The Curious Case of Quentin Peterson

Last week, I explored the role of an inaccurate, seemingly fabricated water shutoff notice that played a pivotal role in the Manatee School District's retaking of Lincoln Memorial Academy. In this installment, we take a look at how the district tied accusations against one of its own employees to LMA's principal and nonsensically used the matter as a secondary justification for the district's use of a rare "emergency" takeover process that allowed for the school to be denied the due process it would have otherwise been entitled to.

On April 24, 2018, Booker High School math teacher Quentin Peterson was arrested, on campus, by the Sarasota Police Department. The SPD was assisting the Palmetto Police Department, which had a warrant for Peterson on charges of possession of child pornography. Peterson had been hired as a full-time sub for Sarasota County Schools on October 10, 2017, before being selected for the math teacher vacancy the following January.

After his arrest, parents in Sarasota County were outraged by news reports that Peterson had previously been the subject of multiple investigations related to allegations of inappropriate conduct with female students while employed by the Manatee County School District. In fact, it was later revealed that the district had allowed Peterson to resign while under investigation, less than a month before Sarasota County hired him.

The resignation agreement was approved by then-superintendent Diana Greene and not only spared Peterson from termination–a career-ending sentence for teachers under such circumstances–but was made effective 11 days from the date it was signed, affording Peterson an additional paycheck. The school district did finally inform the state of the circumstances via an Educator Misconduct Reporting Form, but not until four weeks after he’d submitted his resignation.

Sarasota initially tried to blame Manatee County Schools for its own failure to unearth Peterson’s investigation, but while Manatee’s decision to allow Peterson to resign instead of terminating him certainly made it more likely that he would work in another school district, Sarasota officials would later admit that the district failed to access the state database that informs schools of certain red flags, which would have included the fact that Peterson remained under criminal investigation by the Palmetto PD. In need of a scapegoat, however, both districts seemed satisfied with offering up the head of Eddie Hundley, who’d previously been Peterson’s boss at Lincoln Middle School, before Peterson was reassigned by the district.

At this point, it’s instructive to take a close look at the history of allegations against Peterson, a Palmetto High graduate who was 24 at the time of the events and still has not stood trial on the charges. In April of 2016, a student’s foster mother presented school officials with a journal she’d found that depicted somewhat fantastical relationships with multiple males, including Peterson. Hundley notified the district and removed Peterson while the accusations were investigated, as per district policy. District, law enforcement, and child protective services investigations determined that the events depicted in the journal were fictitious (which the student also claimed) and Peterson was returned to the classroom.

A year later, in April of 2017, a student who was in Peterson’s office discussing a disciplinary matter, claimed that his hand brushed her leg at one point and said that it made her uncomfortable. Again, the matter was reported and Hundley removed Peterson from the classroom. According to the investigations, the student changed her story multiple times, and, again, all investigations determined the allegations to be unfounded and Peterson was returned to his role as the school’s music teacher.

At that point, Dr. Greene instructed Hundley to issue Peterson a letter of reprimand. Hundley didn’t understand why that would be done if the investigations had determined that the allegations were unfounded. Greene said that she thought Peterson had to have exercised poor judgment to put himself in such situations. Hundley said that he couldn’t in good conscience issue a letter of reprimand to an employee after the district’s own investigation found him to be innocent and that if Greene insisted he be issued one anyway, she should be the one who issued it. Greene pressed and Hundley said that the superintendent would have to issue him a directive to do so before he would comply. She did, and Hundley gave Peterson the letter, which acknowledged that he’d been cleared by investigations and that it was Greene’s insistence that led to it while warning him of possible punitive action should such actions occur in the future.

Fast forward a month to late May of 2017, at the very end of the school year. The student from the 2016 allegations regarding the journal–who was at this point enrolled in a Sarasota County school–reported that she believed another student, whom she had previously been in the same foster home as, was having a relationship with Peterson. The student in question adamantly denied the suggestion that anything was going on between her and Peterson, who had again been removed when the allegations were made. As there were only a few days left before summer break, Peterson opted to use personal days rather than report to a reassignment.

From that point, things get a little cloudy. Over the summer, the most recent girl is said to have recanted her denial, saying that she had in fact been having a sexual relationship with Peterson and that they’d sent romantic texts and explicit pictures to each other and met up at his house and McDonald's, all of which were later determined to be unfounded. Former Palmetto Detective Chad Oyler, the investigator on the case, said in his deposition that they found no evidence of any kind on her phone but used the girl’s statement to secure a warrant for Peterson’s electronic devices. However, while the girl also told them some of the alleged sexual encounters took place in the band room, Oyler said that no efforts were made to check campus surveillance videos or interview possible witnesses.

