It Sure Looks Like a Small-Time Crook is Leaving With His Pockets Full

Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Anthony Hamlet resigned his position on Wednesday, Sept. 8. Effective on Oct. 1., the resignation comes 13 days after the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission released a report detailing the ethical lapses by the superintendent.

Hamlet’s resignation follows a series of closed meetings of the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education about the Ethics Commission report. Board President Sylvia Wilson said in a Zoom meeting with the media that she would not disclose the substance of those meetings because they involved a confidential personnel matter.

Hamlet will receive $399,687, which Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] Solicitor Ira Weiss said reflects one year of his salary and benefits minus the value of vacation days that the commission found Hamlet owed to the district. The payment was part of Hamlet’s contract with the schools.

They call it "ethical lapses". Those "ethical lapses"? He put expenses for sponsored trips on his company credit card and then didn't reimburse the PPS when the vendor (The Flying Classroom) reimbursed him for the expenses. Instead of taking time off when he took trips sponsored TFC, he went on those sponsored trips on clock. His contract didn't allow him to roll over vacation days, but he did so anyway. He claimed meal reimbursements while on personal trips.

There's more, of course. Thousands of laptops have gone missing with no response from Hamlet or the PPS as to what happened. I've seen reporting in an offline newspaper that Hamlet accepted (and the school board retroactively approved) the donation of a Boeing 727 engine from TFC for the city's aerospace training program, but that they had no suitable place to put it; they then planned to put it into a K-8 school (and nobody will say where the engine currently is).

You have to know that there was some severe fuckery involved when the PPS tried to limit the press's access to a public meeting.

What is even more unseemly is that both Hamlet and his supporters are insinuating that he only got pushed out for being a small-time bureaucratic crook because he's Black. Playing the race card when caught doing bad shit is the refuge of scoundrels.