Glasrud apology fell short, misled

BY DOLLY JUAREZ CO-FOUNDER, SOUTHWEST LEARNING CENTER CHARTER SCHOOLS

In a guest publication of the Albuquerque Journal (Nov. 28), Scott Glasrud offered an apology that begs further clarification. At the granular level, one must draw expertise from the field of psychology. The five stages of incarceration, outlined by the Prison Fellowship, a Christian non-profit serving prisoners founded by former White House counsel Charles Colson, a former prisoner himself, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — he derived these from the stages of grief penned by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. In the denial stage, most prisoners blame their situation on others. In anger, they express perceived unfair and imagined grievances and therefore find it hard to believe they’re really facing prison.

Glasrud has chosen to blame me as well as others for the path that he alone chose. The federal prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Fred J. Federici and Holland S. Kastrin, the Albuquerque Division of the FBI with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Inspector General and even Senior U.S. District Judge James A. Parker presiding over Scott Glasrud’s sentencing identified me, along with the four schools included in the Southwest Learning Center, the children, and the New Mexico Public Education Department all as victims of Glasrud’s machinations. I declined the victim restitution offered to my counsel, Robert Gorence, by Judge Parker. I concluded, as I always have, to place our children first, and that any recovered funds would better serve the schools.

After a four-year exhaustive and comprehensive investigation, the results yielded a nine-count plea agreement signed by Glasrud, followed by Judge Parker’ sentencing him to 60 months in a federal penitentiary for federal theft, fraud and false statements. And he was also ordered to pay $3 million in restitution, forever memorialized in the Department of Justice press release dated Oct. 12. U.S. Attorney John C. Anderson and Special Agent in Charge James C. Langenberg of the Albuquerque Division of the FBI announced his sentence. There are the facts, and they are immutable.