School board elections are often boring, but not this year. Our schools have increasingly been moving away from a focus on education and expanding into territory usually considered the province of parents, including mental health and social-emotional issues rarely touched in the past.
Education appears to be an afterthought; we’ve seen the steepest decline in academic performance in history. Parents who don’t like this are pushing back.
In past board meetings, discussions of facility maintenance and snooze-inducing financial presentations were common. Now we see deliberation of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” inappropriate materials in libraries, the display of flags promoting favored interest groups, and debate over whether parents should be notified when their kids are facing mental health crises.
Most are issues that rarely, if ever, made an appearance in past agendas but are now common.
This expansion of school activities beyond reading, writing and arithmetic has parents speaking out at board meetings. They’re realizing that the people they’re speaking to may have been elected by community votes but often don’t seem to pay attention to that community once elected.
Parents now realize most board members are elected with financial support from special interests, not parents. Primarily their local labor unions, who provide the bulk of the money spent on behalf of the most successful candidates for the board.
As always, in our political system, money can drive the board’s attention to issues their interests find important, which is not necessarily what parents consider central to schools.
Few have demonstrated this more completely than Oceanside Unified. Dominated by five board members, all elected with union support, Oceanside has taken every opportunity to minimize parent input at board meetings. One board member, from an email sent to an Oceanside City Council member, claims that it is necessary to “stem the tide of significant, repetitive invective voiced ad infinitum… “
Normally an elected official faced with unhappy constituents would want to listen to determine how to help. Instead, the Oceanside Unified board has taken steps to reduce public comment by moving it to the end of meetings, drastically limiting the time given to speakers, eliminating livestreaming of meetings, and shifting meeting start times to earlier in the afternoon.
This makes it more likely that parents will give up rather than speak out and ensure that whatever decisions the board makes are made in the dark.
“Pay no attention to the board behind the curtain” is Oceanside Unified’s message to the community.
Beyond stifling public input, the board also votes in ways that directly benefit district employees, using scarce education funds to give bonus “me too” raises to employees already enjoying significant six-figure incomes.
Last March, the board voted to give administrators (many of whom make $200,000/year or more) bonus raises that exceeded $10,000 per year. Despite the fact that their management of the district has resulted in academic performance near record lows.
And now we see that the administration is rewarding them by pulling out all the stops to help Board members running for re-election.
In September, Oceanside sent a mass mailer to the community clearly promoting the actions of their school board, a clear violation of election law in our state. Using public funds to help elect political candidates is called “electioneering” and is rightly illegal.
The Political Reform Act of 1974 prohibits school districts from sending mass mailings paid for with tax dollars that name school board members within 60 days of an election. Accordingly, a complaint has been filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) requesting this violation be investigated.
The most recent state testing (just released) shows that less than 40% of Oceanside’s kids are proficient in English and barely 29% in math. Yet, Oceanside Unified considers spending money on public relations for its Board more important than improving that performance.
During a time when many districts are facing financial difficulties in the future driven by weakened tax revenue and declining enrollment, this blatant misuse of education funding to help elect “friendly” board members demands the FPPC take action.
With such miserable performance at educating our kids and a clear focus on benefitting adults rather than improving that education, is it any wonder Oceanside Unified board meetings sometimes include parents expressing such “significant, repetitive invective”?
Perhaps we would not hear this “repeated ad infinitum” if we elected board members who listened to parents instead of only listening to their special interests. Perhaps we’ll try that this November!
Todd Maddison is a founder of the San Diego Schools and Parent Association advocacy groups and a long-time activist in Oceanside education.
