The recall is in the mail for senior School Board Trustees Tom
Kinoshita, Del Foster, Jan Masuda and Board President George
Panos.
The recall is in the mail for senior School Board Trustees Tom Kinoshita, Del Foster, Jan Masuda and Board President George Panos.
According to CARE spokeswoman Victoria Battison, the second try at starting the recall process is under way.
“We put them (notices of intent to circulate recall petitions) in the mail today, by certified mail, so they should receive them in next few days,” she said Thursday. “So we are back on track in our efforts. Now we will wait for the petition to be approved by the registrar of voter, then collections of signatures will commence.”
CARE, or Community Alliance for Responsible Education, was formed last year to remedy what members perceived were grave problems within the Morgan Hill School District, including alleged financial mismanagement, a deteriorating relationship with employees of the district and a failure by the four trustees to represent their electorate.
Three of the four trustees that have been targeted for recall are up for election in November. The filing period for candidates in that election begins in July. Foster, Masuda and Panos were elected in 2000.
Kinoshita received a four-year term from voters in November 2002.
Foster said late Thursday that he had not received the recall noticed but that he was not concerned.
“My concern is that the wonderful things that are going on in this district – and that includes our teaching staff, our classified staff, our administrators, our students – are going to suffer from this affect,” Foster said.
“Our very important volunteer efforts in the district – our parents, our relationships with businesses in the community – may be affected as people do not want to get involved with this. I am also concerned that people will be reluctant in the future to step forward to serve as trustees,” he said.
Foster said he did not think that CARE would be able to gather enough signatures for the recall.
The trustees were first served with notices at the beginning of the Dec. 15 School Board meeting. Once the petition went to the registrar of voters, one of the original 10 signatures, required to serve the notices, was discovered to be invalid, so CARE prepared a second notice with valid signatures.
The registrar has 10 days to review the petition and give an answer, and the group would have 10 days to make another correction if necessary. Once it is approved, CARE has 120 days to gather signatures.
After approval and the collection of the signatures the petition is filed and the registrar has 30 business days for signature checking.
Once the signatures are verified, the petition is filed and, 88 to 100 days after, there can be an election.
There are approximately 28,000 registered voters in the district, so CARE must gather at least 5,600 signatures.
Battison said the group plans to gather signatures in “traditional ways.”
“We’ll have people in front of grocery stores, going door to door in neighborhoods, those kinds of things,” she said. “We’ll also have something available on the Internet. We have a Yahoo users’ group right now (Yahoo! groups: CAREMHU), but we’re also pulling together a website that will be more user friendly, it will list reasons, justifications; it will have archived news articles, contact information.”
Battison said membership in CARE has increased, “easily doubled,” since the start of the process.
