CLEVELAND: MODEL GOOD BEHAVIOR
As hundreds of students milled around tables during Career Day in the University Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last week, an individual representing the Cleveland, Tenn., Police Department sat alone looking bored.
If students had been paying attention, she may have appeared to be a pariah because of the department she represented.
It hasn’t been a glorious recent past for the department, after all, the past four-plus years seeing police department staffers involved in sex with underage girls, explicit cellphone texts, sexual misconduct, on-the-clock trysts and extramarital affairs.
Last fall, though, the city hired a new police chief in Mark Gibson, and he undoubtedly has spent his first few months trying to repair the reputation the department — and the city, in its wake — received from its various scandals.
If former members of the department are receiving counseling or changing their habits in the wake of the past few years in this city of 41,000 that is the home of seven religious denominations and several megachurches, all well and good.
But the city can’t seem to escape its recent reputation. Last week, allegations of sexual shenanigans broke out again — this time in the office of the Cleveland school district’s director of schools.
Martin Ringstaff, a man chosen superintendent of the year in 2014 by the Tennessee Association of School Superintendents and who had been given a new contract only a week earlier, was terminated. Messages and explicit photographs from an affair he said ended a year ago were made public.
He first said someone impersonating him had sent the messages and asked the police department to investigate. He later admitted the messages did involve him, and he no longer wanted the department to look into the matter.
Ringstaff’s reversal apparently turned the tide against him, and the school board voted 5-2 Friday to fire him for the cause of “conduct unbecoming.”
On Monday, Cathy Goodman, the Cleveland school district’s assistant director, was appointed to be interim director of schools. We hope the appointment is a new start for the schools.
People may ask, “Why Cleveland?” But why not Cleveland? Unfortunately, no place is free from moral sins, and it’s not always possible to know who is susceptible to such behavior.
The best we can do as citizens is be a part of the process — take an interest in our city, in those who run it and in those who are elected. In that, we have to believe that modeling good behavior will begat good behavior. To think otherwise, as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., said, is to continue “defining deviancy downward” — to normalize what was once considered aberrant behavior.