Police seized two cell phones and a laptop from Peterson’s residence that they sent out for forensic analysis. No pictures or other communications with the girl in question were found, and that investigation was dropped. However, the laptop’s hard drive contained three pictures of a different girl who police said looked like she could have been underaged. In one, she was reportedly alone with her blouse open. In another, a girl, who looked like she could have been the same one, appeared to be kissing Peterson. In a third, she appeared to be lying down with him, possibly naked.

Oiler said he showed one of the pictures to the Lincoln Middle School SRO, Palmetto Police Officer Jennifer Moore, to see if she knew who it was. Moore said she recognized the young lady, not as a Lincoln student, but as the then-17-year-old high school daughter of one of her closest friends, Noemi Alsina, who worked in the front office at Lincoln Middle School (its name before it converted to a district charter school for the 2018/19 school year).

From here, things get even more complicated. By all accounts, Peterson was very close friends with both Noemi and her husband, Al. For this reporting, I’ve conducted more than a dozen interviews with sources who worked at the school at the time, and every single person I interviewed remarked on how inordinate the relationship seemed.

It was well known that the couple had been separated after Noemi was caught having an affair and some suspected there may have been a romantic relationship between her and Peterson. The two were said to arrive at and leave football games and other school events together frequently, and it was well known that he spent a lot of time at the family’s home, sometimes even spending the night.

Peterson was also close with Mr. Alsina, however, and would just as regularly go places with him, including at least one out-of-town trip. Others painted a more wholesome picture. Peterson grew up without a father in his life and lived only sporadically with his mother, mostly having been raised by his grandparents, who lived just blocks from Lincoln. The Alcinas were old enough to be his parents. Peterson, who by all accounts was a very talented teacher, would pet sit for the family and help their younger children with homework and music lessons.

Peterson was said to socialize outside of the home with both Mr. and Mrs. Alsina, though mostly independent of the other, presumably because of the rocky relationship the Alsinas seemed to have. Multiple sources said that they’d witnessed Mrs. Alcina rebuke her husband’s attempt to show affection while adding that she frequently spoke of him in a very derogatory manner at work. Peterson would even frequently celebrate holidays with the family at their home and sometimes crash on the couch after he and Mr. Alcina had been out drinking, according to depositions and interviews.

Another complicated dynamic was the role of Officer Moore, who was said to regularly socialize with Mrs. Alsina, which was corroborated by her deposition as well. The Bradenton Times even obtained a video from a party at the Alsina’s home in which Peterson is doing a mock striptease. Seated behind Peterson on a leather couch are Officer Moore and Mr. Alcina. Moore, who is laughing, can be seen waving dollar bills. Peterson’s clothes remain on. The fact that he's laughing and other body language suggests that it’s all in fun, but the level of fraternization raises red flags in terms of objectivity regarding what later transpired.

One former coworker said that the reason Mrs. Alcina turned sour on Peterson was that he rebuffed her request to accompany him to Orlando for a music competition and instead took Mr. Alcina, whom he’d become closer friends with. The former coworker also said that Mrs. Alcina seemed to be aware that Peterson was to be arrested before it happened, having said that morning that it was gonna be a great day for her and that they would see why later. In her deposition, Officer Moore said that when she identified the daughter in the picture and called Mrs. Alcina to tell her that Detective Oyler, whom Moore indicated Alcina also knew prior to the investigation, needed her to come down to the station, Mrs. Alcina did not ask why.

Peterson told at least one person that Mrs. Alcina’s flirting had escalated to a level he was uncomfortable with. At one point, he took screenshots of what were described as lurid text messages she had sent him. An adult college student by the time she was deposed, the daughter said in her deposition that she and her mother no longer had a functioning relationship. When asked to describe it, she used one word: "horrible." Without being asked, the daughter said it had been destroyed by the mother’s affair with a much older man that had led to her being separated from her father when she was an adolescent.

The daughter claimed that the mother would go so far as to lock her out of the house when having sex with her paramour because, unlike her younger siblings, as a 5th grader, she was old enough to know what was happening. The daughter also said that she’d been told by her maternal grandmother and other relatives on her mother’s side that her mom had tried to allege during the separation that her father had molested her and the other children, which she vehemently denied and claimed was made up by her mother with the intent of securing custody and child support, were they to divorce.

