Erin Kutnick’s Blog

Finally on Wednesday evening, the Capistrano Unified School Board of Trustees approved the 2009/2010 budget.  This was just days before it was due at the county or the school district might have been completely cash-strapped and at risk for being taken over by the state.

After a completely chaotic meeting on Monday night where the budget vote failed 3-4, Trustees were forced to call a special meeting to again try to come up with a plan.  At the heart of the issue is what programs to cut in order to reduce spending for the upcoming year.  This is a tough decision because every program is important or it would not have been implemented in the first place.

Trustees have done a poor job of communicating their priorities though which has lead to each budget meeting being attended by groups of parents each trying to convince the trustees that the program they support must be saved.  Class size reduction and music being the most vocal.  To the parents credit, neither group ever said the other program wasn’t important but stayed focused on why their program should be saved.

In the end though, something had to go.  Due to the high expenses and the lack of money coming from the state, Class Size Reduction (CSR) was recommended to go.  A very popular program, it has been difficult to sustain almost since it’s inception due to the state’s lack of financial support and poor funding model.  There were no good choices and no wrong or right answer however, things could have been handled better.

In the end, 3 trustees did not attend the meeting.  Coincidentally, the same 3 who had supported the original budget and had been on the losing end of the vote.  It was pretty apparent that the other 4 had come up with an alternative before the meeting (which would be a Brown Act violation) and had the majority vote to make it happen.  Trustee Winsten who ran the meeting proposed keeping class sizes at 25-1 for first grade and raising class sizes in grades 2 and 3 as originally proposed.  This change came with a price though…about $1.8 million was needed to make it happen.  So where would they get the money?  They had that figured out too only they should have mentioned it to someone from CUMA (Capistrano Unified Management Association) before the meeting.  Instead they just delivered the “good” news from the dais taking management, who had already offered 5 furlough days, completely by surprise.

The financial situation is a mess and I don’t envy the board their tough decisions but the whole thing was handled badly from the three trustees not showing up, the mandated cuts to CUMA, and the lack of planning with the teachers.

The worst part is there may be even more cuts to come and in the end it hurts the students the most.

If you are interested in signing the petition to change the way we elect our trustees, there are three places you can go this weekend.

1.  Vons in San Juan Capistrano on Camino Capistrano:  Saturday 9:00-12:00

2.  Trader Joe’s in Laguna Niguel on the corner of Golden Lantern and Del Avion:  Saturday 9:00-12:00

3.  San Clemente Farmer’s Market on Del Mar:  Sunday 9:00-12:00

Hope you have a moment to stop by to sign.

We began to collect signatures less than a week ago and we already have more than the 750 that are required to go to the County School Boards Committee of Organization.  We will continue for the next week or so to ensure that we have ample valid signatures to submit. 

We got word on Saturday that the trustees had pulled the item to discuss the change in voting method from the June 22 agenda.  No surprise there.  But it’s all right since the issue will go before the county committee soon and hopefully they can be convinced to put this on the ballot for voters to decide.

There has been almost 100% support for the idea but there are a few issues to clarify.  This is a community-driven effort–there are at least a dozen of us that have been working on this for the past 2 months.  It’s not about me or getting elected.  It’s about having seven trustees that will represent the best interests of our students in the future.  Our district has grown too large and there are too many people who just don’t know what is going on.  The intent is to make a much smaller voting area so that people will only have to worry about the best candidate in their area and hopefully this change will encourage many more people to get involved and run for school board.

The recall committee was so critical of some of the past board members for what they considered a too-long tenure but they clearly forgot that no one challenged four of them in 2004 (just 4 years ago) and I believe part of the reason is that the district is too large and people are too overwhelmed to run.  Changing to voting by trustee area should encourage more people to get involved in the district and actually get out in the community and campaign.  Candidates need to meet people, answer questions, visit schools and know what is going on.  That is what we need and that is the goal.

Another idea that has been thrown in with this is to re-draw the trustee areas.  That must be kept completely separate.  Anytime that you confuse issues and dilute the information, you lose support.  I agree that after the 2010 census, the trustee areas will need adjustment but that is to make sure that there is equal number of people in each trustee area.  The worse possible thing would be to draw the trustee areas by city.

For one, all of the cities in our district are different sizes so it would be unfair for a city the size of Laguna Niguel to have 1 trustee representing them while Dana Point at half the size also has 1 representative.  Each trustee area must have a similar number of people residing in it.  The other huge objection to drawing lines based on city boundaries ties into the only objection we have heard so far to changing the voting method.

