CUSD Update, Jan. 5
Editorial staff

The effort to recall two Capo holdover trustees (Marlene Draper and Sheila Benecke) is nearing the Jan. 29 deadline to get signatures. Residents have reported seeing professional signature gatherers working at storefronts. Hiring professionals isn’t a sign of weakness, as nearly all successful efforts requiring a high number of signatures end up in the hands of professionals.

Recall supporters got a boost on Dec. 27 with an article in OC Weekly, “The Real Portables of South County.” http://www.ocweekly.com/features/features/the-real-portables-of-south-county/28259/

Writer Daffodil J. Altan described the rundown condition of some portables, which has been a talking point of recall supporters. A paragraph of her observations closely aligns with parent complaints:

On my first day of exploration, in a mere five hours, I traveled throughout the district and visited about a dozen of the district's 56 schools. Here, in the middle of pristine South County, I saw valleys of concrete lined with dozens of rickety, sometimes windowless classroom portables, nestled among hills of new homes. I saw rotting wood. I saw wide-open circuit boxes with wires hanging out of them like vines. I smelled mildew in classrooms. I saw small holes in the bottoms of some portables that hinted at animal gnawings (although I couldn't prove this for a fact).

District officials proceeded with a $53 million Taj Mahal administration center (completed in 2006) while many classrooms were deteriorating. The contrast between the administration center and the portables became one of the reasons parents began the first effort to recall trustees in 2005.

As a huge underlining problem, the wasteful spending in CUSD has not changed – despite two trustees being dumped in the 2006 election and a series of new superintendents and interim superintendents. Even with a half-billion-dollar annual budget, CUSD can’t make ends meet. A parent commented on a discussion board, quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger, “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” (That apparently was Arnold talking before he became part of the spending problem.)

The parent went on to explain how CUSD got into such deep trouble: unqualified administrators making poor facilities-planning decisions, such large-scale wasteful spending as the administration center, construction contracts that resulted in rampant waste and attorneys who gave bad advice and took cases without merit to court. And that’s just the beginning.

As another controversial matter, the boundary discussions are not going particularly well, and perhaps no one expected they would. Boundaries have become flashpoints, particularly when some of them were drawn for political reasons or by using faulty data. Some parents reviewing the data said school district officials overseeing the process were incompetent.

Judging by the November 2006 election when holdover trustees were swept out of office, constituents want change. Holdover Trustee Duane Stiff has shown promise on a couple votes, but he’s also shown a lack of resolve to change the majority by voting consistently with the three reform-minded trustees who were elected in 2006.

Large numbers of parents and other constituents don’t trust the old trustees, the hand-picked administrators from the old regime or the process by which decisions are still being made.