Des Moines Public School District Superintendent Detainment Timeline

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Remember what we spent the entire day talking about on Friday,
I do yep, talked about it a lot. It was
the snaffu occurring with the Des Moines Public Schools a
couple hours down I eighty. They're superintendent was detained by ice.

(00:21):
Pretty big deal. Became national news and headlines, as I
predicted it would immediately. It was like, this is this
is gonna grab attention. You said that right away. I
mean you called it from the jump. So yeah, not
because like I'm cheering for national news, No, especially when
it's nearby. But there's like some stories you're like, Okay,

(00:44):
this is a big deal here, like the Bud Crawford
traffic stop. It's a big story here in the in Omaha,
but it's not really that big a story outside of Omaha.
Sometimes you see like regional stories the you know, this
is a really bad one to talk about that explosion

(01:05):
in that grain facility or like that factory. That was horrific,
but a lot of people around the region were like, wow,
that was really crazy, like what happened there. And then
there are some that you just can tell, Okay, this
is going to get legs nationally, and it did, and
you know, over the weekend we saw a ton more

(01:27):
information trying to be shared by people. Here's where I
sit on it. It not everything has to be a
political issue. This one thing that I'm seeing like there's
a huge split between two people, you know, like two
different people on different sides. You can talk to somebody
who's a Republican, they're going to say, this guy's a

(01:50):
con man and he should not have been in the
United States to begin with, let alone a superintendent of
the biggest school district in the state of Iowa. Get
him out of here, and you'll talk to somebody who's
a Democrat and saying due process, this is unfair. Ice
is a bunch of Nazis, this is fascism. That is

(02:11):
the rhetoric you are seeing now. For whatever it's worth,
there are some politicians that are trying to bring some
sort of levity, some sort of cognizant explanation to this.
It's the exact same thing we were trying to do
on Friday. Because I think the facts here and there
still are things that we're trying to discover. We don't
really know much of how he forged these A nine

(02:33):
immigration documents. We don't exactly know what his visa status
was every single year across every single job he had.
The timeline of what jobs he had when are a
little murky as well. And I'm wondering if there was
a way that maybe somebody could just go in and
just like line this stuff up like an old school resume.

(02:55):
But people, because of the political ramplifications, people don't want
to do some of that like that because it may
prove their point to be inaccurate. Here's what I do know.
I've never felt more assured that the person to blame
is the person who's detained than this This guy, while

(03:17):
being apparently a very nice guy and a person that
could have been a very good superintendent for a public
school district that had had plenty of struggles academically, struggles
with participation in extracurricular activities. Kind of a disconnect between
what the public schools in Des Moines are versus the
suburban schools or the private schools which are really thriving

(03:40):
in the Moyne metro area right now. The one public
schools are not on that level on anything, and it's
really going to take some special people to lead them
to get them elevated to a point of pride and
to have people want to have their kids be a
part of the public school system. There's thirty thousand kids
in that public school system, and the trends for years

(04:04):
have not been positive. And that includes with tom Ayheart,
who's the former superintendent who kept the kids out of
classes for a lot longer because of COVID nineteen and
the kids kind of became political ponds for that guy.
Everybody's saying this is a DEI higher. I just don't
buy that. He's a candidate Ian Roberts, and they're not

(04:24):
even calling him doctor Ian Roberts as far as the
news is concerned, because there is some speculation or some
we don't really know if he actually achieved the degree
in which he said he did. Now again, this tells
you that it's alarming how easy it is to lie
about this stuff. But the reason I think this isn't

(04:44):
a DEI hire is because the Na Moite Public School District,
tom Ayhart was a regular white guy who was the
superintendent before the interim superintendent who's leading the way now
and led the way when Ahart left before they hired
Ian Roberts guy. This is the it's a normal white
woman who's the You know, Jackie Norris is the leader

(05:06):
of the one public school district. It's not like this
district in and of itself is just like clamoring to
have diversity for no other reason than to have diversity.
So I don't buy that this was a higher specifically
on the DEI level. Now, I think this guy because
of his background, because of his accent, because he's from Guyana,

(05:28):
because he has an inspiring story. He was an Olympic athlete,
the fact that he came to the United States and
you know, had all of this education that he allegedly
went through when the Coppin State. He eventually went to
Saint John's, he went to Georgetown, he went to Trident
University to get what we thought was the doctorate that
he had. We had all that stuff right, and then

(05:51):
he worked in school districts in Saint Louis, Washington, d C, Baltimore.
He worked in the South Bronx is what we understood.
And he was previously the super intendant at Mill Creek
Township School District, which is in Pennsylvania. They didn't have
any reason to not have him be their superintendent before
he came to Des Moines and that included the gun charge,

(06:11):
which we found out he paid like one hundred dollars
fee fine for a gun charge that was related to
him having a firearm in a car while he was
out hunting. It didn't seem like they kind of downplayed
that whole thing and that he had a good explanation
for it. The paperwork in Pennsylvania matched the explanation, and

(06:33):
it really wasn't that big of a red flag for
the people of the school district. So all of these
places apparently fell for this guy being a con man,
even if and apparently him being charming and decent enough
at the job itself was good enough for them to
feel like they wanted him to be around. And what
we learned as we kept looking at this is JG Consulting.

(06:55):
It was the consulting firm that paid like they were
doing the process of gathering candidates to give to the
school board so they can do interviews and then hire
the person they want. They hire a completely different Baker
u Banks is the firm that does the background checks,
and nothing popped up from Baker Ubanks or JG Consulting
that this guy was a fraud. I don't know how

(07:17):
you can blame that the one public school district for saying, oh, yeah,
there's something not quite right with this guy, when none
of these other school districts seemed to have those problems,
and neither of the firms that did the background check
or the candidate process, the gathering process of the candidates
for the school district, there were no red flags. So
I just want us to be clear, it's not just

(07:39):
point fingers and blame. I think this guy took advantage
of lax laws and lax ability for us to maintain
some sort of recognition of immigration status in this country,
and that could have been going on for years and
years and years, and the fact that he was order
removed over a year ago just now was detained. So

(08:03):
I guess he just never thought it would happen to him,
and he never sought out getting citizenship or anything like that.
It's all very odd, But I think a ridiculously large
amount of the blame, and I would say ninety plus
percent are all on that guy, to be completely honest
with you,