By KHRISNA VIRGIL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kvirgil@tribunemedia.net

GREG Gomez, FNM North Abaco bye-election candidate, was an educator at least once in the Miami-Dade County Public School system, school officials confirmed yesterday.

Chief Communications Officer John Schuster’s assistant, who did not wish to be named told, The Tribune that the Human Resources Department had combed their databases which produced records that Gomez taught at the Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo, Florida.

The assistant could neither give a time frame of Gomez’ tenure as a teacher at that school.

She said: “The name shows up as one of our employees, that’s what I can confirm and that was confirmed with the office of Human Resources. Lawton Chiles Middle School, that’s the one that came up first in the system which is configured to show the most recent placement.”

When asked if they could confirm any other possible schools that Gomez could have taught at, she said that the system would only give the most recent assignment and showed no others. Gomez recently said that he also taught at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Miami and the Carol City Middle School in Miami Gardens.

“The other two schools would have only showed up if he had multiple assignments at the same time,” she said.

With that, The Tribune further asked if her office would have been able to name any documents that were submitted by Gomez that could confirm his nationality and status in the US. A request for that information, she said, would have to be sent through e-mail. She said results could take months to produce.

“Right now I have 200 of these requests to be filled, it will take months to get the results that you want. We get several thousands of these per year.”

The Miami-Dade County Public School System, she said has 80,000 employees with 30,000 students which would take an enormous amount of time.

Calls were then made to FNM Chairman Darron Cash in an attempt to have the FNM produce confirmation of Gomez’ other teaching engagements. The party on Wednesday night said they have had “sight of pay slips” as evidence that Gomez taught, over a four-year-period, as a substitute teacher at three different schools. They said there was also proof that he had one point was a full time teacher at one of the schools.

Mr Cash asked if this newspaper was acting as a court proceeding that would never be satisfied with information provided to us by his party.

He was informed that members of the public and more specifically the people of North Abaco should be given an opportunity to know the truth and come to their own conclusions.

“This party,” Mr Cash said. “Has no intention to release anymore information at this time.”