Raises Questions about Lack of Anti-Bullying Programs and Use of Federal Dollars for a “Boot Camp”

Bobbie Bean, a candidate for the US Senate, launched an investigation today into the way the Highlands County School Board is dispersing and using its Florida Safe Schools funding. Mr. Bean is questioning why the vast majority of Highlands County’s federal Safe Schools funding is going to the Highlands County Sheriff and Police Departments and a “boot camp.” The funds are allocated by the Florida Department of Education (FDOE).

Many Florida schools use Safe Schools funds for anti-bullying educational programs starting as early as kindergarten, but Highlands County’s federal dollars are being funneled to law enforcement for job creation, Mr. Bean says. According to House Bill 5001, Safe Schools funds should be used for “school programs for middle school students; other improvements to enhance the learning environment, including implementation of conflict resolution strategies; alternative school programs for adjudicated youth; suicide prevention programs; and other improvements to make the school a safe place to learn.”

“Our society needs stronger preventative measures at a time when we’re seeing very serious bullying and harassment problems among children, such as the case of Michael Brewer of Ft. Lauderdale, who was lit on fire by a group of boys, or Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide after she was severely bullied and harassed by a group of girls in Massachusetts,” he notes. “We need to address the violence and bullying problems in America with early education, more anti-bullying programs and activities, awareness literature, and other preventative measures.”

Over a 5-year period, Safe Schools payments from the Highlands County School Board to law enforcement agencies more than quadrupled – from $173,404 in 2003 to $745,490 in 2008. The vast majority of the funding went toward school resource and “boot camp” officers.

For example, in the 2006-07 school year, Highlands County used their funds only for school and “boot camp” resource officers, according to the FDOE. By comparison, Broward County used funds for preventative measures such as “the enhancement of existing programs for Alternative Placement Programs for Adjudicated Youth. Additionally, funds were utilized for training teachers/staff, providing school resource/school safety officers, funding district-level positions for Safe Schools activities.”  Collier County “utilized funds to support Middle School After-School Programs and to fund district-level positions for Safe Schools activities.”  FDOE 2006-07 county Safe Schools allocations:  http://www.fldoe.org/safeschools/pdf/2006_07_ss_allocation.pdf

“Highlands is creating a time bomb” by not having more preventative programs, Bean says. “The situation in Highlands County shows that these federal funds should be monitored more closely.” According to Florida House Bill 5001, “$65,387 shall be distributed to each district, and the remaining balance shall be allocated as follows: two-thirds based on the latest official Florida Crime Index provided by the Department of Law Enforcement and one-third based on each district’s share of the state’s total unweighted student enrollment.”

A portion of Highlands County’s Safe Schools funds gets allocated toward a boot camp each year. In 2004, the School Board created the Academy at Youth Care Lane as an “alternative to expulsion for Highlands County students in grades six through 12.” It emphasizes “marching drills, calisthenics, a rigid dress code, manual labor assignments, physical training with obstacle courses,” according to a document obtained by the Bean campaign. Dr. Rodney Hollinger, assistant superintendent of the Highlands County School Board and coordinator of the program, says the Academy is the only one of its kind in Florida.

“Every day we had to do drills and drink water until we threw up,” said one 19-year-old Sebring resident who was placed at the Academy at Youth Care Lane after punching a child at school. He described the program as “too rigorous.” A parent whose child was placed at the Academy described it as a “strenuous and scary program for a teenager,” according to a letter written to Superintendent Wally Cox that was obtained by the Bean campaign.

The Highlands County School Board created the Academy at a time when boot camps were being questioned as a safe and effective means of discipline. Critics say boot camps can be dangerous, are a questionable way of changing aggressive behaviors, and can exacerbate behavior problems. Many states and counties have dissolved boot camp programs over the last several years. In Florida, a boot camp in Polk County was the focus of intense media scrutiny when a 12-year-old boy was exercised to death by drill instructors.

