Pittsburgh school board hires investigator to probe superintendent’s unauthorized trip to socialist Cuba

Pittsburgh Schools Superintendent Anthony Hamlet faces questions form the press regarding his unauthorized trip to socialist Cuba.

The Pittsburgh school board has hired an independent investigator to review an unauthorized trip made by the schools superintendent and other administrators to socialist Cuba. Superintendent Anthony Hamlet and four other school administrators traveled to the communist island in April representing the school district, but failed to receive the required authorization from the school board.

Via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Pittsburgh Public Schools has hired an independent investigator to review a trip to Cuba taken last month by the superintendent and other school district administrators. 

District Solicitor Ira Weiss said he referred the review Thursday to Lourdes Sanchez-Ridge, a former solicitor for the City of Pittsburgh and an attorney with Pietragallo Gordon Alfano Bosick & Raspanti, LLP. Mr. Weiss said he will meet with Ms. Sanchez-Ridge on Monday to discuss the timeline of the investigation, as well as the estimated cost of the independent review. 

“Frankly, this is a much more complicated issue than it appeared to be initially, so I really can’t give you a timeline,” he said Friday. “But she understands that time is a major factor.”

Mr. Weiss was authorized to launch an investigation into the trip earlier this week by the Pittsburgh school board, after news reports described the trip taken by Superintendent Anthony Hamlet, Chief Academic Officer Miniki Jenkins and three other district administrators. The international trip during the week of April 15 while the district was on spring break was made without authorization by the full school board — which is required for out-of-country travel — and has raised questions in regard to state ethics laws.

The administrators said the trip to Cuba was part of a planned professional development visit to The Flying Classroom, a Miami-based educational organization that provides STEM curriculum and lessons via its trademark “expeditions.” It is led by Barrington Irving, a pilot who creates digital lessons and programming that bring his global expeditions into the classroom.

Despite 60 years of brutal oppression, censorship, and forced indoctrination of children in Cuba, many American educators remain enthralled by the Castro dictatorship. The leftist bent of academia can perhaps explain their affinity for a socialist dictatorship, but for educators, the well being of children should be their primary concern. It is disturbing to watch how easily they will sacrifice millions of Cuban children to a murderous dictatorship just to score political points among their leftist colleagues.

About the only thing any American educator can learn from schools in socialist Cuba is how to subjugate an entire population by indoctrinating the children. From an early age, children are forced to swear allegiance to the Castro revolution and to eliminate any urges to think for themselves. The only mission of schools in Castro’s Cuba is to inculcate total and complete submission to a brutally repressive socialist dictatorship.

3 thoughts on “Pittsburgh school board hires investigator to probe superintendent’s unauthorized trip to socialist Cuba”

  1. Wait for it: “We only did it for the children. We can learn SO much from Cuba’s education system.”

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