Shakedown

[Stracci] had a fleet of freight hauling trucks that made him a fortune primarily because his trucks could travel with a heavy overload and not be stopped and fined by highway weight inspectors. These trucks helped ruin the highways and then his roadbuilding firm, with lucrative state contracts, repaired the damage wrought. It was the kind of operation that would warm any man’s heart, business of itself creating more business.

- Mario Puzo, The Godfather

LOOPY LOGIC

Watching the Claremont Unified School District in action, one can't help but marvel at the kooky logic employed by the CUSD Board of Education. For instance, when the school board needed help with its last superintendent search, they turned to Pivot Learning Partners, the consulting firm that identified Terry Nichols, the district's last superintendent.

You'll also recall that Nichols cut out on us 18 months into his $196,650-a-year contract and left CUSD in bind, in answer to which the school board turned to....Pivot Learning Partners!  Board member Jeff Stark explained the deep thinking behind this move, saying that this is the way we've always done things.  Like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football, we keep going back for more.

To make matters worse, for its interim superintendent the CUSD board hired PLP consultant Gloria Johnston (photo, left), paying her the same amount the district paid Nichols.  We wonder how hard it was for Johnston to tell the board that the results of PLP's exhaustive search was, for the time being, herself.

As we've seen time and again, the CUSD board of education prefers to overpay for work that could easily be done in-house.  For a fraction of the money they paid PLP and Johnston, the board could have had their assistant superintendent fill in for Nichols while they conducted their search.  They could have simply asked PLP or some other firm for a list of names and then interviewed the candidates themselves rather than counting on PLP to winnow the list down to a couple choices.   But, as Jeff Stark likes to say, that's not how we do things in Claremont.

Incidentally, these education consultant gigs must be pretty lucrative.  We've discovered that Interim Superintendent Johnston doesn't limit her consultative work to PLP.   A Fairfield-based company called Total School Solutions lists Johnston as a member of their team. According to the TSS website, Johnston is a TSS Senior Consultant. Here's her bio:

Click to Enlarge

We don't know much about TSS or what exactly Johnston has done there, but we did find a mention of TSS in a 3/2/08 Modesto Bee article about a brouhaha in the Waterford School District:

Modbee.com continuing coverage: School budget crisis

Report rips Waterford spending
Schools chief defends his 'triage, expedient' actions
By ROGER W. HOSKINS
BEE STAFF WRITER

WATERFORD -- While the Waterford Unified School District stares at an upcoming 10 percent budget cut, the board of trustees heard a legal report critical of relaxed financial practices.

The report at a recent meeting covered three main areas of unauthorized or unexpected payments:

Stipends totaling $25,000 paid to two principals over two years, Jose Aldoca and Don Davis

Administrative pay raises of 5.2 percent, including a raise for Superintendent Howard Cohen, that were paid five months before the board approved them

A contract with a Bay Area consulting firm, Total School Solutions, was ratified as a $33,000 agreement to polish the district's master plan but turned out to be an open-ended contract that cost the district $124,000 before it was canceled with the work unfinished.

Maybe, contrary to Jeff Stark's philosophy, this is the way things are done everywhere.  Another pillar of Claremont exceptionalism bites the dust.


BLATTNER BLATHER

If you hadn't noticed, the district (and now Johnston) doesn't limit its use of consultants to headhunting duties.  When the matter of inter-district transfers (IDT's) started becoming a hot-button issue in the current school board election, the school district, needing to help prop up incumbent Hilary LaConte ahead of the November vote, commissioned Bob Blattner and his firm Blattner & Associates to write a report on the impact of IDTs on CUSD. 

The so-called Blattner Report is posted on the CUSD website.  It's presented as a sort of cost-benefit analysis and concludes not only that the overall impact of IDT's is positive, but that discontinuing the acceptance of IDT's into the district would be detrimental to CUSD's budget because whatever savings might be achieved by eliminating unneeded teaching positions would be eaten up by the loss of state money the district receives for each student.

Here's the report:
Blattner Report 9-15-11


It's too bad Blattner didn't bother to provide any of the actual data he used in his report.  For all we know, he could be making this stuff up out of whole cloth.   He is, after all, a former Sacramento Bee education writer who is known as much for being a Sacramento lobbyist as he is for his other work with school districts.  Let's face it, the school district had to commission a political document to prove its premise - that we need IDT's. To that end, they didn't need a detailed, rigorous study. They had to get someone whom the district could count on to shape the narrative.

