There is not a sane person in the state of North Carolina who would not want to make our schools as safe as possible for our students. Taxpayer money is helping to fund a $35 million-dollar initiative to provide grants in the state to help launch School Safety Month.

According to the Center for Safer Schools website, the programs that are being enabled by DPI and tax payer money include what is on this web page: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/cfss/.

However, schools are starting to receive the following brochures and handouts that promote the school safety initiative that seems to be more of a campaign flyer for Mark Johnson. Take a look.

On both sides of this release is a reference to http://www.ncsuperintendent.com – Mark Johnson’s personal website. Not the “.org” of DPI’s site, but the “.com” of a commercial site that was traced back to GoDaddy.com.

The front and the back of the brochure has staged pictures of Johnson, and a personal note about his wanting schools to be safe – just like every other stakeholder in public education would want school to be.

But if one wants to get more information, one can go to a personal website – not DPI’s official site.

And if one wants some email updates, then they can put their name on a list.

That collection of names and holding of state information gathered specifically by a government entity on someone’s personal site seems unethical.

It’s also campaigning. This brochure is deliberately taking a DPI initiative and driving people to a personal site because someone is making it “all about him.”

Seems like someone should look into that.