11 replies on “Ducey ‘Next Step’ Watch: Day 25”

  2. Perhaps if 123 hadn’t passed, Ducey and his allies would be forced to do something else to relieve the public pressure for increased education funding that had been accumulating. But it did pass — thanks in part to Safier and other sell-outs in the “Democratic” party — so it’s a mystery what Safier thinks he’s up to now, with his asinine “Next Steps” watch. Evidently he expects his readership to allow him to hold his nose, vote for 123, and then step right back into a position from which he can mock the people whose $3.5 billion!!! “solution” to public education funding he voted for and used his blog to help pass.

    I’ve seen him embarrassing himself by underestimating the intelligence of his readers many times over the course of the last three years, but this instance of it takes the cake.

  3. The question isn’t about the governor, it is about our schools – they just received $300 million plus per year, a staggering amount of money. The current culture isn’t working. We have hundreds of thousands of students who can’t add 5 plus 4 and who don’t read with any acceptable degree of fluency. How are we going to innovate, how are we going to make this system work?

  4. How are we going to make this system work? Not by being negligent about appropriately structuring school districts’ fiscal control systems or by failing to ensure that bidding and hiring processes are handled properly and that how money is applied is fully transparent to the public.

    Here’s a little glimpse of what Safier’s friends in TUSD admin and governance are up to now. They are very focused on how to get the 123 disbursements going and what to do with the infusion of funds from the land trust Safier and others helped secure for them:

    Here’s Ricky Hernandez, who serves as CFO for the Pima County School Superintendent’s office
    http://tucson.com/online/video/prop-now-what/youtube_96fe8f16-8023-579f-8fe0-6913e3800471.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share

    Fun fact: Hernandez is also one of the people recruited to serve on the TUSD audit committee with other newly added members Adelita Grijalva, the governing board president, and the district’s CFO Carla Soto after the Board majority changed the requirements for serving and got rid of Jimmy Lovelace CPA and Chuck Kill.
    http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/guest/time-for-tusd-to-stop-making-unforced-errors/article_6293e564-8228-587b-aed1-4051d3d35d70.html
    http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/guest/tusd-volunteer-district-residency-requirement-among-red-flags/article_690f81f3-b6cc-5443-8427-72e352b8fb28.html
    http://tucson.com/news/blogs/ednotes/tusd-board-ends-terms-of-audit-committee-members/article_08cc4875-f8f7-5deb-a0ca-408f281b2e74.html

    Two of Hernandez’s fellow audit committee members resigned after the AZ Daily Star revealed that they had family members employed by the district, but Hernandez has elected to continue serving, though the Star had also revealed that both his wife and a sibling of his are employed by the district.
    http://tucson.com/news/local/education/two-members-of-tusd-audit-committee-resign/article_8a89d380-8791-5d12-977a-3fe0c08aa53c.html

    Oh, and by the way, Hernandez also handles TUSD board candidate filings through the Pima County School Sup’s office.
    http://www.schools.pima.gov/elections/2016-governing-board-elections

    The conflicts of interest (not a term in current TUSD leadership’s vocabulary, evidently) are so myriad in these arrangements we’d have to sit down and draw diagrams to sort them all out.

    And here’s TUSD Board majority member and Board candidate Kristel Foster, discussing plans for what will be done with 123 money, once it is dispensed:
    http://threesonorans.com/2016/06/12/kristel-foster-prop-123-money-go-giving-teachers-another-raise-video/
    But is it the absence of another few hundred dollars in annual income that keeps teachers from filling the scores of open full-time permanent teaching positions in TUSD? Most of the TUSD teachers I’ve spoken with in recent months seem to be saying working conditions in TUSD are worse than in other districts because of TUSD’s toxic institutional culture and administrative incompetence. One small example of this: those who have had direct contact with the districts’ schools during the last three years have had to sit through a number of maddening discussions RE why teachers were having to instruct students who hadn’t received textbooks yet, not because there were insufficient funds for books but because the district could not find books it already owned in its warehouses or because parties within governance and administration had made poorly timed changes to requirements or course offerings that had not allowed sufficient time for the appropriate texts to be ordered and received before classes started.

    With this being the state of the district’s functioning, it’s doubtful that dividing up all the 123 money and applying it to another small increase to teachers’ gravely insufficient salaries will result in more teacher retention / recruitment and superior services delivered to students if there are no significant improvements in the working conditions and administrative and governance competence in the district…but when you’re running for re-election in November 2016 with an embarrassing track record in office, perhaps using 123 money to give teachers another raise may help you in some other mysterious way. Far be it from me to speculate about what that “way” might be, but some have looked at it and have guessed that the help would come in the form of a union endorsement.

    So TUSD constituents can be forgiven for having a very hard time believing that giving TUSD even MORE money immediately is going to improve the educations of kids enrolled in this district. Most well-informed people I know who work for TUSD or have children enrolled in the district are not watching for 123 “next steps.” They are watching the TUSD Board elections coming up in November 2016, hoping that the two candidates (Foster and Juarez) who are current members of the Board majority that has been responsible for decisions like the inadvisable changes made to the district’ audit committee will not be re-elected.

  6. It appears that Ducey’s next step is to meet with Donald Trump, and perhaps that is all we need to know. It seems to me that the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s has reincarnated and become the modern day Republican Party. And it goes without saying, a Know-Nothing Party needs or wants no public education.

  7. There are no shortages of nepotism and good-ol’ boy (girl) systems in the Old Pueblo, in fact, from the city and county governments to the university, community college and public schools there probably isn’t any organization in this backwater Cowtown that isn’t rife with cronyism. Some people think that is part of Tucson’s “charm.” Personally, I’ve travelled to other parts of the country and overseas during my career in the military and lived in communities long enough to realize there are better ways, but until the electorates in Tucson start paying attention and getting involved, don’t look for anything to change. Oh and by the way, you are not listening hard enough if all you hear is crickets, because behind closed doors in Phoenix, the governor and his lackeys are laughing their ass off at how easy it was to take-in the Prop 123 supporters, as easy as 1-2-3. Idiots say what?

  8. The problem here is not money, but the waste of it. Replace the Grijalvas on the school board and it could fix itself. But if you keep voting them in our children and TUSD are doomed.

  9. All these geniuses on school operations should have petitions to run for their respective school district boards already turned in. Of course some of the geniuses live in Oro Valley or Amphi or Flowing Wells or Sahuarita or Sunnyside and not TUSD. This Includes Hupp. e

  10. Most of these geniuses seem to already be doing a lot more in support of real-world public schools than you are, Ms. Perkins. I have yet to read a single one of your comments that shows any level of awareness of the specifics of what’s going on in the management of any of our local school districts. That is step number one in being a responsible citizen and “supporter of public schools”: FIRST, know enough about local governance and administration so that you won’t be re-electing dysfunction when you vote. Once you’ve mastered that, you might want to consider getting petitions signed to go on your local school district’s governing board.

    I’ll tell you what DOESN’T help the children in our schools: blathering on about what’s going on in Phoenix and reciting all the theoretical superiorities of PUBLIC SCHOOLS while the actual schools in your neighborhood descend into total dysfunction and constituents start fleeing them in droves. But that’s exactly the approach that far too many so-called SUPPORTERS OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS take these days.

    Very convenient to keep your attention focused on DUCEY (like Safier, with his inane picture of the little man-with-the-binoculars) while the many-headed hydra Sanchez-Grijalva-Foster-Juarez is wasting deseg funds, 123 funds, and every other source of funds available to them and running TUSD into the ground.

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