You'll note that CUSD doesn't bother to produce the back-up data either.  For all their talk about being transparent and involving the community in their decision-making, they're still stuck in their top-heavy hierarchy issuing edicts from on high.  If we know one thing about Claremont, it's that you can get a report to say just about anything you want as long as you don't provide the data to back up your claims.  Just say it strongly enough with plenty of authority, and pretty soon the education beat writers will be citing it as if it were fact rather than interpretive art.

This no doubt explains why CUSD slow rolls requests for what should be public information.  Rather than just posting all the raw figures on their website so that the community could assess them and have a rational debate, CUSD had to get Bob Blattner to explain it all to us.  And if you ask for the data, they don't just delay, they change the subject by having their surrogates call you a racist - "You don't want those kids here."

Compare the district's website to the city of Claremont's, where one can watch videos of old City Council meetings or peruse the agenda materials and staff reports at one's leisure.  For all the complaints we have had about City Hall, access to public information is no longer one of them, and that didn't improve until the City Council turned over and the upper management changed.  Before that, the stonewalling public information requests received was every bit as heavy-handed as what one experiences with CUSD today.

CONSULTANT-GO-ROUND

So, to recap: Consultants salivate at the thought of dipping into the CUSD money stream.  Remember Jared Boigon, the consultant the district hired at a cost of $25,000 to conduct the polling the school board used to buttress its arguments for the $95 million Measure CL bond?  Boigon leveraged that contract into a campaign consultant job working for the front men the district roped into running the Yes on CL campaign last year.  For campaign funding, at Boigon's suggestion, the Yes on CL folks then hit up the very consultants and contractors who stood to benefit from the bond and would have undoubtedly sought to recoup their campaign donations by working those costs into their future billing.

Of course, the district assured us that there was no conflict of interest involved in the $150,000-plus the Yes on CL campaign raised from those consultants and contractors.  No problem at all.  If the school board says it, it must be true.

So we weren't terribly surprised when we learned that Gloria Johnston's Total School Solutions employers are partners with Bob Blattner's company. In fact, TSS issued a press release trumpeting the synergy that was about to be loosed on the world when the two consulting firms teamed up:

Click to Enlarge

They promise to deliver their prospective school district clients to efficiency levels undreamt of outside the Jersey road construction business.  We have no problem with that.  It's just that it would have been nice if Gloria Johnston and the school board would have told us before contracting with Bob Blattner for his expert opinion on IDT's. 

As we said, no surprise.  It's Claremont, after all.  It's how we do here.

CUSD Appoints Old Hand Interim Superintendent: Litigation Magnet

CUSD announced Thursday night the appointment of Gloria Johnston as Interim Superintendent. She will be paid the same money as Terry Nichols was getting--according to his contract $196,650 per annum. Shockingly, she was a consultant to the headhunter hired by the District to conduct the search.

It's just like President George W. Bush hiring Dick Cheney to find the best-qualified person to be his vice-presidential nominee and Dick Cheney coming up with, well, Dick Cheney.

click to enlarge

The press release is reproduced below (the release is not on the CUSD website as this is written Thursday night).

NEWS RELEASE

The Claremont Unified School District Board of Education voted to appoint Dr. Gloria Johnston as their Interim Superintendent of Schools at their February 17, 2011, Board meeting. Dr. Johnston will begin her service on Monday, February 21, 2011, replacing Dr. Terry Nichols who will become Superintendent in Duarte.

Dr. Johnston has devoted over forty years to a career in education. Her years of service in pre-kindergarten through high school education included roles as a teacher, principal and central office administrator. She retired from public education after serving twelve years as the superintendent of schools for the Banning Unified School District and the West Contra Costa County Unified School District. She subsequently served as Dean of the School of Education at National University, a private, nonprofit institute of higher learning with headquarters in San Diego, California. Dr. Johnston has worked in urban, suburban and rural school districts in Illinois, California and Caracas, Venezuela. As a coach and mentor, Dr. Johnston facilitates meetings, provides professional development for principals, central office administrators, superintendents, and school boards. The current focus of her work is on systemic strategies that lead to improving student achievement and closing the achievement gap.

