Gullixson: What’s with Santa Rosa’s school board?
In this space last week, columnist Pete Golis offered his thoughts on the new and relationally improved Santa Rosa City Council. “Who are these people?” he asked. Given the antipathy of the past, he didn’t recognize them. Yes, it’s amazing what an election, a new city manager and a new year can do.
But here’s the bad news. For reasons that remain something of a mystery, the Santa Rosa school board now seems to have cornered the market on government dysfunction.
It’s all there. The distrust. The backbiting. The hostility. If the school board were a reality TV show, sponsors would be clamoring for a second season. But I’m not sure Santa Rosa is.
The divide consists of board members Laura Gonzalez, Frank Pugh and Ron Kristof on one side and President Donna Jeye and board members Bill Carle, Larry Haenel and Jenni Klose on the other. In the center is Socorro Shiels, who has shaken things up since taking over as superintendent three years ago, replacing Sharon Liddell who had held the post for nearly a decade. But she has clearly ruffled feathers, particularly among teachers. The majority firmly supports her while, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, those in the minority don’t, at least not in many areas. And the enmity between the groups has reached unhealthy extremes.
Never has it been more evident than at the last school board meeting where the focus was on an allegation, made by the head of the teachers association, that Shiels had dropped the ball on a proposal that would have saved the district $2 million on a bus contract. Shiels didn’t even pass the proposal on to the board, the allegation went.
An independent investigator was hired, and the findings were announced at that April 22 meeting before a crowd thick with teachers, who, it should be noted, are at an impasse in negotiations on a new three-year contract. Thus, anything that shows the district is hiding or wasting money bolsters the union’s contention that the district has the resources to meet its demand for a 5 percent boost - 3 percent in salaries and 2 percent in benefits.
But, as the investigation showed, there was no cover-up. A Nov. 5 letter sent from the West County Transportation Agency that outlined the potential savings if the district joined the agency was, in fact, sent to board members on Nov. 12. The members just overlooked it. Given the volume of material they receive, it’s understandable. What’s not is why it took a private investigator to figure that out. How much money and energy was wasted on that?
Even if the directors wanted to jump on the proposal, there was still the not-so-small matter of the district already being under contract with another bus company, a contract that isn’t due to expire for three years.
The findings were particularly embarrassing for Kristof, who had said he was “outraged” that he hadn’t been alerted about the proposal, and for Amy Stern, the president of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association, who accused the superintendent of “blatant violations of trust.”
The investigator and board majority called particular attention to Kristof’s behind-the-scenes efforts to raise questions about Shiels’ actions. “What happened here was about accusation and damaging peoples’ reputations,” Jeye said at the time. She said Shiels and other staffers deserved an apology.
But it did not end there. On Friday, Kristof sent us an eight-page, 4,000-word response to our coverage, including an April 24 editorial (“A convenient story too good to be true”) in which we suggested that the district and its students would be better served “if the members of the school board start working with a presumption of goodwill - and start acting like adults.”
His response is too long to publish here, but it’s available on pressdemocrat.com. (It’s attached to the online version of this column.)
In brief, Kristof said he “was in no position to accuse any individual of withholding information or wrongdoing.” But he added, “in my mind the public trust had been compromised by the lack of information and communication.” He acknowledged the 4-3 division on the board, noting how it has “hardened” in recent months. “This is not something I want to hide or downplay because it will only lead to increased frustration,” he wrote. “There are some personal differences, but they should not be the topic of public discourse. … The divide is clearly political.” He said the board majority sees his actions “as an impediment and uses current protocols to marginalize me.”
Kristof concludes by saying that the district, among other things, should “provide me with an attorney of my choice to assist me with processing concerns that were not addressed over the last two years by the board leadership and to help develop a legal framework for me to operate …”
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