With three school board members second-guessing their prior decision in May to include two charter schools in a parcel tax resolution, Morgan Hill Unified School District’s governing body pulled a complete 180 and withdrew the proposal at a June 19 meeting.
Trustees Mary Patterson, Teresa Murillo and Tom Arnett changed their minds on placing the parcel tax on the Nov. 6 ballot and shifted the board majority from a 5-2 vote in favor (cast at a previous meeting) to a 5-1 vote against moving forward with the resolution.
“I believe what has happened is I have failed and we as a board have failed on two accounts,” Patterson said. “Number one, we failed when we launched the parcel tax and we didn’t instruct staff to bring charter schools to the table at the very beginning….And I think we failed again last week when we made a last-minute change to something that voters and our community have been looking to us for.”
She called the circumstances “sad and frustrating.”
Trustee David Gerard, who was the lead proponent of the board’s May 15 vote to include Charter School of Morgan Hill and Voices College-bound Language Academy in the revenue-generating measure, was absent from the June 19 meeting and did not participate in the proceedings.
Along with Patterson, Murillo and Arnett, Trustees Ron Woolf and Donna Ruebusch—who both were against including charter schools in the first place—voted to withdraw the parcel tax resolution.
“Since the May meeting, I couldn’t go anywhere without people asking me, ‘What’s going on? That’s not what you told us,” said Woolf, who was a lead campaigner for the successful $198 million Measure G bond approved by voters in November 2012. “If we don’t get feedback from the public (on the changes to the parcel tax), then we go out and this thing loses, everybody is in trouble. It will be a cold day before we ever get anything to pass.”
Trustee Gino Borgioli stood alone in wanting to continue on in the parcel tax process—with the charter schools included—and leave it up to the voters.
“I’m not in favor of spending anymore money at $15,000 per clip to do another survey,” said Borgioli of paying for a third survey. The district spent about $30,000 on two previous surveys that did not mention including charter schools. He also ripped into each of the district’s concerns about the May change and requested the vote be delayed until Gerard was present. “We changed one sentence in that (original) resolution.”
District staff explained that any promises made by representatives of the California Charter School Association, CSMH and Voices were not met in the weeks following the May 15 vote. Superintendent Steve Betando and Assistant Supe Kirsten Perez said CSMH and Voices deferred to the state charter group for any negotiations, which included agreeing to a Memorandum of Understanding on how the parcel tax monies would be allocated to the three entities.
“We continued to follow up and haven’t received anything (from CCSA),” said Perez regarding any recommendations for the MOU. She stressed the importance of having an agreement in place between all parties prior to moving forward with a ballot measure. “It’s going to take more time sitting down together.”
The charters also failed to reimburse the district a portion of their expenses for two surveys and other groundwork for developing the parcel tax proposal as they had said they would at the May 15 meeting, according to Betando and Perez.
The five-year, $75 parcel tax resolution was estimated to generate $1.5 million annually, with a small portion of the funds given to each of the two charter schools based on their student enrollment of Morgan Hill students. The majority of the property tax revenue would have still gone to MHUSD schools, however.
“This isn’t the district trying to cut charter schools out. This is everyone losing. This is the district losing its opportunity for the revenue. This is the charter schools losing an opportunity for the revenue,” Arnett said. “To me, it’s a sign that when we fight with each other we all lose.”
District and charter school officials did not rule out the possibility of working together for a future education parcel tax.
“We look forward to working together with the district on a future parcel tax in Morgan Hill that will benefit all public school students.,” said Frances Teso, founder of three Voices academies. “We heard loud and clear from the majority of the (MHUSD) board that they support that important inclusiveness….We are eager to work to that end.”
At the June 19 meeting, district staff, which was caught off guard during the May 15 meeting when the board voted to include charter schools in the parcel tax, raised several arguments for withdrawing the previously agreed upon resolution. On the agenda, they pointed to legal challenges regarding “inconsistent language, verification of eligible students and determination of allocation of funds.”
The information supplied by district staff June 19 was enough to sway three trustees to change their minds and cancel the parcel tax resolution before it was submitted to the County Registrar of Voters.
“The real issue is we haven’t had a good relationship between the district and charter schools,” said Arnett. “Charter schools are public schools. They’re not district schools but they are public schools….It’s fair to say that charter schools should be included in something like a parcel tax.”
Arnett, however, was skeptical that an agreement between the district and the charter schools on terms for a future parcel tax could ever be reached due to “irreconcilable differences” among those involved.
