THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, February 25, 1995            TAG: 9502250016
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   56 lines

VINCENT STILL WON'T STEP DOWN: BOARD SHOULD BOOT HIM

First seven jurors and now a judge have pronounced Charles W. Vincent guilty of nine times violating ethics provisions of state procurement law. The judge has ordered him to forfeit the seat on the Virginia Beach School Board to which he was elected last May.

Mr. Vincent refuses. He says he violated no law and no law requires him to step down before his appeals are exhausted. The criminal charges against him raised the question whether Charles Vincent is ethically knowledgeable enough to serve on the School Board. His reaction to judge and jury verdicts raises the question whether he is ethically educable.

A wiser member, realizing that his continued presence on the School Board compromises not only him but the board, would have resigned his seat long since.

But then a wiser member would not have solicited donations to retire his campaign debt from companies he had just helped select to do business with the school system. A wiser member would have known that such solicitations are inappropriate, with or without the School Board manual's explicit reference to the prohibitive statute, with or without benefit of legal seminars, with or without a political playbook.

Or as Judge Thomas S. Shadrick put it Wednesday in confirming the jury's guilty verdicts, ``a public official or a person of reasonable intellect'' may be reasonably assumed to know better.

Charles Vincent, the first elected official in Beach history to be ordered out of office and the first official in Virginia to be prosecuted for violation of this ethics provision, did not know better. From his public statements, he still does not. Mr. Vincent acknowledges only that his solicitations of school contractors were ``dumb.'' That could yet prove to be an effective criminal defense. It is no recommendation for School Board service.

If Mr. Vincent will be the last to acknowledge any wrongdoing on his part, apparently the School Board will be next-to-last. Except for Joe Taylor and Vice Chairman June Kernutt, the board has left its dirty linen to the courts - and through a series of revelations, its ethical standards in the mud.

During his campaign and since his election, Mr. Vincent repeatedly touted his ``doctoral'' degree in ``counseling psychology,'' without explaining that it was conferred by an unaccredited ``college'' operating under a California religious exemption. Without the proper authorization and with obviously mis-lead-ing implication, he used the state seal on campaign handouts.

Bad enough that one member of the School Board would prove so ignorant not of law, not of politics, but of ethics. Worse, most members of the board waited, and still wait, for the courts to get Mr. Vincent off their board and the board itself off the hook.

KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH SCHOOL BOARD by CNB