DPS: FUBAR Planet

The Detroit Public Schools have been laying off teachers and cutting the pay of those who are left. Students have been fleeing in droves, and there's not enough money to educate those who remain.

Nevertheless, the schools, or rather, their emergency manager, have decided to pay out $650,000 because a former school board member masturbated with a handkerchief last year.

Does that crass language offend you? Does it bother you that I'm about to reveal to all the kiddies reading this that FUBAR means, in fact, Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition?

Well, if you feel that way, your priorities are sadly out of whack, or, you might say, FUBAR. Even if I filled this column with repetitions of the word fuckwad, it would not approach the obscenity of what's been done by Emergency Manager Roy Roberts, a former General Motors executive, and Teresa Gueyser, one of a long line of failed and fired Detroit school superintendents.

Roberts threw away enough money to hire a dozen teachers, and Gueyser, a person whose career was allegedly devoted to education, took that money and deprived some poor kids.

She got it merely because she had to see some disgusting pervert pull his pud in front of her. According to Gueyser, Otis Mathis III, the former school board president, was meeting with her on June 16, 2010, when he unzipped his pants and began rubbing his wee-wee with a handkerchief. Gueyser added that Mathis had stroked his oar during earlier meetings (!), but felt the hanky took it to a new level.

For his part, the alleged habitual masturbator claimed he had a rash. Under pressure from his colleagues, he was forced to resign. 

Several weeks later, however, Gueyser was fired, or at least her contract wasn't renewed. Mathis plead no contest to improper conduct in office.

Somehow, she got the idea that her termination was due to her not being receptive to the carrot-cuffer, and filed a whistleblower suit claiming discrimination, sexual harassment and wrongful termination. Last week, the schools decided to pay her off.

Steve Wasko, the longtime mouthpiece for whatever forces happen to currently be running the schools into the ground, said Roberts had approved the payoff as "the best utilization of district time and resources on this particular case."

Translated into standard Inglés: "We are buying her off for two reasons. We want to stop the humiliating publicity, and, besides, we are afraid if we don't settle, in the long run this may cost the schools more." 

This is a legalized bribe, of course, for which she will sign some sort of agreement not to sue the schools again, and, if the district's lawyers have any brains, she will be made to stop talking about it. 

> Email Jack Lessenberry