Throughout her career Gloria has been an invited speaker at state and at national professional conferences, served on state and national educational and research committees, and has been awarded major professional development grants. She is coauthor of three books, Eight at the Top: A View Inside Public Education, a collection of stories about the work of school district superintendents, Effective Superintendent-School board Practices: Strategies for Developing and Maintaining Good Relationships with Your Board, and The Superintendent's Planner: A Monthly Guide and Reflective Journal.

Dr. Johnston earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Illinois at Chicago, her M.S. in Bilingual/Bicultural Education and her B.S. in Humanities (magna cum laude) from Northern Illinois University. She has been living in San Diego, California, close to her two children and three grandchildren; however, Gloria will be relocating to Claremont while serving as the Interim superintendent for Claremont Unified School District.

########

When Johnston was Sup. of the West Contra Costa District, one of her middle school students made national news. He was brutally beaten in a school locker-room by another student and an 18-year-old non-student. There was a video that got national notice, the school district was sued, and two years later settled for the usual--an "undisclosed amount".

* * *

The vote to approve her appointment was 4 to 1, Steven Llanusa dissenting. We guess he's still not satisfied with the Thursday meeting night and would rather have Monday. Maybe she will at least get another book out of this--in addition to the lavish salary. It might contain tips on the handling of difficult board members.

Heading for the Exit

Terry Nichols Resigns as CUSD Superintendent

The Duarte Unified School District website has a crawler welcoming Dr. Terry Nichols, CUSD (lame duck) superintendent as it's new superintendent in 2011.

click image to enlarge

The Courier has this breaking news on its website, here. (link will go stale soon, but paragraph is quoted below; buy the Courier for more news)

From the Courier:

Claremont Unified School District Superintendent Terry Nichols will no longer be with the district come January. After recently submitting his resignation, Dr. Nichols was appointed as the new superintendent of the Duarte Unified School District at a special board meeting on Monday night. Duarte Unified confirmed the appointment to the COURIER on Tuesday afternoon. Dr. Nichols appointed superintendent of CUSD in July 2009 after the resignation of former Superintendent David Cash earlier that year. More news as it develops.

The Contra Costa Times has picked up Wes Woods' story which fleshes out some details. There is a lot about "going home", as if Claremont was not much more than a bad vacation, a rained-out camping trip, or a deployment in Afghanistan.

Lisa Shoemaker, Claremont Unified's assistant superintendent of business services, said she was surprised by Nichols departure.

"I don't think it was something he anticipated," Shoemaker said. "I'm not sure how it went down, but it went down quickly."

We don't know if the Nichols pull-quote in the article contains any subtext below the text. You decide:

"I consider this move as going home and am very pleased," Nichols said. "It is an honor and a privilege to be working closely with the board and the community that continues to focus on student success."

Terry Nichols (standing, fourth from left)
Not feeling at home with the
Claremont Chamber of Commerce Board

Weekend Mailbag

The mail's been piling up here the last couple weeks, so we thought we'd pass some of our readers' thoughts along.

One soccer parent wrote us because, in addition to copper theft problems, the city of Claremont still has some kinks to work out at Padua Park:

DATE: Sat, October 9, 2010 6:44:50 PM
SUBJECT: [No Subject ]
TO: Claremont Insider


Re: Padua park

FYI - AYSO soccer games today at Padua park were interupted several times because the sprinklers kept coming on. They first came on at about 11:30am and continued in different sections for more than an hour. Why was the city watering in the middle of the day?

* * * * *

Another reader wrote in to say that, rather than floating it's $95 million Measure CL bond on the November 2 ballot, what the Claremont Unified School District should be doing is cutting back on interdistrict transfers--students from outside CUSD's enrollment area, that is.

DATE: Tue, October 12, 2010 4:41:57 PM
SUBJECT: Does Claremont need to tax itself for the benefit of students who have transferred from adjoining districts?

TO: Claremont Insider

I have read someplace, either in these pages or in the Daily Bulletin, that as many as one out of six students in Claremont schools comes from an adjoining district. The "benefit" to our district supposedly is that Claremont schools get the normal state funding for each student. That brings in a little money to the district. (Cui bono?) However, as we have found out repeatedly, state funding is not sufficient to run the Claremont District. Each student in Claremont costs more than what the state provides. Hence, we have been persuaded to pass bond issues from time to time in addition to a parcel tax.

Now, we have been asked to supplement the state funding with a whopping $95 million bond issue. The question is, how much of this money will be used to benefit students other than Claremont students? One would think that if one out of six students is from outside the district than almost $16 million dollars out of the $95 million would be for the direct benefit of other than Claremont students.