Meanwhile, a survey by the Bean campaign last fall found no anti-bullying pamphlets or brochures available from the school district, local law enforcement, children’s agencies, the Chamber of Commerce, or at kiosks in the mall in Sebring, Fla. The only anti-bullying information or program manual provided by a high school resource officer was the Federal D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Program) notebook, which is customarily used by school districts nationwide.

The survey found that the non-profit Highlands County Boys and Girls Clubs of Sebring and Avon Park were actively working on preventative measures. Among their activities is an annual joint outing to a major big league sports event to diffuse tensions between youth gangs in the two communities.

In an effort to track Safe Schools funding in more current years, the Bean campaign inquired about allocations to Highlands County in the 2007-08. “The survey period has closed and copies of the submitted surveys were not compiled in an easily readable format. It would be more timely and perhaps more meaningful for the questions to be posed directly to this district contact,” wrote the FDOE in response to the request.

An exchange was started with Pat Landress, head of Federal Programs at the Highlands County School Board:  “For the past 2 years our district has used Safe and Drug Free funds to pay for an Addictions Specialist who works with our students (and their families) who are assigned to our alternative school,” she wrote. “In 07-08 we used some funds for bullying, and although our grant did not originally show it, we did use some 08-09 funds to send guidance counselors to bullying conferences.”

When asked to provide invoices and cancelled checks for those projects, the Bean campaign received the following response: “Sorry, the person who was in charge of this retired – I don’t know where her records are.”

FDOE was able to provide this information for Broward and Collier County funds for the 2007-08 year: “Broward – Their funds went to funding after-school programs, alternative placement programs for adjudicated youth, and school safety and security program activities which resulted in funding SROs, district level positions and research. Collier – Their funds went to funding after-school programs and district-level positions for school safety and security program activities.” 2007-08 allocations: http://www.fldoe.org/safeschools/pdf/2007_08_ss_allocation.pdf

The following information describes how Safe Schools funding was used for the 2008-09 and 2009-10 years for all three counties:

2008-09

Highlands – Project SUCCESS  – a substance abuse/use prevention program for students grades 6-12. (There was no mention of programs related to bullying or violence prevention.)

Broward – Project B.L.A.S.T. Building Lasting Attitudes & Strategies for Tomorrow (a substance abuse/use and violence prevention program for students grades K-12); CHAMPS (a violence prevention and school-wide climate program for staff (and ultimately students) grades K-12).

Collier – Navigator (a substance abuse/use and violence prevention program for students in grade 8); Positive Behavior Support (PBS) (a violence prevention and school-wide climate program for staff and students grades K-8); Comprehensive Health (a substance abuse/use and violence prevention program for students grades K-12).

2008-09 allocations: http://www.fldoe.org/safeschools/pdf/2008_09_ss_allocation.pdf

2009-10

Highlands – Project SUCCESS – a substance abuse/use prevention program for students grades 6-12. (There was no mention of programs related to bullying or violence prevention.)

Broward – Project B.L.A.S.T. Building Lasting Attitudes & Strategies for Tomorrow (a substance abuse/use and violence prevention program for students grades K-12), and CHAMPs (a violence prevention and school-wide climate program for staff (and ultimately students) grades K-12).

Collier - Too Good for Drugs (a substance abuse/use and violence prevention program for students grades 6-8). http://www.fldoe.org/safeschools/pdf/2009_10_ss_allocation.pdf

Payments to the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office School Resource and Academy Officers from Federal Safe Schools Funds Sent to the Highlands County School Board

The numbers below reflect allocations for school and Academy resource officers only. The Bean campaign was unable to obtain total annual expenditures for the Academy program, despite numerous requests of the Highlands County School Board beginning in November 2009.

YEAR              CUT TO                                                            AMOUNT

6-30-03            County Commissioners                                      $173,404

5-28-04           County Commissioners                                       $175,743

4-22-05           County Commissioners                                       $176,661

4-21-06           County Commissioners                                       $238,533

1-19-07           County Commissioners                                       $357,732

3-21-08           County Commissioners                                       $370,294

10-10-08         Sheriff’s Office*                                                 $383,432

*In July, 2008, an agreement was signed between the School Board and Sheriff’s Office for these monies from 7/1/08-6/30/09. Use of this Safe Schools money as described in one voucher includes “Background checks, conc weapons permits, community maint, fingerprints, meals, school res. officers.” We were later told that the 10-10-08 check was cut to the Sheriff’s Department by mistake, and should have gone to the County Commissioners for distribution, which it eventually did.

