He Was Where?

Kermit Carolina ran in a road race. He didn’t attend a mayoral challenger’s press conference. At the heart of an exploding schools controversy is this question: To which event was Mayor John DeStefano referring when he sent Carolina a note?

DeStefano sent the handwritten note to Carolina, principal of Hillhouse High School, in September.

“Kermit,” it reads. ​“You were there. John.”

Carolina charged that DeStefano wrote the note based on a false rumor circulating that Carolina had attended this campaign event held by mayoral challenger Jeffrey Kerekes. Carolina presented the note as evidence that a bizarre ​“emergency” Board of Ed meeting hastily called the Friday night before Christmas was an opening salvo in a campaign to punish him in retaliation. The meeting concerned unconfirmed charges of isolated instances of grade altering at Carolina’s school; the charges were brought by a Hillhouse administrator, a friend and neighbor of the mayor, who has clashed with Carolina.

In an interview Tuesday, DeStefano insisted he sent the note along with a photo he took of Carolina running in the 5K Labor Day Road Race. He sent several such photos of the race to people, he said. He sends hundreds of such notes to people each year.

Through his adviser in this controversy, Michael Jefferson, Carolina said the note arrived in his inter-office mail weeks after the race, soon after the Kerekes event. He said he doesn’t remember any photo accompanying the note.

So DeStefano was running through folders of old photos in his office Tuesday morning trying, without success, to see if it remained there. He’d erased his photos from his hard drive. On Monday, a federal holiday, he was at Walgreens, where he’d had his road race photos developed, asking if the photos remained in their system. No luck.

“I did what I thought was a nice thing — send him a photo with a nice note — which I have sent you, which I have sent hundreds and hundreds of other people,” DeStefano said.

The hunt for a seemingly innocuous photo fits into a more significant quest: To answer the question of whether the school board’s response to a grade-alteration charge involved just well-intentioned fumbling of a hot-potato emerging controversy, or whether delayed campaign politics and political retribution is trumping concern for kids’ education in the city’s school-reform drive.

“It’s not ​‘kids first’ [the board of ed slogan]. It’s politics first and vindictiveness that has us here,” Carolina said at Friday night’s emergency meeting. ​“This is a political lynching. The mayor has been a bully since he’s been in office. He attempts to intimidate me to become political, to come out and take pictures with him, and he chose this opportunity to put a cloud on me.”

“It raises questions about whether this guy [DeStefano] is really about reform,” attorney Jefferson said in an interview Monday. ​“The mayor saw this as an opportunity to retaliation against Kerm because of his sincere belief that Kerm was against his reelection bid because he is friends with [mayoral critic] Gary [Highsmith] and myself.” Jefferson, a close personal friend of Carolina, endorsed Kerekes at the Sept. 21 campaign event and played a prominent role in the challenger’s campaign.

“There’s no political retribution here,” DeStefano responded. ​“Kermit has done some good things at Hillhouse High School. No doubt about that. There was an assertion made about grade changes. That has to be checked out” in the interest of ​“transparency.”

Where’s The ​“Emergency?”

Transparency? Retribution? The two sides had two takes on why the Board of Ed called an ​“emergency meeting” in the first place Friday night.

Officials quietly had notice of the meeting posted on a bulletin board in the city/town clerk’s office after the office closed to the public Thursday night, at 5:07 p.m. The notice referred to an emergency meeting to discuss ​“grade-altering” allegations concerning a ​“high school.” Carolina had no word about the meeting; he learned about it the next day from the Independent.

The allegation came from an administrator who reports to Carolina, Shirley Love Joyner. It allegedly concerned three instances of a student’s grades being changed, according to Superintendent of Schools Reggie Mayo. Carolina said Joyner brought forth the charges because he had been confronting her with job-performance criticisms. (Jefferson said Monday they included misuse of time sheets for a secretary. Joyner could not be reached for comment.)

“One administrator challenged me on a number of occasions because of my challenge to have her be better for the kids,” Carolina said. ​“Unfortunately that administrator has chosen to take retaliatory action against me, Hillhouse, our school.”