Do Claremont citizens really want to take over a tax burden that properly should be borne by adjoining towns? Should the School District not be encouraged cut back on its expenses, for example, by limiting the number of transfers to a more reasonable number so that the bond issues paid by Claremonters actually benefit Claremont students? Maybe the whole District could be downsized to a size adequate for Claremont students. In that case, we might not be confronted by such an outrageous funding request.

The matter of CUSD's interdistrict transfers hasn't really been discussed too much by the local papers. We saw this with the Daily Bulletin editorial endorsing the bond. The editorial simply parroted back the Yes on CL campaign's mailer language without digging into them to see if they were true statements, and they ignored several of the arguments against the Measure CL, including the fact that 17% of CUSD's students have transferred in from outside the district.

Claremont is able to absorb that 17% because they have too much capacity and too many teachers. Yet the school district refuses to consider cutting back on the transfers and won't trim staff or downsize its facilities. CUSD's school board stubbornly clings to the idea that they must keep their enrollment numbers artificially inflated.

[CORRECTION: After we wrote the above-section of this post, we opened up today's Claremont Courier and saw that the interdistrict transfer issue did come up at Thursday night's Active Claremont Measure CL debate. So at least the Courier is trying to delve into all the nuances of the bond campaign. According to Landus Rigsby's article, Yes on CL representative Bill Fox claimed that CUSD would have to shutter its elementary schools, El Roble Intermediate School, and Claremont High. Highly unlikely. Mr. Fox was just being true to his nature.]

Another related issue is the fact that, because all those interdistrict transfers don't live in CUSD's area, their families don't have to pay for any taxes or bonds the district levies. They aren't paying off the $30 million we still owe for the Measure Y bond, and they don't have to pay for CUSD's annual Recreation Assessment District. They won't have to pay a penny of the Measure CL costs either, costs that amount to a total of around $250 million over 40 years.

In essence, the school district has asked property owners within the district's boundaries to subsidize those children from outside the enrollment area.

The involvement of people from outside the district extends to the Measure CL campaign. Besides a Bay Area consultant running the Yes campaign from behind the scenes, there are a good many people listed as Measure CL endorsers don't even live in Claremont. For instance, many of the CUSD teachers and administrators who were listed in the first Measure CL ad in the Claremont Courier reside out of town, including CUSD Superintendent Terry Nichols, who lives in Glendora.

[BTW, IS SUPERINTENDENT NICHOLS A LIAR? Maybe not, but he comes perilously close.

In the Courier article today, Superintendent Nichols was quoted as having said the district trimmed Measure CL from its original $160 million to $95 million before submitting it to the voters. Superintendent Nichols casts the district as being frugal, saving property owners tens of millions. The truth is, $95 million is just about at the state's limit of bonded indebtedness for CUSD: 2.5% of the total assessed value of all the properties in Claremont. The district wasn't pinching pennies; CUSD was making a money grab, maxing out their credit card.

Nichols is well aware of the limit to the amount of debt CUSD can take on, and he is behaving no better than a scamming telemarketer. If he could grab $160 million, he and the school board would.]

The faculty members who support the bond and who are working on the Yes on CL campaign don't really care about the long-term consequences of the measure. The teachers, like CUSD's contractors and vendors, will benefit financially if Measure CL passes, and the teachers union agreed to its latest contract in exchange for endorsing and working to pass the bond measure. It's pocketbook issue to some of them -- moving as much as possible from your pocketbook to theirs.

Because so many, including the Daily Bulletin's editorial board, think that we have to pass just about any school bond that comes up, these things will continue to pass, and the cumulative debt in Claremont and all around the state will continue to pile up. These bonds are simply financing schemes that are incredibly wasteful because of all the extra dollars that have to be diverted from actual projects to service debt and to line the pockets of the contractors who underwrite the bond campaigns. One way or another, it's going to have to stop.

Cui Bondo?*

More than a half-dozen readers have pointed out that the advertisement for Measure CL that appeared in the Claremont Courier last Wednesday contains the names of numerous CUSD employees and names of many persons who are not residents of the school district.

This was uniformly jarring to our correspondents, because the heading over the "social register" list of names is: "Please Join Us and Vote Yes on Measure CL".

Uniformly our correspondents interpreted this injunction to mean that people in the list were going to vote for Measure CL and wanted the reader to join them in doing so.

