He was the director of Internet Technology until Dr. Birdwell promoted a family member of hers into that position. What I love most about this is that they neglected to mention that the previous superintendent KNEW and APPROVED him utilizing district computers in his home since he worked from home. In addition, they not only removed the districts computers from his home, but his families personal ones as well. Let's not forget that the district FORCED him to take a 3 week vacation this summer when he was in the middle of a huge project of getting the new school into our district ready for opening. Then they toook that project from him and gave it to another who FAILED to do it and blamed him.

As far as the outrageous claim about the smart boards, they were new to the district last year and a select few classrooms at each school actually had them. I doubt that this so called alien tracker had anything to do with them crashing. The computers at the district are always dealing with one thing or another.

As an employee of the district, I feel this is nothing more than slandering of Brads name. A good majority of his team walked out after he did, only to become bullied or slandered as well. How does that make you feel Dr. Birdwell? How do YOU sleep at night with all the bullying you do?

Although everyone has an opinion, I really find this article one sided. Unfortunately, I don't feel there will be another side that is equally published in the paper.

This ship is sinking and I only hope there are survivors when it does.

More comments from that newspaper story- http://www.azcentral.com/news/article...

It is true that Brad was replaced by one of Birdwell's "family members". After nine years working for the district, his salary and title were cut, so that Birdwell could put into place her loyalists.
This article is extremely one sided and the reporter should be ashamed for not publishing all the facts.
In the nine years that Brad worked for the district, the student population more than quadrupled, thus half a dozen new schools opened, and Brad and his understaffed team set all the technology up for each one.
Now, that Birdwell is in charge, she used money that should have gone to the classrooms to pay for outside consulants to dig into all employees in order to find dirt on them and force them to resign. Since she had tech consultants who had access to everyones' acounts, who is to say that the consultants did not do some of these alleged installs and such, and set Brad up? Brad was obviously on Birdwell's hit list- thus to pay cut and title demotion. And if there is any question as to whether or not Birdwell has a hit list- take a look at the number of employees forced to resign/ terminated during her 18 months in charge.

Mr. Niesluchowski had permission from previous Superintendents to have the equipment at his home. It was there so he could work from home since HUSD was understaffed and he needed to put in very long hours. The police found NO EVIDENCE of any wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Niesluchowski. Somehow the reporter failed to mention that in the article and painted him as a thief.

Dr. Birdwell and Sara Bresnahan should be ashamed of themselves for getting this article published. There are so many lies being told it is astounding. The reporter obviously did NO fact checking at all. She simply got the story from Sara Bresnahan and ran it. I hope Mr. Niesluchowski takes action against the school district and AZCentral.com.

This newspaper is reporting LIES. Do they even do any fact checking? I will point out the lies as a former Higley IT Staff member that left right before Brad.

1) Brad was the IT Director, not a Network Systems Administrator.
2) BOINC is SETI. Not another program. BOINC is the controller program for SETI.
3) SETI was never installed on every computer in the district. Only at 4 schools due to it accidentally making into our master image.
4) When that error was discovered we immediately implemented a group policy to turn the service off.
5) During our next re-image cycle SETI had been removed from district computer systems anyway.
6) 1.2 – 1.6 million dollars? Get real. Maybe for all the money they are paying for these hack consultants.
7) There IS multiple layers of firewall security in place at Higley. Without exposing the inner workings of my former employers network setup the allegation that there is no network security is blatantly false.
8) 18 computers at his home of which only 5 were district computers and he had approval from the former superintendent to have them at his home.
9) Failed to train his staff? Come on, I worked there for a few years and learned more from Brad then I have from any other person in my life.
10) SETI requires no significant power to run because it only uses spare CPU cycles. It does not “wear out cpu’s sooner” Idiots.
11) The SMART boards don’t work because SMART boards suck. They should have bought Prometheans. We tried to tell them that for 9 months.

As for his performance review back in 2006 I cannot speak to that since it was SUPPOSED to be confidential. I will say that most of those claims are bogus considering the purchasing department never gave IT a finite budget to begin with so how are we supposed to budget things without any guidance?