And she doesn't deserve the clemency/pardon she's after in a hearing being held today.
In the trial she had, she claimed that she was close to getting her degree at the University of Akron. She whined that a conviction would hamper her ability to get a teaching certificate, as though she would be a victim - rather than her simply having to face the consequences of her actions!
But that was a lie. From what I've read, she hasn't actually been enrolled in school in 2 years.
An Summit County judge says a woman jailed for using her father's address to enroll her children in a different school district was not on the verge of becoming a teacher herself, as she claimed during her trial.
Summit County Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove tells the Columbus Dispatch that Kelley Williams-Bolar of Akron was ''nowhere near getting her teacher's license.'' The judge says her view is supported by school records, which will be presented during Williams-Bolar's upcoming clemency hearing.
Williams-Bolar was found guilty in Cosgrove's court of falsifying documents in the school residency matter, a conviction that threatens her hopes of obtaining a teaching license. She spent nine days in jail.
She claimed to be a full-time college student near graduation from the University of Akron with an early childhood degree. That's a crucial point in her pardon request because felons cannot be public school teachers in Ohio. But today the board learned she hasn't been a student since 2009 and has more than two years of coursework remaining before earning a degree.
And from what I've read elsewhere, she'd been keeping her school records locked, so that the news media couldn't find out exactly what her school history was! It didn't work to prevent every inquirer from accessing those records, as the judge who heard her case, yet took pity on her, found out that she isn't working towards a degree in teaching, and that her GPA wouldn't even allow her to get into the school!
http://www.ohio.com/...
As a result of her complaint that a felony conviction would deny her the right to get a teaching certificate, the judge in her trial took pity on her, and wrote a letter to the Ohio State Board of Education, asking them to take pity on Kelley Williams-Bolar, and allow her to get a teaching certificate despite having a felony conviction. But if she's not actually close to getting a teaching degree (or a degree that would allow her to get a teaching certificate because she'd taken enough of the prerequisites), then there's no real purpose in the judge sending that letter - nor any real purpose in her whining that a felony conviction would hurt her chances of getting that certificate.
Please, if you aren't fully aware of all the ins and outs of this case, before you go off half-cocked, read my previous diary on this woman's case. She wasn't unfairly tried or convicted.
The judge sent another letter, this time to the jurors in that felony tampering with records case. Here's some of what she wrote them....
in her letter to jurors, Cosgrove told the panelists that she subsequently has learned Williams-Bolar hasn't even been accepted into the university's College of Education. {If and when she is, she still has a very long way to go, as she hasn't taken many of the prerequisites to get a degree in teaching.}
In fact, according to Cosgrove, UA records show Williams-Bolar has not attained the minimum required grade-point average for acceptance into the college. She has taken more than 120 course credit hours dating to the late 1980s.
''If she were accepted,'' the judge wrote, ''she would not be poised to receive a degree for some time as she has not completed the prerequisite classes to become a teacher.''
The local county's probation staff got her college transcripts as they prepared to present their side of the story to the Ohio Parole Board - the governor of Ohio demanded a clemency hearing for Williams-Bolar. County prosecutors are going to argue against the pardon.
Here's the full letter.
In her trial, she said that she has
149 credits at the University of Akron and is a senior.
Now, an attorney for Williams-Bolar says that she has 119 hours of study.
A very common misperception about this case was that she was trying to get her kids a better education. That's not true. She was trying to get free after-school child care for her children with the kids' grandparents in the suburbs because she didn't believe it was safe for her kids to go to their home in Akron after school and be alone there.
Gov. John Kasich and others have made the case about school choice, but Kelley Williams-Bolar told the Ohio Parole Board that her daughters' safety, not their education, was her only concern.
Her attorney, David A. Singleton, said the idea she moved her children to another school so they could get a better education from came from school-choice advocates and the media.
She was "motivated out of a concern to keep her daughters safe," he said.
Another misconception is that the local suburban school district discriminated due to race. I debunked this thoroughly in a previous diary on Williams-Bolar. Among other things I documented in that diary, I told readers that she reported her case to the US Dept of Education's Office of Civil Rights back in 2008. This group is dedicated to fighting for the civil rights of citizens when those rights are abridged by schools, etc. Their conclusion, reached after thoroughly investigating her claims however, was that there was no evidence of racism in this case.
Federal investigators from the Cleveland office ''found no evidence that similarly situated families were treated differently based on race with respect to the District's enforcement of its residency,'' according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Different families in the same school district were treated differently than she was because she behaved uniquely! She was the only one who, after being caught multiple times, still refused to admit that she was dishonestly claiming two households for her children.
And what happened in her clemency hearing? Both she and her lawyer (David Singleton) admitted that it wasn't about race.
Singleton has said he doesn't think race was a factor in her arrest....
Asked directly by a board member whether she thought she was treated unfairly because of her race, Williams-Bolar said, "I cannot answer that. I just know that my situation happened for what I did. ... I don't think it happened because of the color of my skin."
Singleton said the idea that her case had to do with race was largely a creation of the media and activists who saw a chance to make a political point.
"This was not about being the Rosa Parks of education," he told the board.
But we had two different diaries here which explicitly (and wrongly) asserted that she was, in fact, the Rosa Parks of education! Diaries that made the Rec List, filled with misinformation. One diary started with "Could this become our modern Rosa Parks story? I think so." But even her lawyer now says that it's not that at all - and I tried and tried and tried to tell people this back in January when this first blew up. And she is the one who submitted this issue to the US Dept of Education's Office of Civil Rights back in 2008! So, once again, a pathological liar! She's claiming now that she knows it wasn't about race, but she tried to claim that it was about race 3 years ago!
