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I keep going back to the public record, reading and rereading the same stories, hoping to find something new. It’s hard to look straight into the disaster and harder still to look away. I study the articles—dated twelve, thirteen, fourteen years ago. There is my father’s face on the screen. I study the compendium of his crimes and memorize his misdeeds. My mind skips backward and forwards through time, piecing the narrative together, but often when I sit down to write, I end up scrolling or staring off into space. Days pass in a monolith of half-done deeds. I languish in the abyss of inaction. Then, just when I’m ready to surrender and let it all go, something appears to crystalize the process, and suddenly the story is writing itself.
That’s how I felt when I came across an opinion piece, penned by a parent whose children had attended my father’s schools and published five days after his death. I couldn’t believe I had never seen it before. Unlike the investigative reports, which are clear, factual, and plot-heavy, this piece reads like a script—ambivalent and character-driven—alive with my father’s presence and magnetism.
“I hope that when everything comes out, you’ll write the truth.” This does sound like my father. I too hear his voice. A few years before he pulled the trigger, my father gave me a sterling silver fountain pen. “You are a Great Writer, Neine,” he said as I opened the box. He said it as if he meant it: Great with a capital G, but his words made me feel tired and small. I shrank from his blessing.
The pen was heavy and shaped like a bullet. I tried writing with it, but it never felt good in my hand. By the time he died, the ink had run dry.
“You are the family historian,” he said when he gave it to me. “You’ll write the story.”
The problem was I never knew what story I was supposed to write.
The headlines were factual and incendiary. It was a riveting story: a disgraced educator and a corrupt former cop, accused of conflict of interests, theft of taxpayer dollars, fraudulent real estate schemes, and destruction of evidence. For months, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran stories accompanied by unflattering photographs and graphics that detailed the illicit flow of funds between the school and my father’s various business entities.
But the sympathy cards that flooded the mailbox in the weeks after my father’s death told a different story. I knew many of the signatories. The letters came from bereaved faculty, staff, parents, and students. I arranged the cards on the sideboard in the dining room, studying the messages of thanks and condolence. Some went on for pages: I don’t care what anyone says. Brien Gardiner helped our son when no one else would. I feel we have lost a great man. I wanted to write back, but I didn’t know how to respond.
In order to understand how far my father had fallen—you have to understand who he had been. Prior to the media revelations, legal review, and federal inquest, my father was one of the most respected educators in the city of Philadelphia. His experience in special education went all the way back to 1971. He was working for the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) when they filed a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The result was the first right-to-education decision in the nation, mandating free public education for all children with intellectual disabilities and laying the groundwork for the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. My father then worked for over twenty years in the public school system as a regional special education supervisor and school principal before joining the front lines of the charter school movement. He had founded two successful charter schools and was preparing to break ground on a third. He was in the process of developing the city’s first “cyber school,” and he had consulted with other founders on countless charters across the city and state. Everyone in the movement knew him. He was collaborating with the superintendent on district-wide projects and talking to politicians about national policy.
For many of his colleagues, the media revelations were devastating, almost unthinkable. Initially, people wanted to believe that the accusations were false, but a legal audit by the firm Ballard & Sphar definitively concluded my father “violated his fiduciary duties to PACS” and “in so doing has jeopardized PACS’ ability to fund capital projects and educational programming initiatives.” In a well-documented sixty-page report, legal auditors outlined brazen conspiracies and top-to-bottom corruption. I’ve read the report dozens of times over the years, and I’m still shocked by the outrageous terms of one of my father’s consulting contracts (which stipulated he would earn $94,000 for no more than 90 days of work per year and receive annual wage increases through 2016). The report also details a fraudulent real estate scheme by which my father used a shell non-profit to siphon $66,000/month from the school. The report further details an unauthorized $70,000 interest-free loan from the school to one of his business ventures, the construction of lavish executive offices, and almost one million dollars in missing funds. It explains how he exploited the school’s maintenance team for personal projects and submitted exorbitant expense reports. It’s shameful to look at, painful to accept. The legal team noted that “Gardiner’s conduct is particularly surprising and disappointing in light of the profound trust that PACS’ faculty, staff, parents, and students placed in him as PACS’ founder and a leader of the charter school community.”
The findings of the report were very clear, but his influence was so strong that, to this day, members of the community still hold to his vision. In September, I interviewed a member of the school’s founding faculty who asked to remain anonymous. I was surprised when she characterized my father as “an amazing man” and “a visionary.” “He would see it,” she explained. “And we would do it.”
“You have to remember,” she said of my father. “The school was his. It was his great labor.” She described how my father dedicated his life to building the school. And she explicitly harkened back to the Op-Ed. She recalled that my father had said that “When everything comes out, you’ll realize that I didn’t build this school just to steal from it.” Her voice broke when she said, “I don’t think he ever got that chance.”
I too remember vividly the excitement surrounding the birth of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School. I was in high school when my father first started collecting signatures and traveling to meetings at the state offices in Harrisburg. By the time I graduated, he had started a revolution and staged a coup. He found investors, got government grants, and converted a warehouse behind a shopping center on Roosevelt Boulevard into a school building, complete with a gym, cafeteria, technology labs, playing fields, and dozens of windowless classrooms.
