THE LOCAL AREA WATCH

NEW MOTTO FOR BLOTTO TEACHERS: NEVER SAY QUIT!

Last month we reported the story of John Gregory, a Forest Hills school district principal who refused to resign his office after pleading guilty to drunk driving.  Why should he?  No one in authority is demanding it of him.  Besides, ‘fessing up to his criminal irresponsibility made it a “teachable moment” for his students.  Exactly what that moment taught I’m not sure, but when too many kids drunk behind the wheel kill and get killed, keeping his office certainly doesn’t send the message that drunken driving should be taken too seriously.

Gregory, it seems, has an acolyte of his school of “Never Say Quit!”  James Idziak, a Comstock Park school district teacher, was charged with a pair of felonies after leading the cops on a drunken car chase northwest of town last month.  The prosecutor further charged him with misdemeanor child endangerment from partying with his high school students prior to the chase.  The teachers union, the Michigan Education Association, is standing by their man and providing him with a lawyer to defend his tenure because he refuses to quit teaching.

Again, why should he?  Even though the Comstock Park school board, in stark contrast to the Forest Hills board, fired Idziak for his reckless conduct, that is no guarantee he will lose his job because of it.  The union will fight for him.  In fact, even a conviction on one of the felonies or the child endangerment charge is no assurance that he will lose his teaching certificate.  The union will fight for him again.  The only certain means of Idziak losing his job is to quit.  But he learned from Gregory’s teachable moment that a public servant is the last person who needs to hold himself accountable for his wrongdoing.

CROFOOT VINDICATED

Last week Jack Crofoot contacted us with good news.

As you will recall, Mr. Crofoot was facing a trial on criminal charges pressed by the grocery chain Spartan Stores.  On the advice of Warner Norcross attorney Alex DeYonker, Spartan was trying to intimidate Mr. Crofoot into silence about his mistreatment by the company after one its security guards had falsely twisted a honest mistake into a shoplifting beef against him.  (Mr. Crofoot, who is legally blind, exited a Spartan grocery store with an unchecked item in his shopping cart.  The security guard accosted him when he was going back into the store to correct his mistake.)

Grand Rapids Assistant City Attorney Margaret Bloemers gleefully piled on to prosecute Mr. Crofoot, even after Spartan's security manager contacted her to drop the charges.  You see, the company's surveillance video proved Mr. Crofoot's innocence, and the security manager knew that.  This put Spartan Stores in a pickle:  They had falsely accused Mr. Crofoot of a crime, about which he had been making public complaints.  DeYonker tried to bully Mr. Crofoot into silence by hanging the possibility of future prosecution over his head if he didn't shut up, but Mr. Crofoot refused to be cowed.  So Spartan pressed on with charges, with Bloemers happily carrying their water in court.

This shouldn't have been a tremendous problem for Mr. Crofoot to overcome, because of the evidence of the Spartan surveillance video.  However, Spartan refused to release to the court the portion of the video that exonerated Mr. Crofoot, and Mr. Crofoot's public defender did not want to be bothered with defending his client.  (After all, that would mean working for his fee paid by the taxpayers, and who are they to expect anything like that?)  So, by the time Mr. Crofoot's trial was scheduled for the end of April, things looked bleak.

Fortunately, the American Council for the Blind stepped and sent an attorney to Mr. Crofoot to represent him.  All of the sudden, Bloemers folded and the City Attorney's Office signed an agreement dismissing all charges.  As for Spartan Stores, all Mr. Crofoot could say is that he signed an agreement to no longer publicly discuss the matter.  Therefore, we do not know what, if any, settlement has been reached between Spartan and him.  For what it's worth, I will say that a "gag order", like the one Mr. Crofoot spoke of, would indicate his lawyer got him a favorable settlement from Spartan.

So despite the mendacity of Spartan Stores, the thuggery of Warner Norcross, and the supine submission of the City Attorney's Office to the players in town, justice did prevail.  Mr. Crofoot is officially no longer a bad man.  We wish him well.