Last week I appeared before the New Rochelle Board of Education to formally request that the Board of Education rescind an illegal “ban” issued by Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak under which I am supposedly denied access to school grounds except in the case of otherwise public events or meetings involving my own children. This “ban” was in response to my parking in the lot at Isaac E. Young Middle School to report out whether it was true that Isaac Principal Anthony Bongo was smoking cigars on school grounds each afternoon (it was true). Bongo used his cousin, a cop on the New Rochelle Police Department, to attempt to intimidate me so that I would not run a story about his cigar smoking (of course, I ran it). Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak responded by sending a letter advising building principals to be on the look out for me and that I was banned from school grounds.
It was during about this same time that the district began to illegally ignore my Freedom of Information requests. When I filed an appeal to Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak, he illegally aggregated my requests made over several months in order to artificially inflate the time it took to compile the records I had requested in order to create an invoice for several hundred dollars. The district then refused requests to explain how a series of requests that should have resulted in little or no charge had come out to several hundred dollars. The district refused to explain itself.
Although there is no legal requirement to do so, the district has also refused our request to be added to the District press release mailing list even thought Talk of the Sound is the only media outlet that regularly covers Board of Education meetings in New Rochelle.
A direct email to Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak making these same requests directly went unanswered.
Last night I made a presentation to the board addressing these and other related points and concluded that if they were not going to even respond to my requests let alone grant them then there was no particular reason for me to try and work with them on a cooperative basis and they can expect a return to the status quo ante.
