The new signs on the roadways say “Stop Stegeman Now.” They just showed up recently, and you’ll only find a few of them scattered among the yellow “Change the Board” signs, which, based on my recent drive through town, make up about half the signage out there—not half the TUSD board race signs, half the signs, period.

The anti-Stegeman signs are paid for by a new independent expenditure committee, Protect Our Schools TUSD, which filed its papers with Pima County last week. We don’t know anything about its finances since it didn’t exist during the last reporting period, but if the amount of signage it’s put up is any indication, it doesn’t have anything like the $35,000 amassed by TUSD Kids First, which is responsible for the yellow signs blanketing the city. We’ll get a better idea of its funding by the number of signs that go up before the election and by its sponsored presence on social media.

Protect Our Schools TUSD has two goals: to get rid of Mark Stegeman and to reelect Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez. The group’s website explains the reasons for its choices in bold letters on the home page, but for some reason, it hides its “Want to learn more?” link way down at the bottom of the page rather than creating the usual navigation bar near the top.

This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2016.

5 replies on “There’s a New I.E. in the TUSD Board Race”

  2. David, your a piece of work. Really, we don’t know anything about them. All you need to do is read their signs. ALL dollars outside of the District by three PACs. So you chastise the business people of Tucson with kids in the District but are mum on this IE. Let me try to help you since it is all over the web. They are primarily supported by three PACS with little connection to Tucson.

    Livable Communities PAC out of DC (affiliated with Raul G). Money from the National Air Traffic Controllers and an Indian tribe out of Alabama, They really care about our kids.

    Arizona List PAC. Money from Emily List and the like to promote pro-choice woman. Huh.

    Great Schools Now PAC. Money from the Education Union out of Phoenix. See Phoenix does care about Tucson afterall.

    So our choice is to believe people that live here, work here and have kids at TUSD like those at TUSD Kids First or all your friends in Washington DC and Phoenix. Great piece of journalism here David. The Weekly should be proud.

  4. Hey, David — I heard that one of those who recruits donations for TUSD Kids First was able to leverage the outrage over your smear pieces on that IEC into thousands of dollars more donations. So you yourself may be personally responsible for inspiring the donations that funded the newest batch of signs put up — the ones that say Foster + Juarez = Closed Schools and something to the effect of teachers don’t like Foster.

    Job well done. Keep up the good work.

  5. “Stop Stegeman Now”?

    Really? That’s all they’ve got in the way of messaging?

    Anyone who has been watching the district for the last three years might have been inspired to blanket Tucson roadways with signs saying “Stop Sanchez Now,” but then they wouldn’t be supporters of Foster and Juarez, who, instead of holding Sanchez accountable, have excused every lie and every botched administrative decision. The decision to receive the ESI donations, by the way, is the end of a long string of bad decisions which started, when Sanchez first arrived in town, with Foster, Juarez, et al. backing his “reduce class sizes” initiative, which was accomplished in part by redistributing Title 1 monies intended to help poor students, but ended up in effect reducing class sizes in high-SES schools but creating hard-to-fill positions in low-SES schools on the South and West sides. Then there was the outsourcing of the management of the subs who, by-in-large, manned the classrooms which were lacking full time qualified teachers in the low-SES schools. This saved the district a lot of money by undermining the subs’ benefits and in some cases reducing their wages. The outsourcing company benefited by being able to take a chunk of subs’ pay, and a marketing exec at the company rewarded the Board members who recently voted to grant them a $21 million contract (Foster & Juarez) by donating to their desperate campaigns to win RE-election. (Why were they desperate? Because by the time the 2016 elections rolled around, the community was up in arms about their total inability to say NO to the district’s ongoing disastrous mismanagement, which included, astoundingly, the mismanaged-in-chief persuading Foster, Juarez, et al. to make him the highest paid Superintendent in Arizona in return for his willingness to continue damaging a district that mis-educates and underserves 40-something-thousand of our students every year.)

    But keep weighing in on their side, David. They say they are “progressive,” which in Tucson apparently means nothing more than that they are willing to take direction from the Grijalvas. It obviously doesn’t mean what it might be understood to mean in cities that aren’t in the grip of this kind of institutionalized malfeasance: ability to make decisions in office that actually protect the wellbeing of the most vulnerable members of our community.

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