Woodstock CT Café

This article was published at the Cafe on August 24th 2008.

One has to wonder if this is/was the ultimate goal of Powers, Shultz, and Wholean.

In the Opinion (snippets below), The Judge used words like “pure folly”, (not)”sincere”, “disingenuous”, “baseless”, “shifted their argument”, and “common sense” to characterize Powers’ case.

Then there is the FOI case perpetrated by Shultz using a document passed to him from the office of the First Selectman (Wholean) obtained by her own FOI lawsuit against the BOE while she was First Selectman (Shultz’ own testimony in June). The reality that the leadership of the Town Hall was passing documents to private litigants to be used against the school system shows how devious our Town leadership was a year ago. This should not be forgotten when Ms. Wholean tries to regain the First Selectman position in the next Town election.

The contradiction in Powers’ case should be obvious to all. Over the last four years he was requesting (“demanding?”) more services from the Woodstock school system including the addition of a staff member while doing everything possible over the last three years with his defunct “Coalition Website” and now his Untruth website to undermine the school system. If the choice of a common lawyer (Robert Skelley) is any indication, both Shultz and Wholean are parties to Powers effort.

Powers was quoted in the February 23rd 2007 Villager article “My bigger concern as a taxpayer, is that the town is spending all of this money on legal defense and this is how the lawyers conduct themselves.” In a second lawsuit he had accused Shipman & Goodwin BOE lawyers of misconduct during his first lawsuit that drew all of the same conclusions of this third lawsuit in Federal Court (an appeal of the first lawsuit). The second lawsuit was thrown out unceremoniously. His quote above shows the irrational beliefs that form the basis for all three lawsuits, and Shultz and Wholean’s FOI lawsuits as well. He is criticizing the BOE and ultimately the Town for defending itself against his own lawsuits.

If Powers follows up with another appeal there ought to be a counter-suit to recover damages to the taxpayers.

Snippets from the Court’s Opinion:

This is decidedly not a case in which a school turned a blind eye to a child in need. To the contrary, Mrs. Fulco acted conscientiously, communicating regularly with Mrs. Powers and utilizing special strategies to help A.P. succeed. In fact, Mrs. Powers admitted in her testimony that she was pleased with A.P.’s progress in the fourth grade.…in fact, according to Plaintiffs’ counsel at oral argument, A.P. has never been diagnosed with ADD

Although the Parents claim that they did not know they had this right, all evidence points to the contrary.

It would have been pure folly for the school sua sponte to convene a PPT and make a decision on whether A.P. was eligible for special education services before learning the results of the evaluation.

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Powers asked the BOE leadership to step down in August 2007 in relation to his lawsuit. This article was published on August 10th 2007.

In his Letter to the Editor published today (August 10th in the Villager) Craig Powers blames Lindsay Paul for “nearly $100,000″ in legal costs that have been placed in the 2007-2008 budget. He calls this “simply outrageous for a town” the size of Woodstock. Looking back at the 2006-2007 fiscal year, I faintly recall that Mr. Powers sued the Woodstock School System because he felt that Woodstock taxpayers should foot the bill for his unilateral decision to send his son to the Rectory School in Pomfret – that’s you, me, and all other residents of Woodstock. It’s odd that Powers fails to mention this in his Letter to the Editor. The cost of Powers lawsuit against the BOE has never been publicized, but it must have been substantial. Keep in mind that you, me and the rest of the residents of the Town have been paying for Mr. Powers’ vendetta against the school system.

Given that Ms. Wholean just sued the BOE (Docket #FIC 2007-352), no wonder the BOE feels the need to brace for this coming year’s round of lawsuits. Powers, Wholean, and Mr. Shultz and their so-called “coalition” are conducting their vendettas against the BOE at taxpayers’ expense. The difference between Ms. Wholean’s litigious acts and the Powers/Shultz litigious activities is that, in my opinion, Ms. Wholean is using her attacks on the BOE for political reasons at the taxpayers’ expense. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pomfret Voice Bites the Dust“The Last Post – To my friends and fellow residents of Pomfret,In an effort to create more lines of communication among all of us I had created this site and paid the nominal costs in hopes of helping us all. Despite my several pleas to use the site for positive open discussion it,primarily, became a place for negative criticism and in some cases slanderous posts. The site has been a constant administrative headache and is costing me more time than I have or am willing to devote. Therefore the site will come to an end this weekend. I wish you all well and hope someone else will create a better venue in the future.” Pomfret Voice Admin May 23rd, 2009.The negative Canterbury Blog has also shut down.

There’s more going on at the Cafe than meets the eye of most Cafers. Take “ANN” for example who occassionaly leaves negative comments. ANN is not Anne of Green Gables; ANN is an acronym for ANNARCHY. When you think of Ann don’t think of the female gender…hmmm, I wonder who this could be?

The Cafe has many visitors with only a very few ever leaving comments. Nearly every week we are surprised to find new people who visit the Cafe because they tell us so. We’ve always been curious about whose visiting or how many are visiting and we usually report this on a quarterly basis. But it has become clear that more and more Internet surfers have found ways to hide their IP (Internet Protocol) address (like our friend ANN), and so our StatCounter is not picking these people up. Thus using our StatCounter, we are seeing only part of the story.

Our host is BrightEgg, and they have from time-to-time given us information on activity at the Cafe because they have been surprised that the Cafe is the most active website they host. In February after one year of service, they told us that the Cafe had over 1 million page turns at BrightEgg in our first year with them. We were surprised too because our StatCounter was reporting much less.

The difference in the two measurements is that the StatCounter measures Internet traffic while BrightEgg measures activity directly off of their server computer which is bound to be accurate. Internet data compilers like compete.com measure Internet traffic and tell us that we have about 1000 unique visitors each month, but this measurement is highly error-prone because we are at the limits of detectability by their methods.

If we measure activity at the Cafe directly off of our host server for the month of May up to May 29th we see the numbers shown below:

We have some understanding of these numbers but do not fully understand them. We are not saying that there are 6000 unique visitors each month who are interested in Woodstock and are avidly reading articles at the Cafe. For example, searching images on Google has become more and more popular around the world, and we have always been aware of outsiders coming to the Cafe because some Arab searched an image posted at the Cafe like Scarlet Johansonn who played Jennica Heifer in “Hollywood Comes to Woodstock”.

“Unique visitors” is simply a unique IP address being detected (over 6000 in May). The larger number of 15,233 visits is all the times all IP addresses have entered the Cafe; so many of these unique IPs are coming back. We tend to think the “Pages” or “clicks on any page” is the most interesting data.

Below are graphs of the day-by-day activity in May at the Cafe in terms of visits and page turns measured directly at our server or by our StatCounter.

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Cafe Elves have been working feverishly to manufacture these precious works of art. Each of these signs is hand-crafted (I’m sure you couldn’t tell). No two are identical. Since the elves expect these to become valuable collectors’ items after June 9th, the elves have decided to make only a limited number of these for distribution. After the referendum you can have these framed and hung in your study…or even sell them on EBay to the highest bidder.

Just think about it…How often do voters that normally vote YES get a chance to vote NO? Likewise, the voters that normally vote NO like the 123 that voted NO in the budget referendum will now have to train their grimey hands to fill in the YES oval. This will not be easy for them to do because of the long-standing habit that they’ve developed.

Also, be careful if you put one of these signs out because the CPS members will steal them and save them for the next referendum vote.

If you desperately need one of these Vote NO signs, the elves can make it happen ( contact the elves at woodstockctcafe@gmail.com ).