The Philadelphia Academy was “an amazing experiment” with a noble mission: to provide exceptional academics while simultaneously creating a fully integrated educational model for neurodiverse children. Students with disabilities would be mainstreamed into general education classrooms as much as possible. Every child would get their needs met regardless of whether a student was high-achieving, nonspeaking, or twice-exceptional (gifted and disabled). Guided by the principle that everyone is capable of learning, PACS created educational spaces where children with disabilities would be integrated into the social fabric of the school—paving the way for broader societal integration and cultural change.
The teacher I spoke with asserted that she had never seen anything like it before—and, to this day, she has never seen an institution do special education better.
About one-third of the PACS student population had a documented disability. Some had relatively low support needs; others had physical limitations. The terms of the charter stipulated that the city and state would pay more than double for each student with an Individualized Education Plan. The bottom line was that disability was good for business.
These were the earliest days of the charter school movement, and people were excited about freedom, possibility, and promise. Teachers would have creative agency over their pedagogy. Parents would have a choice over where their children went to school and a voice in the process. PACS provided hope and resources to parents and students in need.
If the Philadelphia Charter School was a “family,” my dad was the literal “founder” and the symbolic “father.” My father had a way of making people feel seen, heard, and understood. My father listened more than he spoke and looked you in the eye. He had a nice speaking voice, deep and smooth, and he was exceptionally good with names. He knew every student’s first and last name. He knew their mother’s name, their father’s name, who their cousins were, and how everyone was connected in the social fabric of the community. When a family was in financial crisis, he gave money from his own wallet. When a student was in the hospital, he visited. When there was a death in the community, he attended the funeral. He made people feel like they mattered.
Growing up, people always said I took after him. I was also very good with names—and did not shy from looking strangers in the eye.
My father had an “inimitable way” about him. People believed him. He had a credible, forceful demeanor and gave clear directions. People trusted him to make good decisions. That’s why the revelations came as such a blow, such a betrayal.
Toward the end of our interview, the faculty member told me, “Your father made mistakes, but we can’t forget him for who he was,” and, in her estimation, his biggest mistake was trusting Kevin O’Shea. Kevin was a former Philadelphia police detective who rose quickly through the ranks at PACS. He was promoted from parent volunteer to Director of Facilities to CEO, in an emergency vote that was pushed through the board. No one could understand it because Kevin had no formal training or background in education and was, by all accounts, a bully, who intimidated and belittled the staff. “Your father didn’t like to be mean to people,” she told me. “That other person delighted in it.”
When my father went down, Kevin went down with him, eventually pleading guilty to viscerally offensive crimes like pocketing lunch money, vending machine proceeds, and donations for Toys for Tots. The Charter Report describes “O’Shea’s fraudulent behavior ” and “abuse of his position” as “pervasive.” Nobody liked Kevin, and the language of the report does little to mask its authors’ disdain, stating that “O’Shea plainly intended to extract unwarranted respect… while cheating” the PACS community, but even then no one “could have predicted that O’Shea would have engaged in the fraudulent behavior [to the extent] described herein.”
There was some speculation that perhaps my father was “outwitted by Kevin” and “naive to his real motives.” The faculty member I interviewed said, “Kevin had a lot of things set up to make it look like Brien had taken all this money… I think there were a lot of things that Kevin did to make Brien look more guilty than he was.”
I recently shared this theory with my stepbrother Christian, who was a special education student in my father’s schools from the time he was seven years old until he aged out at twenty-one. When I asked him if he thought Kevin might have been calling the shots all along, he got quite a moment. “No,” he said finally. “He [Dad] was the boss of the whole school.” A long silence settled between us before he said, “And it’s about time the truth came out.”
I too feel like I’ve always been waiting. My whole life, I’ve been biting my tongue, biding my time, and trying to find the right words. I’ve always been writing this story.
About six months before the first media revelations, I fell into a prolonged period of insomnia. I had a desk in a small graduate student office in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University. I would often go there at midnight. Sometimes the night janitor would be vacuuming quietly in the lobby, but I always had the third floor to myself. I would close the door and open my notebook, look out over the rooftops and down at the page. Those long nights I wrote as if in a trance. I didn’t know what I was writing; I just watched as the words spilled incoherently onto the page. I would then type up and print out my puzzling notes, underline interesting phrases and images, and rearrange the fractured lines into poems. The result was a collection of tight, weaponized poems full of oblique references to my father, a handgun, an impenetrable mystery, and a sense of dread.
It’s been thirteen years since my father died, but I haven’t managed to write my way out of the story, to find my way through to the end.
The facts may already be a matter of public record, but there is no such thing as a true story. The truth is not one thing or another, not black or white. It’s a third unsayable thing.
‘The truth is always—and only—a poem.
Join me as I unravel my father’s crimes, examining the price of shame and the consequences of our lies.
Because “Poetry is what survives.”