Lucia Mar Unified School District needs oversight

October 6, 2024

OPINION by PAUL BISCHOFF

The California School Boards Association states on its website: “Citizen oversight of local government is the cornerstone of democracy in the United States. School board members are locally elected public officials entrusted with governing a community’s public schools. The role of the school board is to ensure the school districts are responsive to the values, beliefs, and priorities of their communities.”

The current Lucia Mar Unified School District Board of Trustees is derelict in its duty, as it neither provides oversight, nor is it responsive to the values, beliefs, and priorities of the community.

With respect to providing financial oversight, I reviewed meeting minutes from the past two years of board meetings. Each month, an item on the agenda called “ratification of expenditures” was placed on the consent agenda (the portion of the agenda for non-controversial items, which are voted on all at once to save time). The average non-payroll costs to the district are around $3.5 million per month.

One feature of the consent agenda is that any board member is allowed to “pull” an item for discussion if he or she feels it’s merited. For the past 24 months (and probably a lot longer), no board member has ever asked a single question about a single one of the $3.5 million worth of monthly non-payroll expenditures, not even once.

With respect to curriculum oversight, in June of 2021, the staff brought the Character Strong curriculum before the board for approval. Parents argued that it contained aspects of critical race theory, and asked the board to reject it, or at least wait to approve it until more review could take place.

Don Stewart, the president of the board at the time, showed that he had failed to review the curriculum at all when he commented, “I trust the staff to vet this stuff properly.” Another board member, presumed to be Vicki Meagher, showed scorn for the parents and their concerns by whispering during the discussion, “I don’t want to cave to these people.” (The board meeting was held over remote video conference.) The controversial curriculum was approved despite parental concern.

With respect to the values, beliefs, and priorities of the community, we all saw how our district was the very last in the area to return to in-person instruction during the COVID lockdowns. Our board showed disdain and contempt to the justified requests from parents to restore normal life to our community’s kids.

During the lockdowns, we had data we could use to know returning to school was safe. Red states and Sweden showed the way (and we knew a lot earlier than they’d like to admit), but our board fearfully resisted returning to in-person learning despite the learning loss we knew would come to our kids.

Now that we are experiencing this learning loss, and seeing how our kids were affected, are we willing to reelect this current board who hasn’t even deigned to acknowledge their grave error? How confident are we that they wouldn’t do this all over again if faced with a similar situation, despite knowing what we know now? Not one of them has ever apologized for what they did to our kids.

This current board is just simply not providing oversight. The number of 6-1 and 7-0 votes is astounding. The relationship between the current board and both the teachers’ union (despite their surprising endorsement) and the classified employees’ union (which endorsed us challengers) is challenging. The relationship between the current board and the parents of our district is fractured and needs healing.

Change is required.

And that’s not to mention the subterfuge the current board used to push the Measure H bond proposal onto the ballot, and the fact that the committee promoting the bond campaign, Friends of Lucia Mar Schools, is funded (over $100,000 to date) almost entirely by the architects and contractors who would be in line to profit from the bond work…”friends” indeed. Check out our Instagram account rebuild.the.board for details about that.

The choice is clear. It’s even more clear than it usually is. My two friends, Paul Hively and Mike Fuller, and I are running against the current status quo. We propose providing oversight of our district. We propose being responsive to the values, beliefs, and priorities of our community.

The current board, especially the three incumbents, want to continue on the current path. We propose a new path. Will you join us?

Paul Bischoff is a candidate for Area 1 of the Lucia Mar School District Board of Trustees. He and his running mates Paul Hively for Area 2 and Mike Fuller for Area 4 can be found at Rebuild the Board.