US Senate candidate Bobbie Bean is known for his extensive lobbying at the local and state level for safe schools after his son was viciously beaten at the Highlands County Public Schools for nearly 3 hours in 2002. He visited Tallahassee eight times to lobby for the Jeffrey Johnson Stand Up and Be Counted Act, which was enacted by the Florida House and Senate in 2008.  Safe schools, education, law enforcement, and court reform are key concerns in his campaign.

Permission is granted to reproduce this article unaltered for free.

“Florida has more than 160 of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, putting it second behind Texas, according to data from Johns Hopkins University and calculations by the Alliance [for Excellent Education].”

http://www.all4ed.org/files/PrioritizingLowestPerformingSchools.pdf

Chapter 1

I’ve never aspired to become a politician. My dream was that one day I would own a piece of land and become – a farmer. I wanted to buy a parcel in the country, live lightly on the land with my family, and build that American Dream everyone believed was possible in our land of prosperity and opportunity.

After many years as a printer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I eventually did build a house with my family in the country, raised cattle, and grew palm trees in a nursery for several years. We now grow three acres of melon each year on our property. I’m basically a blue-jean wearing, occasionally swearing, hard-working family man with a working man’s dreams, ethics, and concerns about America.

I’m concerned because over the years I’ve watched the erosion of that American Dream I worked so hard to build. My family’s dream got trampled by the very system I’d paid taxes into for years, and I’ve watched the dream of millions of my fellow, hard-working Americans get destroyed over the years as well by a government that’s lost its bearings. That’s when I decided to put the rake and hoe aside for awhile and run for the United States Senate from the state of Florida.

I’m a strong advocate for government built on individual rights as outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Like many Americans, I’ve watched the American Dream crumble over the years as the United States has fallen into “disrepair” from lax regulation, lack of accountability, and endemic corruption.  Food stamps and pink slips have become the norm. I believe that the average, working American isn’t being fairly represented in Washington, D. C., where about half of our congressional representatives are millionaires. We need more representatives who understand the needs of the average, working American.

To understand who I am and why I’m running for a Senate seat, you need to understand a bit about my background and family. Although my upbringing in America was unique in many ways, it was pretty basic. Both my mother and father were hard-working Americans. Bobbie Sr. and Billie Bean worked all the time to put food on the table for my brother and sister and me. That’s all they did.  They were never home. We lived modestly.

When I was six we moved from Oakland, California to a small house in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. My parents ran a printing business.  The importance of the written word and the right to publish was a part of my life daily.

We lived in a blue-collar neighborhood, and some of our neighbors were carpenters, builders, and plumbers. I learned a lot from them when I was sweeping out their machine shops or helping out around their business. When I discovered I didn’t read or write very well, those skills they taught me helped me to survive.  I also had a lawn mowing business at the age of nine – the mower handle practically towered over me.

I didn’t get along with my dad very well, and I’d sometimes spend the night in the high school air conditioning ducts where I could stay dry and warm. At the time, my dad drank too much, but he’s been sober now for 45 years. Dad is a big patriot who was in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. He believed if you worked hard, you could have the American Dream. He finally achieved it after about age 78!

My mother was Native American, and we lived down the road from the Hollywood Headquarters of the Seminole Tribe. My father was the son of a Frenchman who immigrated to America in about 1890 and became a coal miner, US Marshall, and trucker. My grandmother on my father’s side was a strong, burley German.

I received a marginal education from the Florida public schools. Somewhere in my elementary school years, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, which is a neurologically based learning disability that can result in poor reading and writing skills. It’s a challenge I’ve had to deal with throughout my life. Every man and woman has their cross to bear, and this is one of mine. But I adapted to this challenge and made do in various ways. For example, in high school I switched to a trade school and ended up teaching my fellow classmates the printing business.

