By Tracy Dingmann

The Journal published a letter today from a reader who made an excellent point about a recent story involving a former Albuquerque Public Schools official.

The official, former chief financial officer Dupuy Bateman, had been placed on paid administrative leave May 24 after APS Superintendent Winston Brooks announced he had “lost faith” in Bateman’s ability to do his job. Less than two weeks earlier, Brooks had hired a new chief finance officer at an annual salary of $165,000. Up until May 24, Brooks had said he intended to keep Bateman on for “special finance projects,” while paying him his annual salary of $125,000. Bateman’s contract had been automatically renewed on April 1, meaning the only way the district could have gotten out of paying his salary would be to fire him with cause.

The unorthodox and unfortunate personnel situation, coupled with recurring and serious money management problems at APS, had prompted the Journal to publish a series of front-page stories and editorials over the past few weeks that were highly critical of APS.

The paper singled out Bateman for particularly harsh criticism in its coverage of the issue. (I had noted it as part of the tried and true Journal editorial technique of picking one public employee and holding him or her responsible for a complicated, long-ranging and systemic series of problems.)

On July 24, the Journal wrote a story saying Bateman had reached a $68,900 settlement with the school district to end his employment there.

The story recapped a list of serious financial errors that occurred at APS over the last few years and included this passage:

“No one from the district has publicly blamed Bateman for these errors.”

I saw that sentence and wondered why it was there. According to past Journal stories, didn’t Bateman – a former UNM finance official – join the school district in the spring of 2009, after those errors were committed or set in place? In fact, wasn’t he even credited with discovering and rectifying some of them?

Reader David E. Stuart, an associate provost emeritus at UNM, picked up on it too. In his letter to the editor, “APS Budget Woes Predate CFO,” he wrote:

The sentence…leads the average reader to believe Bateman could have some how been responsible for the seriously off-base bookkeeping, and that is utterly irresponsible per the Journal’s earlier reporting which made it clear these basic havoc-causing financial errors occurred before Bateman went to work for APS.

The Journal argued loud and clear in a series of pushy editorials that Bateman be cut loose on financial grounds. You got your way, so why pile on and imply that he might have been part of the problem. Not fair. Not clear and not true. A clarification is in order.

I have to say, I agree. Intimating that Bateman had anything to do with the colossal errors that predated him is not only unfair – it’s just plain wrong.

So what about it, Journal?