Forsyth now acknowledges she worked here

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/04/2015 (4205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stephanie Forsyth’s profile on LinkedIn now acknowledges that she was president of Red River College.

However, that change in her on-line CV is pretty much all the information she lists about that job.

Not that one would expect Forsyth to go into great detail about the expenses and firings scandal that led to her departure, but there is nary a syllable about her accomplishments as president, whereas there are oodles upon oodles of details about all the jobs she previously held.

One curious thing — Forsyth says she was RRC president from September of 2010 through September of 2014. We’ve been told repeatedly that she left Aug. 30, 2014, through mutual agreement.

On to other things…

Today is the 10th anniversary of Safe Schools Manitoba’s having severed all contact with me and with the WFP. I still maintain that I have done nothing professionally or otherwise for which I have any reason to apologize.

A succession of education ministers has apparently been OK with paying Safe Schools Manitoba’s budget without having its programs, guidelines, events, and advice shared with Manitoba’s schools through the province’s largest print medium.

Sigh.

We turned down another request for me to speak at a school.

It’s just not realistic, given staffing levels and the amount of assignments I could cover every day, to expect that the paper would agree to my spending four hours on the road to address a single elementary school class.

Sorry. I hope you can find someone a tad closer to the school.

And seamlessly seguing…

A while back I went through one of the umpteen daily news releases from the communications empire at U of M, and one intrigued not only me, but also Big Editor (not his real name).

A prof had won an innovation award for a really nifty way of engaging elementary school kids in the principles of science. An article was merited.

Off I went to the campus and talked to the prof. Through a particular set of circumstances, his great idea is already in use in classrooms in Grand Forks, and could come here next school year. The prof also told me about another super-neat science project in which he’s involved with schools, and I successfully pitched both to my superiors.

Pause while I tug at my forelock.

I would get an exotic junket to Grand Forks to conduct diligent journalistic research, and I would cover his second project locally.

And the prof would get back to me with dates to pursue both stories. And after a while, I reminded him, and he said he was working on it, and after another while I asked him again, and again he said he was working on it. And now, my last couple of emails have gone unanswered.

Sigh.

I got an email early Monday morning from someone named Morgan at Uproar PR, who told me, “I’m not sure if you’ve heard already, but a parent at a school in Winnipeg was recently arrested for stealing $24,000 from the lunch program. I’d love to set up an interview for you with Chris Johnson about how Permission Click could have stopped this crime from happening.”

First off, yes, I have heard, since I wrote that story. Secondly, I checked through your phone number and learned that you’re based in a rural county in Florida, where you might not be aware of how our justice system works, namely that we have a presumption of innocence, and here it would be “arrested for allegedly stealing” and “stopped this alleged crime”.

Harumph.

I’m wondering how Morgan’s company flagged down this story on the Internet, somehow she both found the article and then found me, yet she and her software didn’t notice that my byline was on the article. Permission Click appears to be some kind of digital school permission slip that her client is flogging.

And now for something completely different…

Mayor Brian, I had no idea what the envelope was when it arrived, and when I opened it up, I was really flabbergasted to receive the certificate and the kind words. Thank you.

Leaving all of you wondering what that’s about…

I was live-tweeting Monday evening’s WSD public delegations board meeting, filing tweets galore and regularly updating the web coverage to a breathless world — I’m sure that everyone at the MTS Centre had one eye on the ice and the other on his or her device — when one person replied and told me I needed to re-send everything this morning, because no one was paying attention Monday evening.

Um…I guess maybe there’s something I don’t understand in the ‘live’ part of live-tweeting.

I did find out that trustee Lisa Naylor can multi-task, she was RTing and favouriting me while listening out of the corner of her eye to trustee Mike Babinsky.

You young people might want to try this social media stuff, it’s kind of hip and fab.

Finally…

The Supreme Court ruling on prayer at municipal council meetings reminds me of the time back when I covered Winnipeg city council in the early 90s…the 1990s….hmmph. We’d sit way up at the top of the public gallery, and when they’d start to pray before the meeting, I’d just push my seat back where no one could see me, and not take part.

Until this one meeting, when a radio reporter — you might be surprised at which network he represented — got furious with me, and ordered me to get up on my feet and show respect and take part or he’d call a security guard. No, he wasn’t joking.

So rather than become the story, I chose to leave for a minute, and thereafter would wait outside in the hall until they’d finished praying.

Which, it goes without saying, could be seen as a violation of my rights.

I sense a great disturbance in the force as the anonymous trolls reach for the reply button…