I have a keen understanding about what it means to be different or special needs, and I understand how harmful stereotyping people can be. Being illiterate was the most embarrassing part of my early years. At one time I was madly in love with one girl, but she found out I was illiterate and then laughed at me and spread it around. Another girl embarrassed me in front of the class in high school when she found out I couldn’t spell the word “grey.”

Many years later I met someone from the Seminole Tribe who recalled that incident and apologized for that girl. She said that girl had told her she’d carried the guilt for what she did to me for 20 years.

I finally lost it one year when a guy called me “dummy” several times. I busted him in the mouth. It made everybody in the classroom quiet. Was physical force the wrong way to deal with the situation or the right way?  It made everyone in the classroom stop teasing me, but the teacher really should have stepped in and stopped the teasing at the very beginning. The teacher never stepped in once on the verbal abuse, but I sure got punished when I busted that guy in the mouth.

Many years later, these memories would resurface when our eldest child was brutally beaten at the Highlands County Middle School. The incident prompted me to begin lobbying on behalf of the Jeffrey Johnson Stand Up and Be Counted Act, which resulted in multiple trips to Tallahassee to address the issue of safer schools before the state House and Senate. The Jeffrey Johnson Stand Up For All Students Act was finally enacted on April 18, 2008.  It was named in memory of Jeffrey Johnson, who committed suicide after he was incessantly bullied by his peers. Bullying and aggressive text messaging has become a serious and reoccurring problem in our schools that is crying out for more attention from our school district personnel and parents.

Our public schools are in crisis. Youth violence is an epidemic in America. It has become increasingly important for our public schools to start anti-bullying programs and become more proactive in the area of school safety. I continue to provide talks and work on these issues today.

When I graduated from high school, I could barely read and write. It was only with the help of a tutor, and a lot of persistence and determination, that I taught myself to do so. From this victory came the determination to overcome and succeed at almost anything. From this experience also came a greater understanding of the challenges many Americans must face and overcome in their daily lives.

I started weightlifting in 1968 at age nine.  Eight years later, I won the state record for bench pressing at age 17 for the 165-pound weight class. I then won the 1985 Florida State Championships (over-all winner for the Governor’s Cup). In 1998, I won first place in the AAU Drug-free International Powerlifting Championships at Disney’s Wide World of Sports arena and was ranked among the top-40, drug-free lifters in the world.  I was a weightlifter for 29 years until 2002, when our son was serious hurt in a bullying incident and required constant care.

My wife Marilyn was my constant companion during that time. We were in love, and we were best friends.  We married on Aug. 31, 1985, when she was 23 years old.  I remember we received about 9 toasters as wedding gifts and gave them away at Christmas presents for years! Marilyn is an old-fashioned girl who attended Catholic schools and still attends the Catholic Church regularly.  Occasionally we go to the Baptist Church – some of our children attended the Baptist school at one time.

Before I married Marilyn, I told her I was semi-literate. She replied, “Bobbie, I’m not marrying you for your reading and writing skills.” Marilyn grew up in Bronx, N.Y., until her parents divorced and she moved to Florida with her mother and siblings when she was seven. Her father worked for the US post office and then went into the sanitation business primarily to make enough money to send the children to private Catholic schools in Queens. She was enrolled in a Catholic school in Florida as well, transferred to a public high school in Ft. Lauderdale, and eventually attended Davie Community College in Ft. Lauderdale.

She worked in a veterinarian office during her summers and eventually was accepted to the University of Florida Gainesville in the School of Veterinary Medicine, but didn’t attend because she was concerned about accruing a debt load. Instead, she attended Davie Community College, and graduated with a degree in English.

