Courtesy: Chaucat Mains Claims Jefferson Reports Contain Inaccuracies; Refuses To Give A Single Example JAMESTOWN-Tim Mains, Superintendent of Jamestown Public Schools, Thursday evening turned down an invitation to get behind the mic on ” NY-PA Today” , the 8 a.m. weekday offering hosted by Ryan Hedrick at 95.3 The Lake. Mains told Hedrick his reporting on the Thursday morning threats and fights at Jefferson Middle School contained inaccurate information. Hedrick asked him to come on and detail the alleged errors, Fair enough? Well not fair at all according to Mains. To do so he said would be to play into Hedrick’s hands. Hedrick’s reporting, according to Mains “was a deliberate effort to spread misinformation.” He made it plain that, to Hedrick at least, he will have nothing to say for the foreseeable future. Hedrick, Mains said, “was either going to respect him and the district-or not.” The choice the superintendent added, is Hedrick’s to make. I am not making any of this up. So in Mains view Ryan should have not followed up when he received a tip about t what had happened at Martin Road. In fact when Ryan called me we discussed the validity of the account he had been given. First, the report came from a person in a position to know. Still we both worked our phones to corroborate the report, and if it checked, to enlarge upon it. Those calls I made included three different members of the JPS hierarchy. (None of them took my call, and none to date returned my call.) We quickly learned more details from two police sources. We both published with that confirmation. As the afternoon progressed we learned more: for example a member of the Jefferson staff required treatment for what were termed minor injuries sustained as he and another staffer subdued the unruly student. We didn’t invent any details, no matter how minor. There never was any “deliberate effort ” to report falsehoods. And, let’s be very sober, no one we reached out to at the administration, has given any specific information whatever, disputing our reporting. They have had and continue to have every opportunity to do so. The decision to not specify anything is theirs not ours. If we got it wrong, show us where and we’ll correct what needs to be corrected or clarified. Perhaps Superintendent Mains believes we just shouldn’t have published the report. That’s a non-starter; an attack by a student, a youngster at that, on school staff is news. A school administrator is certainly a quasi-official. All of the local media receives news releases almost daily from the district. Almost all of it gets published somewhere. It is virtually all the good kind of news. And that’s fine. I doubt Mr Mains knows or cares if TheCAT exists, but if he looked any day the week following the JHS championship he couldn’t have missed our Header image. It showed the entire team and over on the right was the superintendent smiling and waving the number one with his index finger. That was doing our job, just as we did it Thursday. Respect, respectfully, Mr Superintendent , is a two-way street.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 02:54:36 +0000
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