A curated reel of public-agency gaffes, preserved in their original public-records format, for the education of parents everywhere.
Welcome to the Blooper Reel. Every entry on this page is a public employee, on a public account, doing public business, saying something that — when held up next to a second document the same agency also produced — is pretty funny. Not ha-ha funny. Funny the way it is funny when somebody slips on a banana peel and the banana peel is the one they themselves put on the floor ninety minutes earlier.
We publish the documents verbatim, exactly as their authors wrote them, with exactly the contradicting document pulled from exactly the same filing cabinet. We do not editorialize. We do not add adjectives. We do not need to. Government employees, when given a .gov email account and a bad day, are fully capable of generating their own blooper material. We are merely the archive.
How a document gets on the Blooper Reel. Every published entry is a document that is (a) filed with a government agency, (b) obtainable under a public records request, or (c) otherwise already a matter of public record. No anonymous accusations. No rumor. No private communications between two people. If we do not have the paper, it does not go on the reel.
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Starring: Alan I. Strauss, South Regional Superintendent, Teaching & Learning · Broward County Public Schools ·
alan.strauss@browardschools.com
On the morning of January 23, 2026, at 8:58 AM, Broward County Public Schools General Counsel Susan Hofstetter put it in writing to district staff: "Both parents have shared parental responsibility."
Seventy-two minutes later, at 10:10:20 AM, South Regional Superintendent Alan Strauss sent the following email to BCPS Superintendent Howard Hepburn. We invite you to read it and locate the moment at which Mr. Strauss either forgot, ignored, or mathematically repealed what his own general counsel had written down one hour and twelve minutes earlier.
The email (verbatim)
From: "Alan I. Strauss" <alan.strauss@browardschools.com>
To: "Howard D. Hepburn" <howard.hepburn@browardschools.com>
Date: 1/23/2026 10:10:20 AM
Subject: Re: Urgent- please please help
The main issue is that the mother stopped speaking to him back in May. He wants the schools to solve the lack of communication issue, which general counsel office has stated the school is not to get involved in. I will be speaking with the parent on Tuesday. He is aware of it but continues to send multiple emails per day. He lives in Marco Island. Therefore, he is not the custodial parent.
Alan Strauss
South Regional Superintendent, Teaching & Learning
754-321-3210
Screenshot
The counter-document (same morning, 72 minutes earlier)
From: Susan Hofstetter, BCPS General Counsel
Date: 1/23/2026 8:58 AM
Classification: Internal BCPS email
Both parents have shared parental responsibility.
For the record: residence in a different county is not a legal basis, under Florida law, for converting a shared-parental-responsibility parent into a non-custodial one. Florida Statute § 61.13 governs parental responsibility. It says a lot of things. It does not say "Marco Island."
Where to pull it yourself
Both emails are part of the BCPS internal record and were included in a 682-page evidentiary packet filed with the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings. They are obtainable via a Florida Statute § 119 public records request to Broward County Public Schools.
The editor is confirming the primary-source document before this blooper goes on the reel. Check back soon.
You've seen something on a .gov email, in a court filing, in a CAD log, or in a public records response that is, shall we say, informationally inconsistent with the document the same agency produced down the hall? Send it over. One human reads every submission personally. No bots. No auto-publish. No database. Just a real person and an email.