ETUSD: Has the decade of crisis finally come to an end?

  • Former ETUSD Superintendent John Wight pitches his plan for a $7.12 million bond to upgrade school facilities at a Rotary Club meeting on October 6, 2005, one month before election day when voters passed Bond Measure E.[photo by Gary Meyer, The Mountain Enterprise]

    Former ETUSD Superintendent John Wight pitches his plan for a $7.12 million bond to upgrade school facilities at a Rotary Club meeting on October 6, 2005, one month before election day when voters passed Bond Measure E.[photo by Gary Meyer, The Mountain Enterprise]

By Patric Hedlund with Gary Meyer

It has been a gut-wrenching decade to be covering El Tejon Unified School District. From 2006 to 2016, the district has dealt with an apparent charlatan; the loss of a beloved superintendent, Rochelle ‘Shelly’ Mason, who died of a brain tumor; a series of temporary administrators; and a disastrous recession which damaged schools throughout the state—with greatest injury to rural districts like this one.

It would get worse before it got better. In 2010 trustees took a…

Photo captions:

2005: Wight promotes $7.12 million school bond Measure E

Former ETUSD Superintendent John Wight pitches his plan for a $7.12 million bond to upgrade school facilities at a Rotary Club meeting on October 6, 2005, one month before election day when voters passed Bond Measure E.

John Wight explains plans for the transformation of Frazier Park Elementary School on May 17, 2006, six months after Bond Measure E made $7.12 million available to the district—and 14 days before he vanished from the community when a video recording of him allegedly stealing gasoline from school district fuel pumps was made public.

At the ETUSD gas pumps in the night, then-Superintendent John Wight glances toward the video camera that had been hidden by a maintenance worker as he finishes one of many trips to the pumps to allegedly steal fuel during early 2006. He had a system of large gas tanks arranged in the back seat of his district car, which he filled repeatedly, ferrying fuel back to a large capacity tank in his motor home. • The fuel inventory kept by district workers had been coming up short for a year, before this nighttime tape was made. The original tape was brought to the attention of Board President Steve Newman.

2006: Wight resigns amid shocking revelations

At the emergency meeting of the Board of Trustees, board members are stunned as Board President Steve Newman announces that Superintendent Wight has resigned and explains the circumstances of his departure. Newman—a retired sheriff’s deputy who knew the rules of evidence—would later reveal that he had copied the video tape, then disposed of the original video recording, destroying a key piece of evidence for any criminal case that might have been brought against Wight.

Investigator Riley Parker at The Mountain Enterprise office reviewing information gathered by the newspaper about John Wight’s background of alleged theft at a prior school district.

The Mountain Enterprise had been investigating Wight for several months before he was “caught on tape” at the ETUSD gas pumps. Reporters found that a prior district had been so eager to get him to resign that it signed “gag orders” to forbid any employees from talking about the reasons for his departure, leaving new districts where he applied vulnerable to being victimized also.

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This is part of the June 24, 2016 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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