy phone calls about Garcia. Should the board accept Garcia's offer, senior schools staffer Chris Henson would be named interim director.

Hermitage Hall in More Hot Water

Power to the People, a Nashville-based black human rights organization, today asked the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to launch a criminal investigation of Nashville's Hermitage Hall, a treatment facility for juvenile male sex offenders.

The organization filed the complaint Monday, citing this Scene story that detailed life at Hermitage Hall, which one current employee dubbed a “nightmare” for boys ages 9 to 17 who live there. In December, current and former employees told the Scene that some of the facility's young residents were forced to sleep on mattresses on the building's floors, locked in a small room for weeks on end as punishment and put in “chemical straitjackets” thanks to heavy sedation. Despite these claims, the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities (DMHDD) has continued to license Hermitage Hall.

In the complaint, Power to the People claims that Hermitage residents are subjected to “horrid” conditions and “cruel mistreatment.” The organization has asked the DOJ to suspend or end all federal funding to DMHDD and to sue Universal Health Care, the King of Prussia, Penn., company that owns the facility, for “operating an unsafe, abusive and criminal operation” that violates the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.

This is the second time in as many months that Universal Health Care has found itself in hot water. Just last month, the family of a 17-year-old boy who died at Clarksville's Chad Youth Enhancement Center after two staffers held him in a physical restraint, sued Chad and its parent company, Universal Health Care.

CNN Reports Eric Volz Free

Finally, this poor kid's hell will end.

Say Anything

A couple of weeks ago, we reported about a court filing accusing one courthouse translator of neglecting to tell non-English-speaking defendants that they have the right to plead not guilty.

Now a second non-English speaking defendant is making the same charge about a different translator. Julio Jesus Pedro was arrested for possession of cocaine back in 2001. In court with his attorney a few months later, the translator assigned to Pedro's case did not speak his language, which, according to the filing is not Spanish but “an indigenous Guatemalan dialect.”

Pedro’s lawyer pled guilty on his client's behalf without telling him that cocaine possession, though a misdemeanor, is a deportable offense. (Actually, his lawyer couldn’t tell him much of anything, given the language barrier, but that’s beside the point.) So Pedro paid his fine and went on with his life.

Fast-forward to this year when Pedro was arrested yet again, though it is unclear just what for. He retains Nashville immigration attorney Sean Lewis, who tells him for the first time that the coke charge is “an immigration deportable offense,” according to the filing. Lewis claims that his client received “ineffective assistance of counsel,” and that there was a “failure to properly inform him of the crime with which he was charged, and his legal rights.”

Much more after the jump...

Pedro's Time

Across the city and, more importantly, on Metro's school board, there is growing consensus that Nashville schools director Pedro Garcia should move on. Sources tell the Scene he's trying to do just that, having quietly applied and interviewed last week in San Diego, a district that hopes to install a new superintendent by year's end (but may have an announcement as early as Dec. 18).

The possible opportunity in San Diego comes at a time when Garcia’s popularity in Nashville is ebbing and his future here is uncertain. Although his current contract runs through 2010, the school board will approach his annual performance review in January with a critical eye, according to recent reports. A popular figure in his first few years after coming to Nashville, Garcia has evolved into a controversial system head whose imperious leadership style is thought by many to have undermined teacher and principal morale while alienating parents. In the last couple of years, Garcia has found himself encountering increasing resistance to his ideas for system reform, including a balanced calendar (rejected by the school board after much public opposition), standard school attire (in place systemwide since August, over the strident objections of a vocal minority), citywide school rezoning (put on hold by the school board after much public opposition) and single-gender classrooms (in place experimentally in some schools but apparently receiving a cool reception from the board).

Now, with MNPS placed in “corrective action” status by the Tennessee Department of Education because of the system’s underperformance on federal No Child Left Behind academic achievement benchmarks, it appears that the school board (which itself could be taken over if the state were so inclined) may be more interested in reforming Garcia than in Garcia’s reforms.

Across the board, education officials the Scene asked for on-the-record comment either feigned ignorance about this development or cryptically declined.

While this news could well incite familiar invective, complaining emails in all caps between parent groups or blood-thirsty political rantings from Metro Council members elucidating the reasons why Garcia has worn out his welcome here, that wouldn't be constructive. The story line is not simply that Garcia has outgrown Nashville—or that it has outgrown him—and hopes to see Bransford Avenue in his rear view mirror. It's that Nashville is poised to embrace a new visionary whose leadership will directly affect more than 70,000 Metro students.