June 6, 2006 Address at CUSD Administration Center
by Kevin Murphy

We are here today to let the taxpayers and parents in the Capistrano Unified School District know the truth about the new CUSD administration building.

The most important thing to understand about the largest, most expensive school administration building in Orange County history is what it is not. It is not a school for our children. 

The second most important thing to understand about this building is how the district could afford such an extravagant building for administrators when Supt. James Fleming claimed the district was experiencing “budget cuts.”

Many of us parents wondered where the district got the money when the district claimed it couldn’t afford to give our teachers cost-of-living raises and threatened three of our schools with closure. We wondered how they came up with $35 million to build this unnecessary building when so many of our schools were doing without basic programs and supplies.

We parents started digging for answers. We reviewed hundreds of documents and found that on March 18, 2002, the CUSD school board approved a Certificate of Participation, or COP, to finance the new administration building. We learned that a COP is a type of loan, a bond that does not require voter approval. We also learned that the school board pledged two of our schools, Las Flores and Capistrano Valley High School, as collateral assets to secure the loan for their administration building. This means that our school board put these schools at risk, allowing bond holders who live outside Orange County to decide the fate of our schools, should CUSD default on the loan. 

We learned that this $35-million loan was also supposed to fund a 50-meter pool at Capistrano Valley High School and the sorely needed modernization at Newhart Middle School. We also learned that the money instead was spent on this building, leaving no money for Newhart’s modernization. The school board has recently acknowledged that Newhart needs to have some of its many portable classrooms replaced and bathrooms brought up to minimum California Department of Education standards, among other necessary repairs. However, since the money for Newhart was spent on the administration building, they will now have to take money from other schools to fix the problems at Newhart.

The trustees and superintendent claim they will save money on lease payments. We learned that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the principal and interest payments alone on this building are over $1.5 million per year, after rent from tenants is collected. The lease payment on their current facilities is about $550,000 per year. That leaves a deficit of almost $1 million per year. For a school district that can’t afford to pay for full-time librarians, school nurses and basic supplies in the classroom, this is inexcusable. 

We also learned that according to the most recent CDE report, CUSD has 861 portable classrooms and only 821 permanent classrooms. The life span of a portable or “temporary” classroom is about 10 years. Two hundred of the portables in CUSD are more than 25 years old, some with mold, others with dry rot. Parents and taxpayers in CUSD want to know how the administration can justify spending $35 million on this building when over half of the kids in the district are in trailers.

This building should be a source of pride. If our schools looked as good as this building, I and many other parents would be proud. But too many of our campuses are so overcrowded that kids have to sit on the blacktop to eat lunch, or are forced to share lockers or lug around 30-pound backpacks because there aren’t enough lockers to accommodate them. Too many of our campuses don’t have enough bathrooms, and existing ones are so poorly maintained kids won’t use them. Too many of our campuses look like dilapidated trailer parks.

As a result, this building is a source of shame, not pride. It’s time for the school board and superintendent to start putting our kids first, not themselves.

I invite you to visit our website: , to review some of the documentation that we have compiled to support our claims. The next time Supt. Fleming or the school board members make a claim, ask them to show you the proof, in writing. It’s time we start holding them accountable.