Problem is: many, many of the names are of people who are not residents of the district. We were given various counts: eighteen, twenty-five, forty-one, and sixty-nine of the 168 names.

We do know that there are a couple of prominent administrators listed who don't vote in the Claremont district: Dr. Terry Nichols, the Superintendent, for one--and Mike Bateman, Executive Director of Student Services. Joe Tonan, a teacher and head of the teachers union in the district also signed on but lives outside the district. It is indisputable that another dozen or two--at minimum--don't vote in the district.

So why are their names on the list? Because they would benefit directly from the bond. As the opponents of measure CL state in their ballot argument,

Then there’s the legal requirement that bond money “not be used for teacher and administrator salaries”. The District emphasizes that. But “ANY MONEY FROM A BOND NEEDS TO GO TO SALARIES,” the Claremont Courier quoted a senior District administrator. “Before the District can spend money on other things, a certain percentage will go back to salary restoration for all the employee groups,” he added.
Forget all of the nebulous atmospherics about "high-quality education in our neighborhood schools" and "education is highly valued in our community". This measure is about money in the pockets of teachers and--make no mistake--administrators.

click to enlarge

The recent advertising for Measure CL (there have already been at least three four-color glossy mail pieces--who's paying for those?) is subtly de-emphasizing the legal requirement that no bond money be spent on teacher salaries. This is because it's hard to make that statement and at the same time make the statement that Measure CL will "help attract and retain great teachers". Even the flexible minds of the proponents and their consultant can't square that circle.

We have been told that district teachers were told to sign the ad whether or not they lived in the district. There can be no doubt that pressure is great to conform to the Measure CL party line. The pressure is being exerted by the District staff their cohort who have the power, literally, of professional life and death over all serving under them.

Perhaps the community would like to give a little bit more to the teachers, but isn't a capital bond--money that is intended to build, "furnish and equip" school facilities, with tens of millions of dollars in interest costs to muni-bond investors, the wrong way to go about it? Because of the nature of the bond, and even with the loose accounting of CUSD, only a fraction of this bond money will reach the intended beneficiaries. Even less will improve the lot of the students.

* * * * *

*Our title is in Latin. Translated, it means, "Who benefits from the Bond?"

Soon Parted: Hello Fools, Goodbye Money

We and others in the community have been bothered by the fact that Measure CL, the Claremont Unified School District's $95 million November bond measure, has no identified projects in need of all that money. Perhaps we missed something.

We looked again at the bond resolution the CUSD board approved on July 22, and noticed that buried deep in the ballot proposition language was a sentence under the heading "Project List" that says:

The District conducted a facilities evaluation reflected in the [Facilities Master Plan] presented to the Board of Education on January 21, 2009 and incorporated herein by reference...

So there is a project list, CUSD just didn't include it for the voters to review easily. We've confirmed through our back-channel sources that it takes more that a bit of effort to see that list. If you are interested in what that $95 million might be spent on, you have to go to the district office on San Jose Ave. and review a several inches thick binder that constitutes the district's Facilities Master Plan, otherwise known as CUSD's wish list.

It's not exactly the most user-friendly way of discovering the district's intentions for the bond. From what district tout Bill Fox said in the Claremont Courier last Saturday, we can expect the bond campaign committee - Fox, Mike Seder, and, direct from Claremont Heritage and the Claremont Educational Foundation, the ever-reliable Lee Jackman - to cull through that binder and pull out enough poll-friendly projects to add up to $95 million.

But there's no guarantee that whatever bond project list CUSD's campaign cooks up will ever be completed. Buried in the fine print at the end of the resolution is a sentence that says:

In the absence of State and/or Federal matching funds, which the District will aggressively pursue to reduce the District's share of the projects' costs, the District will not be able to complete some of the projects listed above.

The school district doesn't tell you, however, that it will fail to really pursue State and/or Federal matching funds as it assures us it will. Even in failure, the district has a design. If the district opts out of state funds, it also doesn't have to worry about accountability in the form of state spending guidelines and audits. That's why no CUSD official will speak of any bond oversight that is independent of the district. Instead, CUSD and its board will handpick a "citizens committee" with a safe majority of its friends to ensure the bond money is spent as they see fit.

The district's secretive project binder and that fine print at the end of the ballot proposition language demonstrate just how far CUSD Superintendent Terry Nichols, the CUSD Board of Education, and the bond campaign committee are willing to go to conceal the truth of the bond from the voting public. They are betting that if they bury enough qualifying clauses in dense enough prose, they will be able to fool enough voters into supporting this bond.

