Countdown 5:  Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain!

Did Todd Vesely intentionally understate the Grade12 enrollment number for Benbrook Middle High School in a spreadsheet that he sent to Richard Penland?  Did Richard Penland then make some changes and send that spreadsheet back to Todd Vesely to submit for UIL Snapshot. 

In other words, did they both lie to the UIL?

Vesely’s number placed total enrollment at 1 student shy of the cutoff.  The only thing Penland did was change the numbers so BMHS enrollment would fall 3 students shy of the cutoff.

The spreadsheet Vesely gave to Penland just contained numbers typed into cells.  It did not contain a LIST of actual student names that add up to the numbers in the spreadsheet.  Vesely just typed in a number and sent it to Penland. There isn’t a list of names in existence that supports the number Vesely and Penland came up with.

I, on the other hand, was able to recreate a list of actual student names from the exact same time frame.  How many students names, you ask? 

Well, 15 MORE student names than Vesely’s “magic number” for Grade12. 

You know, the number that magically put Benbrook 3 students below the cutoff for 4A, Division 2 instead of 12 students above, which would have placed them in 4A, Division 1.

Here is another fact about MY LIST: it is incomplete.  In other words, there are MORE Grade12 students actually enrolled at BMHS than my list shows.

How much more?  Probably another 15 students.  Maybe 30.  And don’t even get me started on the whether or not Vesely and Penland lied about the number of Grade11 students.  I’m pretty sure they shaved a dozen or so off that headcount, as well.

For anyone following the Wizard of Oz analogy, it is Todd Vesely who I am claiming is the man behind the curtain.  The falsified numbers came from the DISTRICT.

Richard Penland thought he could hide behind the man behind the curtain.

The lies of FWISD go all the way to the top. They exist AT EVERY LEVEL of the organization.

(Image shows what I think Todd Vesely might look like when he realizes he’s been caught falsifying records and lying to the UIL.)

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