Marilyn was working at Merrill Lynch Investment Services as a sales person in Oakland, Florida, when she became pregnant with Bobbie Jr.  He was born a healthy, happy 8 pounder in 1988. Marilyn stopped working, and our second child, Jesse, was born a year and a half later in 1990. I was present when every one of our four boys was born. I was working as a printer doing jobs such as letterheads, business cards, manuals, and pamphlets. My biggest account was with the National Headquarters of the Seminole Indian Tribe in Ft. Lauderdale – the largest Native American tribe in Florida. I now do a lot of printing for ACR Electronics, which supplied the United States Coast Guard and military with products. They’re the world leader in nautical and aviation products.

In the 1990s, we were an upwardly mobile, middle-class American family – and Marilyn and I had a dream. We wanted to buy land, build a house with our own hands, own livestock and till the soil, and try to live simply – just as many Americans have done for centuries. We didn’t need anything more than that.

We began to look around for property in Central Florida and found 30 of the prettiest acres just west of Sebring in Highlands County in 1995.  We bought the land with the idea of dividing up the property for our children and giving each one of them a few acres.

The land had a small creek and was surrounded by fields used for farming and livestock. The property deed included a second entrance and 15-foot-wide ingress/egress easement or right-of-way that passed through the neighbor’s property. We were told it could be used during the rainy season when the front entrance and driveway flooded from the creek. We thought we had finally found our dream location that we had worked so hard for over the years.

For about 4 years we commuted from Ft. Lauderdale to a trailer on the property to build our four-bedroom home with our own hands. We chose a lovely spot next to a little duck pond and even mined the stone for the floors from a local quarry. Eventually, there was enough of a house built that we left our home in Ft. Lauderdale in 1998. I opened a printing business that serviced the community and began planting melons to help subsidize our family expenses.

It was a wonderful time in our lives. Our land is quiet, peaceful, and remote – we’ve seen an abundance of wildlife over the years. As someone who is half Native American, I felt I was finally attuned with nature the way my ancestors and God has intended me to be.

There’s an old saying that good fences make good neighbors. But in our case, our fences (there were no gates at the time) and the 30 acres of land we bought weren’t enough to keep the neighbor’s from making our lives a living hell. We had a slight taste of this when we first moved in, and odd rumors circulated throughout the rural neighborhood that Marilyn was Cuban because she has dark eyes and hair. She’s actually Italian.

Our troubles began when one day we suddenly discovered a make-shift fence constructed by our neighbor, Jerome Kaszwbosiki, who held a senior position at the County Clerk’s Office in Sebring. It appeared across the drive we had been using since the time we first bought our property two years earlier. Access to the road was in our deed restrictions, so I took down the fence after checking with the County Sheriff’s Dept., who told me “the road couldn’t be obstructed,” as stated in a June 13, 1997 Sheriff’s report. Mr. Kaszwbosiki wanted to have a locked gate that would require us to get in and out of our cars each time we drove down the drive.

It was the beginning of a series of events in which my family found electrical wires, pieces of wood, and ropes occasionally stretched across our means of egress. As the newcomers to the area, it seemed as if a group of neighbors had singled us out for harassment.

Over time, we began to discover that Sebring had a powerful network of people who have worked and lived together for years, and they control the town. This wasn’t apparent to us when we first moved to Sebring. But as the harassment toward us began to build, we began to see that townspeople in key positions and our neighbors were so closely knit together that the deck was stacked against us from the very day we moved onto our property as the newcomers.

Our disturbing personal experience in this small, semi-rural town is emblematic of what has happened in America on a much broader scale as our individual constitutional and civil rights have eroded and been trampled. Our judicial system, law enforcement, schools, child protection services, and government has become so incestuously intertwined, and even corrupted in some cases, that the individual rights our country was founded on are perilously at risk. Our democracy is atrophying into socialism, which is suffocating our individual rights and squeezing out the American Dream.

I believe my experience with the inept and inappropriate handling by county and state officials of the crisis our family endured after our son was beaten for nearly 3 hours at Highland’s County Public School holds clues as to what’s gone wrong in America. This book will attempt to use our experience to raise questions about what needs fixing in America and provide suggestions on how to restore our government back to what the forefathers initially intended.

Copyright 2010 –  Bobbie Bean Campaign for the US Senate

Time and time again, residents of the state of Florida have experienced frustration and disappointment with the Florida Bar. My first experience with the Florida Bar proved that the organization is fraught with good-ol’-boy politics where “who you know” is more important than judicial integrity.