The Fine Print
(Click to Enlarge)

As you can see above, it's not exactly an open, clear, well-articulated plan. It's really more of a lawyerly, CYA paragraph designed to inoculate the school district from blame when the money dries up long before their yet-to-be-released project list is completed.

The first sentence in the fine print, for instance, says, "The listed projects will be completed as needed." In other words, if needed we will decide that items previously deemed priorities really aren't necessary, and we'll use the money on other unspecified things - whatever we want.

As we've pointed out several times in the past, in the case of CUSD's $48.9 million Measure Y bond one of the main projects listed, La Puerta Elementary School, wasn't ever built because it was deemed unnecessary. Instead, the district threw the money away on such urgent, non-educational items as Claremont High's track and football facilities.

With Measure CL, the district also seeks to circumvent its own bond language. On the one hand, the last paragraph states, in all caps for extra emphasis:

NO ADMINISTRATIVE SALARIES. PROCEEDS FROM THE SALES OF THE BONDS AUTHORIZED BY THIS PROPOSITION SHALL ONLY BE USED FOR THE ACQUISITION, CONSTRUCTION, RECONSTRUCTION, REHABILITATION, OR REPLACEMENT OF SCHOOL FACILITIES, INCLUDING THE FURNISHING AND EQUIPPING OF SCHOOL FACILITIES, AND NOT FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE, INCLUDING TEACHER AND SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR SALARIES AND OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES.

But just a couple sentences above that, the full ballot language claims:

Proceeds of the bond may be used to pay or reimburse the District for the cost of District staff when performing work on or necessary and incidental to bond projects.

So, how does one square those two contradictory statements? The district doesn't intend to. That last paragraph is merely something they are required to include but which they will never follow. If you need further evidence, check reporter Landus Rigsby's article on page four of the August 11 Claremont Courier. Rigsby wrote:

"Any [extra] money that comes in [from the state] or money from a bond needs to go to salaries," said CUSD Director of Human Resources Kevin Ward. "If the district receives an increase in base revenue higher than what is [currently] projected, then before the district can spend on other things, a certain percentage will go back to salary restoration for all the employee groups."

Ward was simply being honest, even if what he said ran counter to the bond's ballot language. The bond money will be used for salaries, no matter what the district says during the bond campaign. Now, it would be illegal for the district to simply take the money and dump it directly into teacher salaries. So CUSD will wash the money through its project list and pay for the salaries that way rather than asking employees to make some temporary sacrifices to help balance the district's budget.

No one thing irks us more than the disregard and contempt the district, its board of education, the teachers' union, and the bond campaign committee have for language, bending it as they please to suit whatever momentary meaning they require. They intend to use words not to further their educational mission but to manipulate the public into supporting something they've intentionally misrepresented as a needed facilities repair and construction bond.

It's a poor example for the very students they claim to care so much about, and no wonder why, even under the best of circumstances, Measure CL supporters and their highly paid campaign consultants will have a fight ahead of them. Without the truth on their side, it'll take a lot of doublespeak to get the 55% of the vote needed for the measure to pass.

Of that sort of talk, though, the district and its various representatives have no shortage. These are, after all, many of the same people who gave us Glenn Southard, the Parks and Pasture Assessment (lost 44% to 56%), Preserve Claremont, and failed city council candidate Bridget Healy, the retired Claremont assistant city manager who's currently raking in $166,700 a year from a CalPERS pension.

Given the stagnant economy and the level of joblessness and foreclosures in our area, they'd be wiser to ask for far less and sacrifice more before asking property owners to pay off a $95 million debt. They'd also be well advised to stick to the truth in the future if they're going to ask people for that amount of money.

(In the coming days, we'll have more on that debt, how much larger it will be than the district has portrayed it, and how the bond proponents intend to finance the bonds over the next 55 years - far enough in the future for all of them to be safely dead long before the extent of their folly is revealed.)

Claremont Unified School District Drops the F-Bond!

District Shoots for an A, Gets an F,
Asks for Grade Change

Sometimes it's amazing what we hear. This came from a Los Angeles County employee who wanted us only to use that identification. We couldn't confirm the ID from the email address--it wasn't a County email--so we called a County office and confirmed the basics of the story. We were asked to re-write the events, so here goes:

You heard it first here: In the November 2010 election we will be voting on Claremont Unified School District Bond Measure CL.