Carolina came to Friday night’s 6 p.m. meeting to defend the school. He noted that the board rarely holds emergency meetings — even when a student gets shot to death, for instance, or allegations arise about official misconduct at other schools.

He blamed the mayor, a school board member, for the public meeting.

Superintendent Mayo said he called the meeting in order to be ​“transparent.” It was felt that Joyner’s allegations were going to become public soon. Mayo wanted to keep his board abreast of the situation from the outset.

Carolina said the school board had been given information about only one of the three alleged grade-alteration instances. He provided the Independent copies of the transcript in that case. It shows the student getting low grades. Then two English courses with As were added. The student had taken those courses over the summer at Riverside Academy, according to Carolina and Jefferson, in an effort to boost his grades. At first the Hillhouse computer system had trouble recording the course credit because the course codes didn’t match. Eventually staffers were able to get the system to record the grade. That’s what changed, Carolina said. (Public school parents are familiar with the school district’s computer system woes, especially when it comes to registering credits from approved courses taken at other schools.)

5K Recall

His most explosive charges involved politics. He produced the handwritten note from DeStefano (pictured at the top of the story).

Friday night, first told of the note, DeStefano was caught off guard. He said he was sure it had nothing to do with campaign politics. But he couldn’t remember why he had sent it. He sends them all the time to people, he said.

He later had an ​“aha” moment when his chief administrative officer, Rob Smuts, sent him an email on Christmas Eve. Smuts remembered receiving the exact same note from DeStefano along with a photo from the annual Labor Day road race.

DeStefano then remembered seeing Carolina in the race and taking his photo. DeStefano’s son and another son’s girlfriend were running that day. So the mayor stood by the finish line taking photos of people he knew.

“Here’s one I didn’t send,” DeStefano said Tuesday morning while poring through his collection of road race photos. ​“She didn’t look too good.”

(See who ran in the race, including Carolina, here.)

“That’s a distraction. He’s talking about a road race, [but the card] was sent right after the [Kerekes] press conference,” responded attorney Jefferson.

The Kerekes press conference, at Lincoln-Bassett School, took place on Sept. 21, weeks after the road race. Carolina remembers getting the card soon after that, following rumors going around town that he had attended the event.

Jefferson also said Carolina never received a photograph with the card. The card did not contain any specific reference to ​“there.” (Since Friday night’s board meeting, Carolina has referred questions about the case to Jefferson pending further developments.)

“I know he wasn’t at the press conference,” DeStefano responded Tuesday. ​“We send people to other people’s press conferences. Sometimes we film them. You know we do that. Everybody does that. Cedar Hill Resident filmed Friday night [at the emergency board meeting].”

The election’s over and irrelevant to any of the past week’s events, DeStefano said. ​“I won.” He said he did return a call Wednesday night to Joyner; she had called him about the allegations. But she had already brought the matter to the Board of Ed, which had begun investigating, he said. The fact that they are friendly neighbors had no bearing on any decisions, he said. ​“Shirley Joyner is saying a lot of things,” and he has no idea if they’re true, he added.

DeStefano said that photos always accompany the cards he sends; they fit right in the envelope.

If Carolina had somehow ​“gotten the note without a photo, I would understand [him thinking], ​‘What the hell is this?’”

DeStefano added that he has always supported Carolina’s work at Hillhouse, attending championship basketball games when Carolina was the coach.

Carolina — who has given reporters free rein to observe the school without monitoring or subject approval — has instituted wide-ranging changes since taking over as principal in the 2010-11 school year, with a special emphasis on upping expectations and standards for black males and for students most at risk of failing. He has instituted the granting of ​“varsity letters” for academics; he has brought in adult mentors who overcame challenges teens are facing today. He also had teachers schoolwide train in and then put into place an intensive every-period, every-day writing program.

Carolina has also developed close relationships with students in danger of succumbing to the street life. He had been trying to help several young men who have been murdered in the last year; he had given Antonio Holloway a suit and sent him to a job interview just days before his Christmas Eve homicide, for instance. Earlier this month he presented DeStefano and Mayo with a plan for identifying the most at-risk kids and developing a ​“wrap-around” program of support for them.

Allan Appel contributed reporting to this story.