Candidate for
Board Member; Mount Diablo Unified School District

I see these as the top five priorities of the district right now. As I said on the cover page, in addressing these high priority issues, the emphasis must always be with ensuring the best education for our students.

1.

• Reprioritize the budget and direct money towards classrooms and students and away from other things. I can give you a couple of concrete ways we could reprioritize. We currently employ 17 people in the position of supervisory custodian. They are supposed to supervise the custodians. They work the day shift and the vast majority of custodians that they supervise work at night. So we are spending $2 million a year on custodial supervisors who don't work the same shift as the custodians that they allegedly supervise. Our Superintendent and our Board majority cut campus supervisors who are at our sites supervising students and maintaining a safe learning environment, but they were unwilling to look at custodial supervisors who don't actually supervise anyone at all. The second example is in the area of legal services. We spend over $1 million a year for outside legal services to protect the district in special education cases. I won't go into whether I think it is a good use of money hiring attorneys to limit the amount of services we provide our families, but I will say that we should hire an additional in house attorney for less than a fifth of that amount and save over $800 k per year. So that is just two ideas that would free up almost $3 million a year and not have any negative impact on our students. The Board must do much more budget analysis to determine where there are other areas in the budget that we can make cuts. I will also say that we have a responsibility to continually evaluate the programs that we are paying for so that we make sure that we are spending our dollars on programs that are effective and that we discontinue programs that are not. We have a $300 million a year budget and our Superintendent and Board majority want you to believe that there is zero waste and that we are spending our money wisely. In light of the two examples that I have provided, I think that is highly unlikely.

• Settle all contracts and change the way we negotiate. I only place this second because we can't settle our contracts until we make some budget changes. We must make settling the contracts a high priority because we are losing employees to other districts. Our teachers don't have medical benefits and that must change. We need to stop paying an attorney to talk to our employees and start talking to our employees directly. We have spent almost $200k on an outside attorney to negotiate for us. I keep asking the question, if we can't even talk with our own employees, then how can we expect the relationship that we have with them to improve? We must free up money in the budget and place serious offers on the table that will begin to get us to a point where we are competitive with surrounding districts. We need a Board that understands that teachers who are expected to take care of our families should have affordable health benefits so that they can take care of their own children. Sherry Whitmarsh and I have had many opportunities to discuss the issues that surround contract negotiations and she understands the need to set budget priorities that mimic what we say are our priorities. The Superintendent says that he values teachers and the Board majority says that they value teachers, but they do not have any strategy to move the district towards settling contracts. In fact when Paul Strange and I attempted to get the Board to set a strategy to settle contracts, the Board majority, directed by the Superintendent, voted against doing anything until the state budget was approved. Despite the fact that every major educational organization, from statewide PTA to the California School Boards Association, was forecasting that the budget was going to be bad news and despite the fact that we would have to make cuts, the Board majority voted not to do anything until we had a budget. We had an opportunity to do something proactive and the Board majority squandered that opportunity. It is now October and we haven't had a contract with any of our unions since the 2006-2007 school year and our Board has no strategy.

• Strategic planning. Our Board does not understand the importance of developing a shared vision and set of goals with our community. We must begin the process of developing a shared vision for our school district in collaboration with our community and our employees so that we are acting proactively to overcome the challenges that we face rather than always acting reactively.

• Customer service. I envision a school district that treats students, parents, and the community as customers and a district that has as one of its top goals, providing excellent customer service. That is not happening as evidenced by the many unhappy parents and students in our district. Do you think that the parents in Walnut Creek would have ever started a petition to transfer schools out of our district if we were addressing their needs? We must change the culture of our district. Our parents are not our adversaries; they are our partners in our goal of providing a world class education to our students and their children.

• Communications. We must begin to communicate in an open and honest way with our parents and our community. We must make every effort to ensure that we are providing the public with all of the information that they request. The Superintendent must provide whatever information Board members request. Information is currently being hidden from Board members and from the public and that must stop. As a Board member, I have had to file a public records request to get records that are available to the public. I literally had to threaten to take the Board to Superior Court to seek relief unless they provided me with the information that I requested. How can I be expected to do my job as a Board member if the Superintendent and the Board are going to conspire to withhold information from me?

• There are many more things that we must work on collaboratively as a Board and I could go on for hours with all of the ideas that we have to improve the school district. I am a parent of two district students, one that is in kindergarten and one who is a sophomore in high school. Sherry Whitmarsh is a parent of two district students. Paul Strange is a parent of two district students. Is it any surprise that the Board majority do not have children in district schools? We see first hand that things are not good in our district. I hear it from my daughters and I hear it from parents and staff. We need fundamental change in our district and that will not happen until we change the Board majority.