PD Editorial: A convenient story too good to be true

It was a convenient narrative. Amid tense negotiations between school teachers and Santa Rosa City Schools over a new three-year contract, the allegation arose that school Superintendent Socorro Shiels intentionally hid from the school board a proposal that would have saved the school district $2 million on a school bus contract - money that could have been used to bolster salaries.

The smoking gun was a Nov. 5 letter sent from the West County Transportation Agency that outlined the potential savings if the district joined the agency, a joint powers authority made up of 16 local school districts.

School board member Ron Kristof said he was “outraged” that he hadn’t been alerted about the letter. Amy Stern, the president of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association, accused the superintendent of “malfeasance,” leading to a packed house at Wednesday’s school board meeting.

There was just one problem. It wasn’t true.

An independent investigation released at the meeting found that the Nov. 5 letter from the transportation agency arrived at the district office Nov. 13 - and was emailed to the school trustees the following day. Furthermore, there was no $2 million that was suddenly going to fall out of the sky. To join the JPA, the district would have had a matter of days to complete all of the paperwork and negotiations necessary to meet the agency’s deadline for a commitment. As Trustee Bill Carle noted at an Oct. 22 meeting in which the bus costs were discussed - a discussion the prompted the letter from the authority - the timing wasn’t going to work.

And there was another problem. The district already is under contract with another bus company, a contract that won’t expire for three years. Any calculation of savings in joining the JPA would need to take into account the cost of getting out of the current contract.

In short, there were good reasons why the district didn’t and shouldn’t have quickly committed to this offer. What defies explanation is why this issue - which by all appearances could have been resolved with a phone call or two - reached such levels of public antipathy.

Unfortunately, it’s as much a product of the dysfunction on the school board these days as it is the environment that surrounds contract negotiations. This situation was allowed to get out of hand for one reason - the willingness to believe this narrative was true was greater than the desire to seek, or wait for, the truth.

In particular, the report by a Sacramento-area attorney raised questions about Kristof’s role in provoking this environment of distrust. The report also found that Stern accused Shiels without a proper assessment of the facts, or she “relied on incomplete information from unknown sources.”

Santa Rosa teachers already have a good argument for why they deserve a raise and an increase in benefits. They don’t need to resort to raising these kinds of fanciful charges to curry public favor.

While we’ve come to expect this type of shenanigans during contract negotiations, we don’t expect it of a functioning school board.

The fact remains that the district may yet find savings in joining the JPA. But as it evaluates this and other proposals, the district as a whole and school children in particular will be better served if the members of the school board start working with a presumption of goodwill - and start acting like adults.