The daughter said that she was much closer with her father, but indicated that he’d sided with the mom on the Peterson allegations. She said that both of her parents told her she was a "horrible person" and that they "would never be proud" of her, and that while she told them that nothing had ever happened between herself and Peterson, they both warned that she’d better "tell the truth" when Detective Oyler came to the house to interview her. The daughter said she did just that.

According to the transcript, she told Oyler that she never had a sexual relationship with Peterson and that she took the picture of herself with the opened blouse on her phone and photoshopped the other two using a Polaroid of Peterson with who she thought was his girlfriend from college and uploaded them to his laptop using the same password she’d seen him use for his phone (which was confirmed to be his) and a USB cord when he left the device unsecured in her presence. The forensic tech who performed the analysis on Peterson's devices did say that the pic was determined to have been a screenshot image from a phone and was not found on analysis of either of those belonging to Peterson–only on his laptop. She did say that she kissed him in the one selfie, which she said was taken when she was 17, and that it had been the only physical contact to have taken place between her and Peterson.

In Oyler’s deposition, he acknowledged that the recording of the interview stopped at one point, then resumed, and said he was giving the girl a chance to collect herself after she became emotional. The daughter said that she began crying when the detective showed her text messages "about my mom telling Quentin that she wanted to have sex with him." She then said that Detective Oyler told her that if she didn’t tell him that she had sex with Peterson it would "be worse" and threatened her with perjury charges while the recorder was off. To make matters even murkier, Oyler retired for health reasons more than two years ago and says his condition affects his memory.

In her deposition, the daughter said that during Oyler's interview, she felt like a prisoner who was not leaving the room until she told the detective what he wanted to hear and that she eventually did so. Afterward, however, she wrote a letter recanting the statement she said Detective Oyler had coerced from her. It reads as follows:

As the school year neared (the last in which Lincoln would be a district school before converting to a charter), administrators at Lincoln Middle needed to know whether the music teacher was returning. Then-Assistant Principal Darlene Proue testified that, because she needed to complete a master schedule, she contacted Child Protective Services to see whether the investigation that had been initiated at the end of the previous school year had been resolved. She said that she was told that the investigation had been concluded and that the allegations were deemed unfounded, same as the previous two.

Hundley said he’d heard that Peterson had been cleared–again–and reached out to the district to see if the school’s music teacher would be back, or if they needed to seek a new one. School district legal counsel Mitchell Teitelbaum emailed Hundley, telling him that while CPS had closed the case, the Palmetto PD was still investigating and were awaiting the results of FDLE’s forensic audit of the electronic devices and that the school district was trying to resolve the matter as swiftly as possible.

Peterson started the year reassigned to the district’s transportation department. He was later put on paid administrative leave. The next thing everyone at Lincoln said they heard–including Proue and Hundley–was that Peterson had resigned (as in, was not terminated by the district). The district provided no further information, probably because he had been a district employee at the time, not a teacher at Lincoln.

As noted earlier, Peterson applied for work with Sarasota County right after submitting his resignation. Both Hundley and Proue are listed as having submitted standardized reference forms, though Proue claimed she hadn’t, at least at that point. Nonetheless, she acknowledged in both her testimony (click here to view) and an interview with a school district investigator (click here to view) that when the district contacted her in January to satisfy a district policy requiring two references from former supervisors when hiring an experienced teacher into a full-time position, she did give him a reference.

Proue said she was unaware that there was still an investigation all this time later and was answering honestly when she indicated Peterson was a good teacher, that she’d hire him again, that she knew no reason he shouldn’t be around children and that he’d never been disciplined at Lincoln, saying she didn’t think the reprimand letter qualified. She later wrote a letter then Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart asserting the same and defending Hundley's reference (click here to view).

Hundley said that, like Prou, he had no knowledge of the ongoing Palmetto Police Department investigation or the circumstances involved in Peterson’s resignation. He only knew that nearly a year after the allegations had been made, Child Protective Services had closed their investigation, Peterson had not been fired by the school district and he hadn’t read anything about him being arrested, which would have surely been big news given all of the media attention his case had received.

