Opinion: Laguna Beach Unified School Board Still in Denial

I applaud the Laguna Beach Unified School District Board for not wasting more pubic school staff time and resources defending its indefensible unilateral decision to end summer early.

If not rescinded at the hastily called emergency meeting, the new calendar -- falsely touted as a truancy prevention measure -- would have triggered a boycott with the potential for 75% truancy on any school days in August. A recall was also a real prospect the School Board sensed, as they realized the opposition was spreading beyond the parents they stonewalled on the Social Host Ordinance controversy.

The School Board is going to regret taunting parents for not attending the meeting at which the calendar was changed based on false statistics and a one-page staff report. Now we are going to attend as often as we must to find out why the Board blamed public school employee unions for their decision to end summer early without disclosure to the community.

The classified employees union attended the emergency meeting and disowned the calendar change, while the faculty union's absence and silence spoke volumes. But whether the School District or the faculty union drove the calendar change, it was the School Board's duty to manage the process with integrity, and they did just the opposite and conducted themselves in a shoddy manner.

We also want to know why the Superintendent reportedly has been allowed to recruit her pals from former jobs to create what many parents see as a culture of cronyism in the School District. While we are at it, how much of our tax dollars have been spent on contractors and consultants to perform educational management duties for which we already pay high-salaried employees?

Finally, if the Board thinks sandbagging the City Council to get the Social Host Ordinance passed is the end of that story, they better think again. Use of false information by District employees who acted as political lobbyists at the taxpayer's expense will come back to haunt the School Board.

It is time for the School Board members to stop acting like martyrs when parents finally just say no to divisive actions. They ask us not to vilify them, but then they vilify parents who dare to speak out. We don't need a School Board that thinks we are impressed when they pretend to be educational technocrats. Just represent the community and keep it simple.

And we sure as heck don't need high-paid educators who act like politicians. School bureaucrats paid by residents should be barred from acting under color of their official responsibility to advocate policies not yet formally adopted by our elected leaders.

So, see you at the next meeting.

-- Howard Hills