Our introduction to the Florida Bar began in 2004, when our neighbor, Dr. Ronald Owens, attempted to obtain a permit for a lighted airport runway that would run beside our rural property line. It turned into a contentious battle. After I cited several safety issues at a Highlands County Board of Adjustment meeting, which were backed up by the Federal Aviation Administration, his permit was denied.

Two weeks later, the Highlands County Sheriff’s Department arrested me for cutting a fence (and allegedly letting cows out) that suddenly appeared across the deeded access road to my property (see “Our Family Story” on this website). I cut the fence to allow my wife and mother-in-law to pass through the gate with a car full of groceries. We had been using that access road unobstructed for many years.

At the advice of Alister Ibrahim of Gator Title, I hired the firm Keough & DuBose, P.A.. Attorney Keogh convinced me that the charge was a serious federal offense, and I could spend a year in prison. Because we were financially strapped due to extensive medical bills resulting from our son’s serious injuries from a bullying incident at the Highlands County Middle School, we were forced to put a 10- and 5-acre parcel of our land on the market.

Initially, the law firm convinced us to sign a promissory note for the entire property, including the house. But we found out that the note was misleading, and we demanded to have it annulled.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ibrahim, Sheriff Susan Benton’s granddaughter, and the daughter of former code enforcer Gary Laurey all offered low bids on the 10-acre parcel. We finally sold it to a local doctor, Dr. Kevin Roberts, who turned out to be a friend of Ibrahim’s. The 5-acre parcel was put up for auction and sold to a relative of Dr. Ronald Owens, the neighbor who was denied a runway permit.

I never thought someone would take advantage of a family with burgeoning medical bills and an ongoing crisis with their son. But Keough & DuBose convinced me that the fence-cutting offense was so serious that we ended up paying $15,000 to them to keep me out of jail for an offense that we later found out, according to Florida state records, was a mere $125 bail. It was the same bail paid for selling fish and frogs without a license. We managed to keep our house, but after all of the legal bills, we lost 15 prime acres. We also found out from someone who had worked for over 15 years at the Animal Control Department for Highland’s County that no one, other than myself, had ever been arrested for cutting a fence and letting cows out during that time. She had dealt with a whopping 75,000 “cow out” calls.

Several years later, before I realized what had happened, I tried to hire Keough & DuBose again to look into the questionable manner in which the Sheriff’s Department and Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) handled our son’s bullying case. They refused to take the case, citing a conflict of interest.  How could Keough & DuBose handle my bogus arrest by the Sheriff’s Department several years earlier, but not represent us in a probe into the same department’s handling of our son’s bullying case?

In a letter dated Oct. 4, 2007, fax #3197, to Bobbie and Marilyn Bean, Attorney John DuBose stated: “As we discussed with you on Tuesday, we have an ongoing relationship with the State of Florida and represented various state agencies through State risk management program. In that regard, we routinely represent various state attorneys offices, public defenders offices, and other constitutional officers. Therefore, we would have a conflict of interest bringing any action against an officer or employees of the State of Florida, including officers or employees of the Highlands County Sheriffs Office or officers or employees of the State Attorneys Office for the the Tenth Judicial Circuit, and we must decline to represent your interests in any such action.”

If Keough & DuBose couldn’t represent me because of a conflict of interest, then they shouldn’t have represented me in the fence episode. They failed to disclose their relationship with state agencies to me at that time. In fact, they should have declined representation at that time based on their relationship with any state agencies. One can conclude that it was an orchestrated sceme.

When I sent two complaint letters to the Florida Bar regarding the questionable response by Keough & DuBose, they refused to address the clear conflict of interest. It became clear that the deck was stacked against us from the very beginning. A group of high-placed individuals within the community set us up and tried to steal our house and property right out from under us. But I held the Ace of Diamonds, because in the end, I managed to clearly expose the corruption and favoritism within the Florida Bar. If I’m elected to office, I will again.