EDITOR: Our superintendent
’s career as an effective leader in our district is over.
Hopefully, she will have the grace to resign immediately. Her
legacy to this district is a wide array of damages left in her
wake. The lack of ethical leadership has crept into every process
that the district has undertaken.
EDITOR:
Our superintendent’s career as an effective leader in our district is over. Hopefully, she will have the grace to resign immediately. Her legacy to this district is a wide array of damages left in her wake. The lack of ethical leadership has crept into every process that the district has undertaken.
Members of our community who have stepped forward to serve the district on committees have often been dismayed by the manipulation, spin and half-truths that district leadership routinely apply. For anyone seeing the big picture, this district has not been about serving our community. Instead, it has become an experimental playground for ambitious administrators from outside our community to exploit as they build their nest eggs and resumes all the while repeating the failures of their past districts.
Allowing this to happen has been the work of our “senior” board members. At best this has occurred through blissful ignorance and the naive belief in the sincere motives of all. At worst, the board has been both negligent and complicit. Tom Kinoshita, George Panos, Jan Masuda and Del Foster have a lot to answer for. They also have a very narrow window to demonstrate representative leadership if they are to salvage any support from the community.
Recalls are indeed real things. It is time for Kinoshita, Panos, Masuda and Foster to heed the warnings that have repeatedly brought to their attention by the community and teacher and classified staff, as well as the new board members whom the “senior members” seem to demean at every turn.
Thank God for Shelle Thomas, Amina Khemci, and Mike Hickey for having the courage and integrity to take on the daunting task of convincing Mr. Kinoshita and his three senior colleagues that something is terribly wrong with both the ethics and practices of the administration in this district. The senior members have become little more than pawns in the administration’s deliberate strategy to force an educational vision on this community without the needed informed consensus. The community hopes but is waiting to see the entire board close ranks together and do the right thing.
There are two current opportunities to demonstrate representative leadership: Providing a new administration, and re-voting on the Small Learning Communities grant would be great places to start. This grant is a sweeping commitment leading to heterogeneous grouping and an experimental clustered educational plan. It was passed 4-3 by Kinoshita, Panos, Masuda and Foster despite the fact that all admitted that they had never even read the 80-page document that they received only hours before the vote. It is indeed the next step in the experimental resume building in which our administrators are actively and teaching staff are covertly engaged. This three-year implementation plan has been soft-pedaled to the teaching staff despite the fact that it carries specific obligations that both violate the collective bargaining contract as well as committing fiscal obligations that run beyond the duration of the grant. It appears that being ethically bankrupt is the administration’s current achievement – being fiscally bankrupt will be their legacy.
Sobrato, a $54 million now $83 million high school that was coerced from the community under threats of double session due to soaring enrollment, is the flagship of the administration’s controversial vision. This school will not only monopolize the district’s entire building fund, but to date, there is no viable plan to meet the operational costs of running another major campus without an influx of students.
Of course now declining enrollment and the plan (which has far more to do with launching their careers outside rather than with their service within the district) with only tentative and uniformed community and staff support remains as a recipe for diaster – a disaster that they will leave to the rest of us as they no doubt negotiate a golden handshake and escape from the mess that they have made.
An entire campus built around the clustered model-approved and carved in stone before anyone discussed the ramifications or even was made aware of the “vision.” None of our administrators will acknowledge or take ownership for his plan until they can place it squarely on the shoulders of an Ed Specs committee that is being lead by the nose to a forgone conclusion. The primary architects of this plan make Machiavelli look like an amateur. They have taken great measures to both deceive and isolate the four board members who have thus far allowed them to have their way.
And yet, after all is said and done, it really isn’t Carolyn McKennan and her staff who are to blame. The administrative practices that she has shown her mirror what she did in Soquel. Our School Board is responsible for not doing their homework. They have either purposefully or unwittingly allowed the superintendent her way, and the superintendent has in turn taken them for all they are worth. Will it be redemption or recall? The answer will be determined by their impending actions. We all hope that Tom, George, Jan and Del can wake up to the challenge.
Glen and Lloyd Webb,
Live Oak Teachers