Hundley said that while he could not speak to Peterson’s guilt or innocence on the charges he’s yet to be tried for, he answered honestly at that point in time when he said Peterson was a good teacher, that he’d hire him again, that he’d never been disciplined (he too felt that the letter of reprimand, which clearly stated it was a warning that disciplinary action could be taken on similar matters in the future, didn’t qualify, as no allegations had ever been substantiated by the district), and knew of no reason he shouldn’t be around kids. It should also be noted that such forms are created in a very deliberate manner, asking very specific questions, one of the reasons being to avoid liability. Offering speculation or opinions outside of the direct questions could open up the person who is asked for a reference to litigation from the applicant.

Facing pressure from their community, Sarasota schools pushed law enforcement to investigate whether charges could be filed against Hundley, but the Sarasota County Sheriff's Department determined he had broken no laws. On May 2, 2018, Greene, who was set to leave the district to become Duval County's superintendent, issued Hundley a letter of reprimand, alleging he’d given "false and inaccurate employment references" and knew Peterson was under criminal investigation when he resigned. However, under oath ever, Greene acknowledged that she had no such documentation (click here to view her deposition). Palmetto Police Chief Scott Tyler said that he’d verbally made Hundley and Proue aware of the investigation status, which they dispute. In her deposition, Proue claims Tyler made reference to it in a meeting sometime around February or March, but definitely long afterSarasota had reached out to Lincoln.

Hundley, who would only be a district employee until the school became a charter in July, refused to sign the letter of reprimand, which did not include an investigation or prescribe any punitive action, but, like the one given to Peterson, ended with a warning of potential future consequences were similar actions to occur, lending more credibility to Proue and Hundley’s reasons for not feeling that Peterson's letter qualified as having been "disciplined." Hundley disputed the merits of Greene’s letter in a document that can be viewedhere.

On May 16, Sarasota County Schools filed an Educator Misconduct Report on Hundley with the Florida Department of Education related to his reference for Peterson, but no action was taken, presumably, because Hundley was not employed by that district. Manatee then filed a complaint with the state and the FLDOE recommended a two-year suspension of his educator’s certificate, at which point his attorney recommended he seek a negotiated settlement that admitted no guilt, the most common manner in which such cases are routinely resolved. For his part, Hundley, a 25-years educator with a stellar record, adamantly refused to admit to anything that suggested that he had endangered children. He was then presented with the option of an informal hearing with the state or a formal one with the Department of Administrative Hearings.

Confident in defending his answers on the reference form, Hundley chose the DOAH hearing and represented himself. At the hearing, everyone from Chief Tyler, to Teitelbaum and even newly-appointed Manatee Superintendent Cynthia Saunders (who’d followed Greene to Manatee from Marion County and was named superintendent when the latter left for Duval), would testify against him in a quasi-judicial process with very different legal parameters than civil or criminal courts. A number of highly inaccurate news articles on the situation were presented as evidence and, much to his surprise, Dr. Laurie Breslin, the assistant principal of Booker High when Peterson was hired, would claim that in addition to the reference form, she had a phone conversation with Hundley in which he offered a more detailed reference, something Hundley staunchly denies.

Hundley did email Breslin when she left him a voicemail alerting him to the reference form, congratulating her on the hire. He said he did follow up with a phone call to ensure she’d gotten both, but disputes her account of the conversation which Sarasota County Schools says was the basis of a form they needed to check the block on moving Peterson, who’d already been working with them for nearly six months, from a full-time sub to a math teacher. Under oath, Breslin said she had not asked Hundley the questions on the form verbatim, which the ALJ disregarded in the ruling.

Curiously, that form was not signed by Breslin, who'd spoken with Hundley, but by her superior, Booker Principal Rachel Shelley. Even more curiously, the secondary reference is not Prou, despite her having acknowledged twice having given the phone reference to Breslin, but rather an employee from the Bradenton Christian School, where Peterson once interned, a position that would not have met the district's criteria for the required reference. Why was Proue listed as a reference in Sarasota's records, but not on that form where an internship supervisor from before Peterson was a teacher was used instead? And why was Hundley's disputed andinformal conversation used if Proue's wasn't?

To make matters worse still, the arrest warrant for Peterson was issued in mid-February, a month before Peterson would be hired into the math teacher position in Sarasota, where he would remain employed for another five weeks before he was finally arrested.

When all was said and done, the administrative law judge threw the book at Hundley. Rather than suspending his educator certificate for the two years the state had been seeking, or even the 10-year maximum suspension, the ALJ escalated it to revocation which allows for anywhere from 1-5 years, or can even be taken permanently. The ALJ hit him with a 5-year revocation (the only consequence short of a permanent revocation), utterly unprecedented for what was alleged to be secondary involvement and much more than other educators have received for directly causing harm to students–harm that was not in question. The only saving grace for Hundley, who was now, much to the district’s chagrin, principal of Lincoln Memorial Academy and CEO of its charter company, was that according to Florida statutes you do not need an education certificate to be principal of a charter school.

