The superintendent of Columbus city schools is claiming someone created a series of fictitious, sexually-charged text messages between him and another person and distributed the texts in an effort to hurt the school district.
“The messages are fake and did not come from me,” Dr. Philip Hickman, the superintendent of the Columbus Municipal School District, said in a statement last week.
“Someone unknown to me,” Hickman said, “spent a lot of time writing and distributing these fabricated messages in an attempt to divert me from my task of educating students with the ultimate goal of hurting the Columbus Municipal School District.”
Other local media outlets have been reporting about the alleged texts since Friday.
The Dispatch on Tuesday obtained a printed copy of the alleged messages. They depict approximately 95 exchanges between two people. They discuss meeting and efforts to be discreet. There is a nude photograph of someone other than Hickman. They discuss a trip Hickman took last fall to Washington, D.C., when he attended the Symposium on Open Education. Included is a photograph of Hickman with Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, which was presumably taken at the event. Hickman posted an identical photograph on his Twitter account on Oct. 29. The exchanges also include what appears to a video of napkins with an official emblem on them and a reference to a presentation at The White House. The video does not appear on Hickman’s known social media accounts. In the exchanges, the date on both the photo and video is Oct. 29, the day Hickman gave a presentation at the symposium.
At one point in the exchanges a tiff arises and one of the people bemoans that his career could be in jeopardy.
Hickman did not respond to multiple messages last week and this morning.
In his statement Friday, however, he said: “There is no truth to these phony messages.”
The superintendent suggested that any photographs included in the messages “have been posted on social media in the past.”
“It was not difficult for someone to pull these pictures and alter them as they did,” Hickman said. “In fact, there are apps available now to create fake text messages, no matter what the intent.”
The goal of whoever created the fake messages, he said, was to hurt the school district.
“It saddens me that someone wants to hurt the Columbus Municipal School District and our community in such a way,” Hickman said. “However, this will not lessen my resolve to educate students every day. We are entrusted with a great responsibility to our students and this is what we do. Anonymous fake text messages aimed at me and the district will not deter me from my mission.”
Angela Verdell, president of the CMSD school board, declined to comment on the alleged text messages but offered a written statement on the general mission of the district.
CMSD serves more than 4,000 students.
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