She's a pathological liar. In the hearing today, she said
A parole board member asked Williams-Bolar why she deserved a pardon. She said, "It was never an intention to try to deceive. I never tried to hurt anybody. I made some mistakes. I never meant for it to spiral out of control like this.
But she did "intend to decieve". It's undeniable. She signed multiple pieces of paper that weren't accurate. She thought that her kids were entitled to claim to have two residences, whicheve one suited the purpose she had in mind. She found out that this was impermissible at her first hearing, yet she continued the charade for a year and a half after that! She clearly intended to deceive! And she did mean for it to go exactly as it did - instead of behaving as other parents who were caught behaved (removing their kids and/or paying back-owed tuition), she continued to lie about where her kids lived. She changed her driver's license info to her Dad's home, although she never lived there and told the city of Akron social services people that she lived in her subsidized housing. She also tried to give her Dad temporary guardianship of her kids to justify them getting free schooling from that district - except she did it wrong, and she wasn't really giving him guardianship, and she couldn't do it without the signed consent of the kids' father, which she never got - and so she was lying there too with that effort to give him guardianship! And when she found out that the only way that temporary guardianship would make her kids eligible to attend that school without paying out of district tuition was if she was in the military and was deployed, and so she pretended that was the case! A pathological liar! She tried to get benefits reserved for members of the military for herself!
And it looks as though she's actually guilty of yet another crime of falsifying official documents - she's renewed her driver's license with her father's address, according to her own testimony in her clemency hearing today. She had originally changed it from her Akron home to his address back after her kids were first caught - that was her first attempt to have documentation in-hnand showing that she and the kids actually lived in the suburban school district.
Board Member Cathy Collins-Taylor explains that filling out a form with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles with false information is fraudulent and that the BMV does prosecute.
Williams-Bolar acts surprised. "It is? That's fraud?"
Collins-Taylor asks her if she did - after everything that's gone on over the last few months - renew her license again with the Black Pond address, which belong to her father.
She answers that she had.
In earlier testimony at today's hearing KWB testified "Oh,yes. I just had it renewed" when asked about her current driver's license.
She also testified that it lists her father's address, which she changed the address to in the days following her discovery that the Copley-Fairlawn School District was investigating her residency, rather than the address of her AMHA provided 4 bedroom home where she still resides.
One of the board members told Williams-Boler that she should get advice from her lawyer, who appeared shocked to hear that her driver's license still had her Dad's address on it, and the lawyer told her to change it right away to her actual address.
She's also now saying that she'd be willing to repay the school district for the tuition. Too little, too late.
She also said she'd be willing to begin paying restitution to the Copley-Fairlawn schools like other parents who were caught in similar circumstances.
If only she'd been willing to admit guilt and offer restitution, she never would have been tried and convicted - if she'd only acted as the other families who were caught in this sting acted - we'd never have known about her! The only reason she got caught up in this was because she was the only parent who, when caught, refused to admit guilt and accede to the demands of the school district which had been wronged. As the prosecutor said earlier today though
"Ms. Bolar refused to come to any agreement with the school system," Gessner said. "She took the case every direction except to a conclusion."
"If at any time she would have been willing to tell the truth, this case would have stopped," said Gessner, who added that other families accused of residency issues in Copley addressed the problem. "But one family lied and continued to lie."
From someone who was tweeting from the hearing.
Sentence was appropriate, (local school) board statement says, because of KWB's "wholesale refusal" to accept any responsibility for her actions.
Pathological.
Summit County Assistant Prosecutor Teri Burnside maintained there hasn't been merit to almost all of Williams-Bolar's statements.
"This is a pattern of deception," Burnside said. "She hasn't demonstrated to the Parole Board, or to society, that she is truly sorry."
In a related case, her father, Edward Williams, was convicted of stealing money from Ohio and Social Security to the tune of more than $100,000! He was convicted on two charges of falsifying records about his income, and two counts of grand theft for receiving the money he got as a result of lying about his income! He was immediately sentenced to 1 year in prison. Reportedly, he's also been told that he has to pay restitution.
He's apparently a pathological liar, just like his daughter. He tried to claim that he lived alone, without any means of support absent government help, for many years in the past decade. Turns out that his wife actually lived in the house with him, and she had a full time job!
Prosecutors accuse him of repeatedly lying in applications to the Social Security Administration and the Summit County Department of Jobs and Family Services in order to received food stamps and other government aid from 2003 through 2011.
Prosecutors contend he was living with his wife, Diana, a government office worker in Cuyahoga County, while also receiving government aid.
Over two days of trial, they presented a pile of documents — bank statements and tax and employment records — that they contend shows Diana Williams was living at the couple's Blackpond Drive home and sharing expenses, including mortgage and car payments.
They also contend that once Williams was confronted in May 2009 by welfare workers with questions about his marital status, Williams — within 24 hours — sought to discontinue some of his benefits instead of supplying the agency with his wife's address.
''The heat was on and he wanted out,'' assistant county prosecutor Jon Baumoel told jurors. ''He knew there wasn't another address.
So, instead of identifying an alternative address where his estranged wife supposedly lived, he tried to escape responsibility for improperly receiving benefits by asking that they be discontinued.
But then, in court, he claimed that his wife hadn't lived with him in years. If that truly were the case, then why would he have asked to have his sole means of support removed? How did his supposed estranged wife get her mail and pay bills, for years, at a home where she didn't live?