Posted: Wednesday, 27 May 2009 10:08AM
Blow Baby Blow
Steve Corbett Reporting
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Forget the sirens. We have no need for a SWAT team. Bright lights and bullhorns are not required.
All we need is a federal grand jury subpoena to help us begin to unravel the mess that mires the educational process at the Luzerne County Community College.
That happened yesterday, when FBI agents served LCCC officials with a request for official records.
Maybe we can now look forward to somebody really teaching us a lesson.
I last wrote in this space about LCCC in September of last year, when police charged former college dean Peter Paul Moses with theft. Prior to his arrest, I had been receiving letters and emails tipping me off to the investigation into Moses and others who are paid far more in tax dollars than they are worth.
Still, it took a year for the “investigation” to produce results.
Since then no other arrests have been forthcoming.
OK, Ross Scarantino, the former head of the LCCC board of trustees, is scheduled to plead guilty to federal corruption charges on Friday. But gangbusters didn’t pinch him as a community college official. The feds took him down as the superintendant of the Pittston Area School District.
A photo of Scarantino appears in today’s Citizens Voice newspaper. He is laughing his power laugh that used to define him, a laugh he laughed in almost every publicity photo of him that I ever saw published.
That smug power laugh is gone now, hopefully forever.
In today’s file photo, Scarantino is shaking hands with Tom Leary, the president of LCCC. Trustees voted to hire Leary because they claimed he was the best person for the job.
That’s a laugh, too.
Trustees never looked outside the walls of their school for somebody better. They never searched the nation for the best and the brightest. Instead, they went with a good old boy who was an insider, a trusted member of the political elite that has controlled the school during its descent into mediocrity.
Leary would do as he’s told.
Now, while Scarantino prepares for prison, Leary is being told to cough up records that might once and for all start the cleansing process that will help bring back a quality educational environment that is as necessary as ever.
And Peter Paul Moses is threatening to become a whistle blower. I’m rooting for Moses to tell us all he knows.
Blow, baby, blow.
During the 17 years between 1985 and 2002 that I wrote newspaper columns for the Times Leader, I regularly wrote about LCCC.
I watched a sordid sexual harassment scandal unfold. And I watched a silent public accept bad behavior as the norm. Even when good women got hurt, and they did, the lack of a public outcry embarrassed the sense of honor that any community needs to move forward.
Luzerne County did not move forward until the ongoing public corruption probe got underway. And that includes the year-long Secret Service investigation into the misuse of public funds by numerous high-ranking county officials.
Unfortunately, federal officials have not released the results of that investigation. Sources claim that no criminal charges will be filed. But that’s no reason to hide information that the public needs to know if we ever hope to change bad government into good government.
No, we don’t need a SWAT team.
We do need all the public disclosure we can obtain.
And that means more information rather than less from federal prosecutors and other federal law enforcement who are duty-bound to not only arrest criminals but to reassure and encourage law-abiding taxpayers as well.
Trustees at LCCC must speak out as well.
So, too, must President Leary. Since his appointment he has been nothing more than just another bureaucrat masquerading as a college president, an academic leader who lacks a Ph.D. to back up his claim to scholarship.
Now, though, that doesn’t really matter.
What matters now is that local FBI agents paid very close attention in their grand jury classes at the Quantico academy and that they know how to do more than just shoot straight.
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Corbett
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