BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, THURSDAY, OCT. 22, 2015) — Great guns. That’s what Dr. Watson has titled his tale about the loaded-not loaded gun found this week at South Junior High School. Pittsfield, welcome to Gungate.

Herberg Middle School, as we all know, simply doesn’t exist, except as a horribly actualized figment of the ultra-progressive political nightmare that has engulfed the Pittsfield Public School system. Don’t call them liberals or, worse, leftists. Those words aren’t chic enough and way too descriptive.

Herberg? There is no “School” of that name in the southeast. There is a building. In that building, they have what they call “classes.” In those classes, there are two subsets of homo erectus, erroneously called “teachers” and “pupils.” In actuality, they are “baby sitters” and “babies” or if you prefer “keepers” and “inmates.” And we trust you’ve heard the one about the inmates running the asylum?

THE PLANET won’t startle you with them here, but the horror stories abound of out-of-control classrooms, teachers being told to “f*** off, photos of topless Herberg girls circulating during class among the various dumb phones that regularly supplant the alleged lessons of the day, and those of that ilk. Don’t even ask what the students were up to when they were herded into “safe rooms” during the gun incident. Which leads us to the latest, a loaded handgun found in school.

Locked and Loaded

Much was made of the first press release sent out by the mayor’s office and, as it turns out, authored by school supt. Jason “JIV” McCandless. How that happens, you tell us.

The gun incident has peeled back the curtains that characterize the inner workings of an administration where miscommunication rules and sycophants prosper. The highest paid of the latter is JIV, whose total compensation hits $200,000 a year and who has so many paid vacation-sick-personal-I-just-want-to-goof-off-days that time ceases to exist in his world except to tell him that everything cannot happen at once. His new contract, which was recently extended to six years by the dopes on the Pittsfield School Committee, flips work days with vacation days. JIV is considered permanently on paid leave unless the contract defines work where it once gave him time off, and taxpayers, you’re stuck with this progressive clown for a half-dozen annums. He was the guy so talented that the Lee School Committee couldn’t wait to dump him on Pittsfield after JIV screwed up the finances in that quaint, South County berg.

Cushy.

Fifty Shades of JIV

For those generous terms, JIV is required to be on call from his master in the corner office. The chief task of the superintendent, if we are to judge by Gungate, is to vacate any shred of self-worth and dignity that might exist in his well-paid but chinless persona and replace it with a boot-licking performance of such humiliation that a roving mind might think perverse thoughts. Fifty Shades of JIV.

In an abject mea culpa, JIV set a world’s record in the issuance of blame-taking when he tried to quell the firestorm ignited by David Capeless‘ revelation that the handgun was in fact locked and loaded. The D.A. blasted the mayor for releasing bad information. The press release from the mayor’s office said the gun wasn’t loaded. However, even as fast as JIV acted and could fall on his sword like a loyal S.S. chief (S.S. = Slow, Stupid), Mayor Dan Bianchi found himself at another of those pesky mayoral forums, where he said there was no difference between a loaded and an unloaded gun — in the hands (or knapsack) of a 13-year-old boy, no less. Ouch.

Is the mayor trying to hand this election to Linda Tyer? One could see Bianchi’s political consultant Ryan McCollum turning whiter shades of pale. One thing’s for certain: Events of the past week have qualified McCollum for combat pay.

Gasoline for the Bonfire

JIV’s announcement did little to “clarify” the situation. It did, though, make him the well-deserved butt of community-wide derision. How is it, for example, that a school superintendent could write a press release issued from the mayor’s office? That’s the issuance of a license to counterfeit information. How can an administration permit such a thing, which devalues everything we get on the letterhead of two crucial city departments?

FInally, what are we to say of Herberg principal Gina Coleman? School and police department sources disputed the initial press release’s euphemistic description of Coleman’s actions during the gun incident, which made statewide news. The first erroneous press release said Coleman followed “safety protocol to the letter.” Details are only now emerging from sources about what actually happened and how the Herberg staff really handled it. It’s not pretty.

Herberg staffers and Mercer Building sources refer to Coleman as a “two-fer.” When THE PLANET asked what that meant, we learned that her hiring enabled the city to mark two important items on the hiring checklist (in order of importance): Is the person a minority, preferably black? Check. Is the new hire a woman? Check. Sources claim and two former school committee members confirmed that when Coleman was hired she wasn’t certified in Massachusetts. How could someone who wasn’t qualified to teach in any state public school end up as principal of a Pittsfield middle school. Answer, according to sources, “They got her certified.”

Pigs do wear lipstick, apparently. One shudders to think of what would have happened if the still-unidentified 13-year-old, instead of bringing a loaded handgun to school, had brought a drawing of a gun. Our guess is that the school committee would have added another six years and a 50% pay raise to JIV deal.

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“One fist of iron, the other of steel — if the right one don’t get you, the left one will.” — Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Sixteen Tons,” (1955).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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