One of the most mind-boggling aspects of how Hundley was treated is that while his documented response to Sarasota County Schools’ inquiry on Peterson was materially no different than Proue’s, there was absolutely no action taken against the assistant principal. The seeming injustice of that disparity is compounded significantly by a few factors. For starters, like Greene and Saunders, Proue came to Manatee from Marion County Schools–where she served as Saunders’ assistant principal!

Unlike Hundley, who had a stellar record of employment with the school district, there’s no getting around the fact that it was inexplicable that Proue had remained employed by the district long enough to even be a factor in the case. Proue’s first job with Manatee Schools when she came from Marion County in 2014 was principal at Sugg Middle School. During her second year, she faced a laundry list of serious allegations made by school employees, several of which were firable offenses. For some reason, only the two that were the least significant were sent to the state.

The first was that she’d had a teacher under her employ perform various home renovation tasks at her house when he was supposed to be teaching, granting him three days of sick leave to do so. The second was that she’d then had a male student at the school do work on her home. In exchange, she falsified documents indicating he’d satisfied community service hour requirements.

Not only was Prouenot terminated for those offenses, or the others, but Greene refused to inform parents as to why she was being demoted to an assistant principal at Southeast and falsely told the public that it had nothing to do with students at the school. She went on to say, "I have faith she is more than capable of being the assistant principal at Southeast," as quoted in an article in the Bradenton Herald.

Proue entered into a settlement agreement with the state that allowed her to keep her certificate with just two years of administrative probation (click here to view). When the principal who took over for her at Sugg was promoted to principal of Southeast the next year, for obvious reasons, she did not want Proue as an AP, and she was reassigned downward again, this time to a middle school AP at Lincoln, choosing to stay when they converted to a charter the next year. For some reason, neither the district nor the state sought any action whatsoever against Proue for her reference of Peterson, and she remains a district employee.

This element of the story speaks to two persistent complaints I’ve continuously heard from district employees for many years. Proue was one of many employees who were brought in from Marion County under both Greene and Saunders and employees have long argued that they’ve received preferential treatment both in terms of promotions and a lack of accountability.

Black employees have also long complained that there are two sets of rules across nearly every element of employment in the district. Proue, who is white and does not have a record that is remotely comparable to Hundley's, certainly seems to have been treated generously after violating a number of district policies as Sugg’s principal and remains in an assistant principal position even after giving a recommendation for the same employee that the district later said made Hundley, who is black, a danger, were he even to be in the proximity ofstudents.

Near the end of the school year, Hundley made the decision to step down as the principal of Lincoln Memorial Academy for the good of the school, saying that the constant barrage of negative press was taking the focus away from the success of the students. He would remain the CEO of the charter company and his much-heralded curriculum would continue to be used, but a new principal was appointed for the upcoming school year.

However, during the notorious July workshop and meeting at which Manatee Schools used an emergency takeover process to get Lincoln back under its control, this was one of three prongs used to justify the emergency process and deny Hundley and Lincoln what would have been 124 days of due process, in which the school was all but certain to emerge with nothing more than a financial recovery plan.

The district cited a letter from current Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran (who'd by then replaced Stewart), urging the district to take action against Hundley having anything to do with LMA, opining that he believed Hundley’s punishment precluded him from being present anywhere on campus. When Teitelbaum gave his presentation at the workshop, he cited Florida Statute 1012.795, which regards the "Education Practices Commission’s authority to discipline." The only problem is that Florida Statute 1002.33, which was written more recently and deals with charter schools, specifically exempts them from certain chapters of existing statutes, including 1012.795!

Regardless of whether they are contradictory in intent and need to be addressed by legislation, there is no question that there has been an utterly inexplicable amount of interest at both a local and state level in using whatever leverage exists against Hundley and in favor of the district in its efforts to regain a school–and its infrastructure and funding–that had been lost to the charter process, something that some school board members and administration had openly lamented. Was it forces within the Manatee School District or its school board that was putting pressure on the FLDOE to help with the Lincoln problem?

The idea that Hundley, by way of giving a reference for a former employee who, when last under his supervision had been cleared of all allegations made to that point and had not been terminated by the district or charged by the police by the time he’d given it, was somehow a danger to the welfare of the students who were so clearly thriving in his school defies any application of logic a reasonable person could make.

