I started this website because of a comment which was made to me by one of my closest and most trusted informants. He said, “Finley cares more about what’s on social media than actually doing anything positive for students.” Why is this? Because everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) who knows the game knows that the most important thing to the Board, the Superintendent, and all the support villains is THE BRAND. The message is that Huntsville City Schools are doing AWESOME and that everyone is committed to excellence for students and faculty…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s all bullshit.
Huntsville City Schools are broken. Why? Because the district is being run by a lawyer whose only job is to conduct damage control and to portray the district in a positive manner. Yet every time I would talk to a new informant and tell them about the horrific shit that I was seeing would say, “That doesn’t surprise me.” And yet no one does anything about it.
Why? Because if you speak up and you’re not tenured, you get non-renewed, which is a death sentence to your career. I’ve got the receipts. More on that later. What really surprised me was that when we started putting up pages and pages of factual information regarding the illegal, unethical, and toxic behavior of HCS personnel, no one gave a shit.
From now on, I’m going to try a different tactic. I’m going to let you all listen to the voices of real people who have experienced the trauma or who are trying to do the right thing, but who feel like they cannot speak truth to power because they will lose their job or they will be gaslit or arrested (Michelle Watkins, Mrs. Booker, me). So let me tell you about me, in the hopes that I can convince you that what I’m saying is important and that Huntsville City has lost its soul.
I have been teaching teachers for 24 years. For the last ten years, the very first class meeting for any course I teach, I write two phrases on the board which are the main tenets of my teaching philosophy:
1. Teaching is all about relationships.
2. Good teachers make their students feel SEEN.
I can explain these to you, but I can’t understand them for you. If you disagree, then you should never be allowed to teach students or to be an administrator. One of my informants overheard a teacher say to Laura Worshim “I’m really working hard on building relationships with students.”
It was reported to me that Laura said, “They’re overrated. It’s more important that the students respect you.” By ‘respect’ she meant ‘are afraid of you.’ I don’t make this comment lightly, but it underscores the importance of having effective leaders in the schools to protect students and teachers and to create a safe and productive learning environment. In August of 2022, by chance, I was asked to join the Desegregation Advisory Committee (DAC). When I applied, I thought “There is no fucking way they will allow me on that committee.” When Cathy McNeal (she of the perpetual scowl) called me about joining, I thought “please don’t let her remember the fight I had with Wardynski over my grant and Teach For America.” Once I was on the committee, I knew that I was going to uncover bad stuff, and in my naivety, I thought that if I gathered the data, something would be done to help teachers and students. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, because frankly, it’s fucking horrible and yet no one does anything about it. Does my language offend any of you? I honestly don’t care. Carlita Collins called African-American students “Fucking N*ers” “Fucking Monkeys” and “Fucking retards” and she’s still making 136K per year hiding at a desk downtown riding out the remainder of the year. She also got caught on the PA saying that “students who dress like that get what they deserve.”
Carlita, I had a dream that I was at a faculty meeting and you made me stand up and read my job description (one of the tactics she used to terrorize and gaslight faculty members, several of whom I consider(ed) my friends. Chris Pape, Tim Scott (who bolted to the county to get his ass out of the line of fire), Hovet “I’m building a brand here, none of you is going to mess it up” Dixon, and Maynard Fucking James…all of you have lived rent free in my thoughts for months. Part of this endeavor is my therapy, to get all this stuff out for the world to see.
Make no mistake, I have no expectations that anything will change solely based on my pontification (Carlos, get a dictionary, because there are going to be a few words like this that you’re going to need help with). However, my job is to hold up the mirror to all of you narcissists so that everyone knows how you treat teachers, students, and parents.
For the record, the abuse and toxicity are systemic. I’ve found mishandled child abuse (either physical or sexual) at Mt. Gap, Goldsmith, McNair, Jones Valley, and Jemison. I’m making this point so that you all understand that this isn’t simply a problem with a few ‘bad actors,’ rather, it’s part of the culture. One of my informants said “Huntsville City Schools motto should be ‘Fuck the kids, pay the lawyers.” It would be funny if it wasn’t true and so damn harmful to kids and teachers.
In September, I got five teachers to give testimony to Chris Pape regarding the illegal and unethical shit that Collins had been doing for years at McNair. If you look at the emails that I shared, at first, I trusted Chris. He sat with the teachers for several hours and dutifully documented the things Collins had done. It was a pain in the ass to get three of them to give testimony, because they were still terrified of her. To be honest with you, if I’m ever face to face with her, I have no idea how I would react. Thinking about it is giving me a knot in my stomach, because I have absorbed the secondary trauma of her abusive behavior. Chris does a pretty good job of keeping his guard up, but he did make two comments that were mistakes.
When I brought the witnesses to him, Chris said “We’ve heard these stories about Collins before, but no one has been willing to go on the record.” Stop for a second and think about that comment. He was admitting that he knew about the behavior, but no one was WILLING TO GO ON RECORD. That tells me that he knew what she was doing but that teachers were afraid to tell on her for fear of retribution. That’s the climate of fear that exists within the school. I have several people who have shared that they have brought 10 plus pages of misdeeds against principals, only to be ignored or non-renewed. They are all heart breaking and I absorbed all of it.
The other comment that Chris made that he should not have involved my boy Tim Scott (he of Project BOOST infamy). When I told Chris that BOOST was a problem and that teachers were afraid of Tim, he said, “That guy needs to retire.” That was on October 15, 2022.
