Controversy leads to resignation request

Valdosta Daily Times ^ | 9/15/09 | NDJeep

[NDJeep]

Controversy leads to resignation request By Johnna Pinholster

September 15, 2009 12:03 am

— VALDOSTA — The Rev. Floyd Rose called for Valdosta City School Superintendent Dr. Bill Cason’s resignation Monday night. During the regular Board of Education meeting Rose, president of the Valdosta/Lowndes County Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spoke to the board about the superintendent’s decision not to air President Barack Obama’s speech on education during school hours. Rose and hundreds of others converged on the BOE office demanding answers for why the speech was not shown in a school system that is predominately black. On the day the speech was scheduled to air, Rose and others met with Cason and discussed why the speech would not be shown. Cason, Rose said, had plenty of time between the meeting and the speech to call the schools and tell them to allow the children to watch the speech. Rose said Cason’s reasons for not showing the speech were that it did not align with the Georgia Performance Standards that are the basis for school lesson plans and that the speech and the lesson plans provided would cut into instructional time.

[NDJeep]

My reply: As a lifelong Toledo Ohio resident, I saw first hand the how Mr. Rose divided a community and sparked racial tensions when he lived here. In September 1986, a young black male was beaten and sodomized with a tree branch in City Park, located in Toledo’s inner City. Mr. Rose immediately made claims that white police officers had perpetrated this crime; sparking race riots within the city. A short time later, 4 black males were arrested and convicted of committing these heinous acts. Not once did Floyd Rose ever apologize or admit his error. He figured at some point in history an unsolved race crime had occurred and this would make up for it.

Racial community relations have never been better in Toledo because Mr. Rose isn’t here to fan non-existent flames of racial hatred. Please keep him Valdosta because we don’t want him back.

[ohiogrammy]

I live in Fremont, only thirty miles east, and I do remember the problems caused by this man. Shame on him.