But the story of how the measure came to be designated "CL" is an interesting one.

Apparently the proponent agency gets to request a letter designation for any measure it puts before the voters. In this case, CUSD, through an August 3rd letter from superintendent, Dr. Terry Nichols, requested the letter 'A'. For many reasons, the requested letter might be unavailable, and that was the case here. So the County elections officials provisionally assigned the the CUSD Bond measure the letter 'F'.


The CUSD Bond was the F-Bond!

This was an especially low blow, since Nichols apparently had some visceral aversion to the letter 'F'. Our informant quotes his letter to the election official: "If possible, the District would like to request the measure letter designation of 'A'. If not possible, the District requests that we not be assigned the letter 'F'."

It seems this letter designation lasted through at least Friday afternoon, August 13th (unlucky for some).

Our informant is a little hazy on the sequence of events after that but somehow, probably as a result of several frantic calls between the County offices and the School District, presumably with Superintendent Nichols pleading for a higher grade--"But I did most of my homework on time...", "It was Lisa that was making noise, not me..."I got C's on almost every test..."You didn't tell us we would be tested on that..."Hilary has my papers..." Well, the County relented, and Terry gets to take a brand shiny 'CL' home on his report card. And that will be the Bond measure's letter designation: Measure CL.

We're not sure* what 'CL' stands for.

CLueless?

CLunker?

Certain Loser?

We don't suppose there is any reclama with the County, but we'd like to have Measure F back.

It is with a good deal of wistful regret that we lament the passing of the prosodic possibilities of a Measure F: "CUSD GET'S AN 'F' ON THIS ONE"...... "FAILURE IN STORE FOR CUSD MEASURE F"...... "WTF?".

* * * * *

*Yeah, we know; it's probably CLaremont. CLever. We really do think everyone should continue to call it the F-Bond.

H/T to our County informant. Luvya.

Get on the Bus! Fare: $95 million

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

Yesterday, just ahead of the 72-hour legal requirement, the Claremont Unified School District Board of Education posted an agenda for their meeting 6:30pm this Thursday, July 22, at the Richard S. Kirkendall Education Center at 170 W. San Jose Ave.

As we predicted, the agenda includes a resolution to go forward with a $95 million bond to be financed over 30 years. The bond will (note the inevitability) go to the voters in November. This current CUSD bond effort is almost twice the amount of the $48.9 million Measure Y bond approved in 2000. As we've pointed out many times before, CUSD squandered that earlier bond money without completing all the projects the district promised.

CUSD is using the current fiscal crisis to do exactly what California has done for the past 30 years. The district is trying to finance its operational costs through long-term bonds. CUSD stills owes $30 million on the Measure Y funding, and we are only 10 years into that 30-year bond. The district's proposal says that part of this bond's $95 million will go to pay off that earlier bond. So what we are really being asked to do is approve a 40-year, $113.9 million bond - $95 million, less $30 million for the old bond, plus the original $48.9 million from 2000. All CUSD has done is to break down the vote into two elections 10 years apart.

This money will never get paid back in its entirety. You heard it here first. Our school district will be back in another 10 or 15 years asking for a bond to pay off the 2010 bond and upgrade facilities again. All this to let them move money around to items not expressly listed in their 2010 bond literature. Speaking of which....


OPENING GAMBITS

As with the previous bond election, CUSD Superintendent Terry Nichols and the CUSD Board of Education cannot legally campaign for the issue. But that has never stopped CUSD. The district sent out a district-wide, four-page, four-color bulk mailer that offered a "Spotlight on Claremont Students." The slick mailer, which almost certainly had to have been produced by CUSD bond consultant, was timed to hit mailboxes yesterday, the same day they knew news of the bond would break.

This mailer represents something CUSD they cannot legally do. School districts are not allowed to finance political campaigns, even if is for an education bond. So they send out a mailer with an implicit message saying we need money, we need this bond. The document is a de facto election piece offering up the rationale for voting "Yes" on the bond. The mailer was been planned well in advance and would have been designed by CUSD's consultant (in effect, a campaign consultant), to lay out the first talking points justifying the bond.

The mailer would have cost $4000 to $5,000 to create, print, and mail. That, of course, does not include the consultant's time. The mailer and the district's expenditure was approved without any public discussion well in advance of the district going public with the bond proposal.