Furthermore, if his actions were to be considered so heinous that his career must be obliterated, then every single administrator involved with the decision to allow Peterson to resign instead of being terminated would seem to be even more culpable, except that the district has a long history of allowing resignations for firable offenses. In fact, one well-connected AP who'd been determined to have violated school district policy by failing to report sexual misconduct against a student that actually did result in a criminal conviction was allowed to "retroactively" resign after being terminated so that he could continue working in Florida schools without having to explain his termination (click here to read more about all of that).

That said, the fact that Peterson is still a free man, five years after the alleged events, seriously calls into question the idea that someone else is a threat by way of degrees of separation. And while Peterson is currently scheduled to face trial in July and, like Hundley, I have no idea whether he’s ever done anything inappropriate with this young lady or any other, it does not seem like there is much of a case against him.

It would seem that in order for there to be a crime, there needs to be a victim, and if the alleged victim, now in her twenties, continues to maintain that they did not have a sexual relationship, that she’d doctored the photos and placed them on his computer, and that the only statement she’d given to the contrary had been coerced out of her by way of threats from a detective with a suspect memory who’d issued them after turning off his tape recorder, a conviction would seem all but impossible.

And even if Peterson is convicted of having an illegal picture on his computer, it would be for something that had nothing to do with students at Lincoln or his time on campus, nor would it be something Hundley could be expected to know the details of after he’d been reassigned from his employ. A lot of things could have gone differently here. Manatee Schools could have notified the state in a timely manner, especially since they were allowing someone they suspected of being a direct danger to kids to resign instead of being terminated.

Sarasota Schools could have accessed the system that would have told them Peterson was the subject of an investigation way back when he was applying to be a substitute. Police could have found Peterson, at his grandparents' house, in much less than the more than two months it took and certainly before he was hired at Booker. You have to get pretty far down the list before you'd logically contemplate what Hundley should have done differently based on what has been documented in terms of what he knew and when, and then you'd still have to apply the same logic to the other district employee.

Like the erroneous water shut-off notice, the idea that Hundley’s reference, given months before Peterson would be arrested on charges he still hasn’t been tried for and seems highly unlikely to be convicted of, makes his mere presence on a school campus a danger to the welfare of children, is beyond absurd. It is simply one more dubious prong in the transparent intent of taking back what had been a very challenged school, despite the charter process having greatly improved it, a fact echoed by the months of protest and public comment given by LMA students, parents, employees and community members at board meetings. This fiasco is so clearly not about what’s best for students. Like so many corrupt aspects of government, it is about threats to a power structure and those who stand to lose leverage using whatever means are at their disposal to protect the resources from which they draw their power.

As one final insult to Hundley and LMA, when the district reclaimed the school, there was a need to hire a new principal. Proue had been let go by LMA at the close of the 2018/19 school year but was, despite her record and having given a reference for Peterson, rehired by the district, this time as AP for the Manatee Virtual School. Ronnie King, who’d been principal at Oneco Elementary and had been slotted to move to an administrative position in transportation according to district sources, was reassigned to interim principal at Lincoln Middle, effective July 16, despite the fact that the school hadn’t even executed the takeover until the 22nd.

However, the Manatee Virtual School that Proue was assigned to is housed on the campus of Lincoln. Once the district retook the school, her office was moved back into the main building. Multiple sources who currently work at the school told me that despite her official title, she "runs the show" at Lincoln, operating as the school’s de facto principal. That would mean that while Hundley had his life and career utterly decimated (not to mention what the ordeal has cost him financially) for a reference he gave to Peterson, the other Manatee County Schools administrator who gave him one is not only working on the campus on which Hundley's presence had been deemed a threat to child welfare, but she’s essentially performing his old job.

How much more proof could one possibly need that this was never about the kids? It was about the district, having already seen Rowlett convert an elementary school into a wildly popular district charter, not wanting Lincoln to provide yet another example that might suggest charter conversions were a viable option for communities that felt they have not been getting adequate support from the district and its bloated, cronyism-driven administration and deciding to take responsibility for the education of their children into their own hands.

Lincoln's success and the success of any school that attempts such a conversion is a threat to the district's power structure and the administrators who make a lot of money within it. Eddie Hundley, a talented educator with a rare combination of talent and passion for helping students who come from the most challenged socioeconomic backgrounds, was just an early casualty in what will likely be a long war over the future of how Florida students are educated.