Mountain Schools at a Risky Crossroad-Part 2, plus OpEds by Parents

  • Dedicated English teachers at Frazier Mountain High School meet in their PLC—professional learning community. (l-r) Shannon Norris, Yvette Heasley and Kat Fair, share &quotbest practices" in teaching and excitement about how to use the EduSoft program that assists in analyzing concept mastery by each of the students in their classes.

    Dedicated English teachers at Frazier Mountain High School meet in their PLC—professional learning community. (l-r) Shannon Norris, Yvette Heasley and Kat Fair, share "best practices" in teaching and excitement about how to use the EduSoft program that assists in analyzing concept mastery by each of the students in their classes.

Commentary and Report by Patric Hedlund

“Urgency” was the last word of part one of this story last week. I was explaining—to myself as well as our readers— how the people being paid healthy salaries to run the El Tejon Unified School District, and the smart people who have asked for and received our votes and our trust to become “trustees” of the district on our behalf—could have allowed themselves to be lulled into inertia in the face of failure.

This is a time that calls for urgent and creative action. The time for helplessness and hand-wringing has passed.

Parent Kelly Franti was at the March 14 meeting: “I was struck by a comment made by Ms. Terri Geivet [financial services director for ETUSD], something to the effect of ‘we’re going to do it the way we’ve always done it….’

“Is that an attitude that we should be sustaining in this place and at this time? Are the public’s perceptions worse than the realities when it comes to the district? Or are the realities even worse than our perceptions? Who will tell us what the realities are, in detail? And, in light of the state of the district today, shouldn’t we be doing almost everything differently than the way we’ve ‘always done it?’”

Franti is asking the kind of intelligent question that the board of trustees is not asking publicly. And that is where such questions are supposed to be asked, in the public meetings, not in executive session.

Geivet has given basically the same speech for the past four years of the district’s decline, and for the past four years this same school board (minus one) has sat with the same stunned and helpless looks on their faces, as if caught tangled in a beach chair as a tsunami rises nine stories above their heads, then crashes down to deconstruct what once was.

Although Geivet (the longes-temployed ETUSD staffer still with the district and a perfectly charming and friendly person when not being fierce) has no official authority (according to Robert’s Rules of Order) to speak without recognition by the chair at board meetings, but she chatters incessantly, answering questions on behalf of the superintendent, interrupting to inject her opinions on a wide swath of issues as if she is a sixth trustee—or a vice-superintendent.

This would not be quite as notable, perhaps, or even worth mentioning, if it did not pose such a stark contrast to the rigid “we must follow the rules” double standard applied to parents and other stakeholders who are told by board president Paula Regan in a harsh fashion that they will not be allowed to ask questions or make comments.

Geivet’s knowledge of “how we’ve always done things” has clearly been a source of comfort to every interim superintendent who has come in to babysit this district during its seven years in the wilderness. For the first few years of the revenue decline, she was a rock in constructing lean budgets. But her chatter is also a sort of “inertia lullaby,” often larded with misinformation. It was she who told a parent that they had to file a formal public records request to see a public record that could as easily—and quite legally—have been handed to him to review.

It is puzzling that it was during her watch as fiscal services director and financial manager that the chaotic lack of a bookkeeping system at the high school under a former principal continued unnoticed, and it was under her watch that the failure in attendance tracking at the same school—the critical lifeblood of the district’s revenue—was somehow not detected by the district until almost too late.

But there is good news to report as well. Astute parents are stepping up to become informed, make constructive suggestions and to offer help. Two OpEds here, one by Kelly Franti and another by Michi Knight, introduce constructive voices ready to be part of innovative solutions. Creativity, like kindness, is contagious.

Next week we will report about board members who appear ready to begin sharing new ideas, and follow up on Highly Effective Teaching concepts used by PMLC.

Continued Next Week

This is part of the March 30, 2012 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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