COLORFUL CAST: Ingersoll Trial Jury Deliberation Resumes Monday
March 7, 2015
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The mysterious Miss Fortune has covered the Ingersoll case from the beginning.
The descriptions of the colorful cast of characters in the trial of Dr. Steven Ingersoll makes me wish I had had time to attend.
The jury reconvenes on Monday, March 9 and no doubt will soon reach a verdict. Of course the government is hoping for conviction and Ingersoll continues to maintain his innocence.
I have no opinion on the case since I am acquainted with Dr. Ingersoll and his wife, Deborah, whose charges were dismissed by Federal Judge Thomas Ludington last week.
Alas, I have missed seeing the dazzling antics of Dr. Ingersoll's attorney, one Jan Geht, of Traverse City, also a CPA with an award for helping the IRS. and, as the blog glisteningquiveringunderbelly.com of one Miss Fortune (aka Anita Senkowski of Essexville) commented:
"One of the trial's more colorful personalities, attorney Mark Satawa, argued on behalf of his client, Roy Bradley. Satawa, of Southfield, described his client as "Inexperienced, over his head, and underwater." He characterized the federal government as "Godzilla" and his client as "the Geico lizard" and that the case against all involved is "a great big mess."The government saw something that they didn't like, that they didn't understand, and they went after it and everyone they thought was a part of it," he told the jury.
Meg Hackett, a Grand Rapids attorney representing the Grand Traverse Academy board, testified last Tuesday in Steven Ingersoll's federal fraud trial that during a May 20, 2013 Academy board meeting, Ingersoll asked the board to characterize his $3.5 million dollar indebtedness to the charter school as a "loan".
Ingersoll had told the school board of the for-profit charter school, Grand Traverse Academy, he needed help from them reclassifying money he took from the school on their books because he couldn't pay them back and pay the taxes on it.
Ingersoll is being charged with misappropriation of the funds and a variety of tax-related issues.
Chemical Bank now says he was free to do anything he wanted with the money he borrowed ostensibly to fix up the old Madison Avenue Methodist Church. So, apparently no crime there.
Educators in the Traverse City area are focused mainly on how Ingersoll is an optometrist not an educator and how he used his for-profit charter schools to push his vision therapy, IVL, (Integrated Visual Learning) as an alternative to special education services and his claim that IVL cures ADHD and Autism.
UpNorth Progressive quipped: "Let Dr. Steve Ingersoll be the poster child for School Choice. He's certainly earned it."
Ingersoll has not gotten much traction on his claim that the success of the curriculum is relevant to the trial. His Brighton Study of IVL results 20 years ago has been panned by the education community as "inconclusive" and not peer-reviewed.
MSU Music Education Professor Dr. Mitchell Robinson was quoted on New York education guru Diane Ravitch's blog last week talking about the relative merits of reading testing and the IVL methods results.
Ingersoll claims IVL cured 90 percent of children with ADHD attending his school and was so successful they were taken off Ritalin.
Opined UpNorth Progressive: "More people need to know the state of for-profit charter schools in Michigan, their lack of oversight from authorizers, and the continued operation of poor-performing "schools" receiving our tax funds."
The case has gotten off focus, it seems, with the pros and cons of charter schools and Ingersoll's methods often taking center stage.
It's as hard to get an accurate reading on the efficacy of Dr. Ingersoll's methods, although some parents claim their children have benefited from them, as it is to divine how the jury will come in next week.
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tennis1960 Says:
On March 10, 2015
at 03:35 PM
The guy is guilty PERIOD !
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Dave Rogers |
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