Critics of the “vote by trustee area” are worried that after the change, trustees will only care about or focus on their trustee area and ignore the other 6.  It will be up to the community to make sure we vote for people who care about education and the success of our district as a whole.  Dividing trustee areas to include multiple cities ensures that they will have a more global perspective. 

Stay tuned.

On Monday night, the CUSD Board of Trustees finally made a decision and one that was long over due.  After five long months without leadership, they voted unanimously to hire Dr. Roberta (Bobbi) Mahler to be the interim superintendent.  Dr. Mahler, to her credit, attended the meeting and spoke after the announcement.  She addressed both the trustees and the audience and pledged to work with all.  She said that she looked forward to getting to know all and earning their respect.  It was all good.

However, later in the evening when it came down to the nitty gritty (the budget), the trustees were yet again unable to truly articulate to staff their priorities or make decisions and instead they shifted all of the responsibility to balance the huge shortfall on a brand-new interim superintendent.  How unfair.  A little later on, when it came time to rescind the lay-off notices for 26 administrators who are all critically important to the day-to-day operations in the district, they again shifted all responsibility to someone who had not even began her work yet.  Bot times it was Trustee Winsten who threw this terrible challenge at her.  WRONG!

I have great hopes in Dr. Mahler but she is not some type of genie with a magic wand.  There are no secret pots of money that are hiding.  It has been the responsibility of the trustees for months to identify the necessary cuts and balance a budget by June 30.  It has been their responsibility to communicate with parents and staff about the priorities.  And it was their responsibility to get a leader in place.

Lets just hope that better late than never is true in this case!

As the economy continues to struggle, our budget woes in California continue to grow.  No matter how well we governed our state, the economic crisis would have hit us hard.  However, because we do not govern effectively, we are in far worse condition than we should be.  Yes, times are tough.  Revenues are down and we all need to tighten our belts but the way we have governed our state for at least the past 30 years has helped lead to this terrible disaster and unfortunately, we as voters must share in the blame.

I’ve been actively involved in politics for about 9 years now, and the more I learn the more I don’t like it.  Just this weekend, I read two excellent articles that did a great job of explaining why we in California are in so much worse condition than we should be.  One article was written by Brian Joseph and published in Sunday’s OC Register.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/budget-state-governor-2446641-California-lawmakers

This article explains in depth how the legislators have shifted the responsibility of governing to the voters and well, we can all see how well that has worked.  That coupled with the short (2-year) terms of Assembly members, the money of special interests, and the skilled lobbyists have pretty much lead to the demise of California.  Even Time Magazine can see the problem.  In the June 8, issue, The “Awesome Column” written by Joel Stein calls us the “State of Insanity”.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1901486,00.html

Both articles demonstrate in frighteningly accurate detail how we as voters have unwittingly set our “golden state” up for failure.

I recently spent 2 days in Sacramento with the Capistrano Unified Legislative Team and the utter exhaustion and defeat on almost everyone’s face was quite disheartening.  None of our elected officials nor the Governor are happy about our current situation nor do they like cutting critical programs like education and health and human services.  It’s truly abhorrent.  But yet they aren’t all truly on-board with what they need to do.

We are at the very bottom.  The state will again be short of cash as of July 1st.  So is this not the time to make the necessary changes?  I spoke many times, not of spending more, but of many the necessary changes to a system that clearly is broken.  Most of it fell on deaf ears.  Everyone outside of Sacramento sees the problem but those in charge seem unwilling to make the changes.

There is a glimmer of light.  There are some changes that are coming.  Next year we will look at re-districting so that we will hopefully not have carefully planned Republican or Democratic districts throughout our state.  Another positive change that will hopefully come to California is an open primary where all voters regardless of party affiliation can vote for any candidates and the top 2 will go forward.  This could end the bitter divide where currently our legislature is far right or far left and none of them “for people”.

One group is helping to promote and spearhead change in our state called California Forward.  A non-partisan entity dedicated to forming a new way to govern our state.  I urge everyone to take the time to become better informed and more involved.  The very future of our state (and our children) depends on it.

http://www.caforward.org/about/

Late last week the board of trustees finally hired an interim superintendent.  After 5 long months with no leadership, this is great news.  Now the question is, how qualified is the candidate?  I haven’t been able to find out a whole lot about Dr. Mahler as of yet but she does have past superintendent experience which puts her ahead of some of the other candidates they interviewed.

We are all cautiously optimistic that this will be a good thing for CUSD.  Dr. Mahler has no high school [superintendent] experience and did work with an Education Alliance backed school board in Westminster but we need to give her the benefit of the doubt and allow her to prove herself.

For the sake of our district and our children, I hope this will be a step in the right direction.