Womp, womp. Two other comments seem appropriate to mention here. When Chris introduced himself to me, he said, “My mentor’s mentor’s mentor was the first attorney to represent HCS.” When he said it, I had this picture in my mind of a wall with a line of old white guys in their stuffy suits on a wall. My Ph.D. is in History Education, and I swear to you, the picture that popped in my mind was of confederate generals (all with facial hair and all wearing their uniforms). I think I sensed the racist underpinnings of what was happening, but that’s how my intuition works sometimes. I will get an image in my mind and it won’t make sense until I reflect on it later. Did I mention that only 7% of the African-American students in the District are proficient in math by 12th grade? Did any of you ever look at the racial composition of the lawyers at Lanier Ford? It looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. Maybe one (slightly?) brown person, but everyone else was as white as my Scandanavian (not Irish) ass.
Yet some of you call me racist for going after principals who are people of color. For the record, Crystal Alexander is white, as is the principal of Hampton Cove Middle, and those two are on my shit list, also, for not protecting children. Chris said one other thing that is worth mentioning.
Read this closely: He said, “I REPRESENT the Board.” He WORKED for Lanier Ford, but he represented the Board. When I was given the financial statements which showed how much public money was spent on legal fees, it made complete sense to me. The same district that never had enough money to pay for Special Education services had no problem paying between 900K and 2.4 million (under Wardynski) per year for legal fees.
Back to October, 2022…after my five witnesses gave testimony, Chris assured me that appropriate action would be taken and that the Board would be informed and that my witnesses were not to talk to anyone about the events, so as not to taint the process. He said, “Within two weeks, we’ll meet and made a decision moving forward. We’ll be in touch.” At that point, I was still playing the game and following the rules. I was meeting with Chris Gregory, the chair of the DAC, and I thought that he was committed to helping teachers and students.
That was an erroneous assumption.
Then my boy Tim Scott implemented Project BOOST, and I almost lost my mind.
That was the last straw for a lot of teachers. They all realized that the forms had zero purpose, other than to add another responsibility to already overworked teachers. When I met with Tim to discuss it, he lost his temper and raised his voice at me. This is what happens when narcissists get triggered. I also learned to recognize when he’s lying (he looks up to the right and shifts his shoulder slightly away from the person to whom he’s speaking). I took great pleasure in writing the Project BOOST report that eviscerated the entire endeavor. I told him that I was willing to die on the Project BOOST hill, and he said, “I’m a data guy, I’ll die on this hill.”
When Tim had to record a video rescinding Project BOOST, several teachers sent me texts saying that they were all laughing at the look on his face when he was praising teachers for doing such a good job that the additional requirements were not necessary.
If not for me, the teachers would still be doing those forms. You’re welcome. If you think that’s my ego talking, it’s not. I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. and slept in my office to get that fucking report done before the forms were due to keep teachers from having to waste their time and to maybe give them hope that someone was advocating for them. After I sent the first email to more than 100 teachers, the responses started pouring in and it was the equivalent of grabbing a 120 volt wire which would not let me go. As word of mouth spread, teachers and parents from all over the district started contacting me, and I tried to make every one of them feel SEEN.
It was like a drug. Instead of simply recording and reporting, I became personally involved in all of the stories. I FELT everything. Unreported rape at Jemison, child abuse at Goldsmith, straight A student sent to Apollo because a kid put drugs in her drink, teacher poisoned and mistreated at Chapman. It’s all there in my mind, and every time I open the “HCS Investigation” folder on my computer, it all starts flooding back to me. I get a knot in my stomach because seeing the files makes it real again.
What I’m going to do in the next couple of weeks is share enough of it to make me able to look in the mirror and know that I didn’t abandon the teachers and students.
As a reminder, I tried to work within the system, but there is no mechanism within the existing power structure to hold people accountable. As a result, I’ve had to push every button I can to get people to pay attention, in the hopes that someone would do something. I had six DOJ attorneys reading everything I submitted to them, and they didn’t help. In April, I took a chance and shared an interview from a teacher who was told to delete pictures of child abuse. Specifically, a black child told her teacher that her mother “made her and her sister lay on the bed naked so she could whip them with a belt.” The teacher took photos of the bruises (some of which were old). When I shared the recording with the board and Chris Pape, the teacher was fired. I was SURE that the DOJ would intervene. They abandoned the teachers and me. I felt so ashamed for miscalculating, that I didn’t even look at the HCS files from May until August.
I’ve carried that guilt ever since (the teacher is like a daughter to me, and I’m sure that she’ll never talk to me again). To bring closure to this endeavor, I’m going to start sharing recordings of myself and those who were brave enough to share information with me. I have given EVERYTHING to this (see my mugshot). Unless you’ve been arrested, save your fucking judgment because I’m walking the walk, friends. in a few months, I’m going to start a new life, and I will NOT live in Huntsville. The entire city is a trigger for me, due to a lot of factors, but know that the truth has and always will be my defense. Children and teachers are being abused and by virtue of my abilities and months of hard work, I am uniquely situated to shed light on what has happened. If you support me, send me positive vibes every day. If you oppose me, then you can deal with the karma of your actions. I sleep very well at night, and will never regret one minute of time I have spent advocating for the victims of abuse.