Clearly all of this is - the district's town hall meetings, the polling CUSD commissioned, the mailer, the CUSD board's predetermined passage of their bond resolution Thursday night - are part of a design, a campaign. The CUSD mailing alone is a masterpiece of political manipulation, and we'll take a shot at parsing it.

Here's the mailer:

Click Images to Enlarge

BREAKING DOWN THE MESSAGE

The district's mailer starts with a photo a cute, enthusiastic girl raising her hand. She sports a broad smile because thanks to Claremont schools she can answer any question with confidence. The girl is literally spotlighted. She is in full color and sharp focus, while the other children in the background are out of focus and screened with gray to contrast our shining CUSD student. You're a kid hater if you vote down a bond to help this sweet child.

Underneath this girl's image is a small banner that says "Community Update from Claremont Schools." Ah! See, California Fair Political Practices Commission, it's a newsletter, not a campaign piece, full of information about the goings on in our district. Let's take a look at what's inside:

1. When we open the mailer, we see a highlighted paragraph explaining that CUSD "continues to be known for providing our local students with an exceptional education."
   
   Nothing better than repetition to establish our starting point: Our schools are outstanding and are an asset to our community (i.e., you, Mr. and Ms. Voter).
   
   
2. The first bullet point bears the heading "Academic Acheivement."
   
   More message repetition -good schools, good teachers, good kids, good community.
   
   
3. Next comes: "High-Quality Classroom Instruction Despite State Cuts."
   
   Our district and its teachers are hard at work desperately trying to hold the quality education line against the state's crushing budget crisis. The underlying message is that this great asset, CUSD, is threatened by a fiscal crisis not of its own doing - look, we're doing our best, but we're at the edge of a cliff here. Whatever will we do?
   
   (Cue up the Snidely Whiplash laugh and Nell about to be cast into the abyss.)
   
   
4. "Potential Bond Measure to Update Schools, Offset State Cuts."
   
   More fear. With CUSD offering up the solution: Thanks goodness! CUSD, the same people behind Measure Y, has a fiscal plan to save us. They'll even hire the same consultants! All you have to do is support our bond measure in November.
   
   (Cue up the Dudley Do-Right theme.)
   
   There's no mention of any specific work that will be done, just a list of things like:
   
   
   • The removal of hazardous materials like lead and asbestos.
     
     Hey, if CUSD is so competent, why our they exposing our dear front-page student to poisons?
     
     
   • Retrofitting our schools with energy efficient improvements.
     
     Got to appeal to the green voters - people concerned with the environment, not voters turning green from being spun by consultants.
     
     
   • Fixing leaky roofs, updating technology, improving student safety.
     
     See the first bullet above.
     
     
   • Replacing old wiring:
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     Good God! Our kids are going to get electrocuted if we don't pass this bond!
     
     Here the district's consultant has not-so-subtly inserted the obligatory photo of frayed wiring - the district and bond proponents did this sort of thing with Measure Y, BTW.
     
     In this instance, they've also juxtaposed the perilous wiring photo with a picture of a classroom with a teacher instructing kids who are sitting in front of flat-screen monitors - look out 21st Century, here comes CUSD!
     
     
5. "Fiscal Accountability."
   
   Rest assured, voter. We're looking out for your money. We'll appoint a citizen's oversight committee (handpicked by us) "to ensure funds are spent appropriately." We'll also conduct yearly audits - conducted by an auditing consultant (also of our own choosing).
   
   You can trust CUSD. After all, we had citizen oversight with Measure Y.
   

As always, the district's literature fails to show how that $95 million will save a single teacher's job. We'll have shiny new equipment, all the bells and whistles, but fewer teachers.

And, speaking of fiscal accountability, never forget that in the 2000 Measure Y campaign, proponents spent about $80,000, most of which was raised by district contractors - exactly the people and entities who would have benefited from the bond money. They undoubtedly looked at that $80,000 in campaign donations as an investment that offered substantial returns in the form of CUSD contracts.

We'll see more of the same this time, and, like the little girl on the cover of CUSD's mailer, the school board possesses absolute confidence in the bond measure's passage. Get enough fear into people, and they'll vote for anything.

Once the bond resolution is approved Thursday, the campaign effort will be seamlessly handed off to an election committee led by people the Claremont 400 have slated to be future school board members. The last time around, current board member Jeff Stark figured prominently in the campaign.

Remember, voters, always follow the pea.