TUSD Superintendent Firing Update: Nothing To See Here, Folks (For Now).

1. Fat bloated school districts like Tucson Unified School District One are killing public education.

   Ironically, TUSD was created to save money, but that was a very long time ago. Now, because of its highly politicized and dysfunctional culture, it is making a case for and helping charter schools drain funding and students away.

   This also makes TUSD a poster child for politicians looking for a quick fix and money from the charter school industry and lobbies.

   If you’re looking for an agile, responsive, innovative and high-performance school district it is way past time to slim down TUSD into three or four smaller districts and stop trying to fit the poor old fat guy into the track suit he outgrew 50 years ago.

2. “I’m only going to indulge in a general discussion of the situation. There’s so much heat and so little light on both sides of this battle, it’s impossible for me to sort out fact from fiction or determine the difference between cause-and-effect and random incidents. The fighting is fierce, filled with leaks, rumors, accusations and strange bedfellows.”

   Interesting David. I wish you had admitted the same above when you gave all of your opinions on President Trump.

   Why the double standard? Liberal bias. Once again.

3. The Latino plaintiffs’ representative has expressed her perspective on Foster’s highly tendentious, unverifiable and quite possibly slanderous account of what led to Sedgwick’s submission of the agenda item. Both Campoy’s response and Foster’s alarmist e-mail, which was circulated to undisclosed recipients together with a plea to show up at the Board meeting and make their Sanchez-supporting perspectives heard, are available for review here:

   http://threesonorans.com/2017/02/14/sylvia-campoy-responds-kristel-fosters-urgent-tusd-issue/

   And many sycophants who are too ignorant or naive to recognize malfeqsance when they see it and / or who had something to gain by brown-nosing the PCDP-affiliated TUSD Board members and their little-boy-whose-naughtiness-must-always-be-excused Superintendent heard the summons and dutifully provided their nauseating commentary in the Call to the Audience at last night’s Board meeting, together with a few ever-dwindling representatives of sanity and social justice, like Copeland and Putnam-Hidalgo.

   “Board watchers, stay tuned?”

   Board watchers: think better of your TUSD addiction and find a more worthwhile way to spend your time. There is truly nothing to see here that hasn’t been seen a thousand times before and won’t be seen a thousand times again — at least for those too stupid to learn the lesson and MOVE ON.

4. David Safier,

   Once again, you prove yourself to be an extremely non-objective blogger. I’m not sure why The Weekly allows you to write for them; I assume you all have personal bias regarding TUSD, including your editor. I have seen your posts to Kristel Foster on her Facebook page, most recently the ones where she gathered her followers to support HT Sanchez at the board meeting last night. As far as your opinion on Rachael Sedgwick, you are misguided and obviously personally aligned with other school board members. Ms. Sedgwick has been visiting many schools in TUSD since she was elected, and has shown up at some of the schools that have lost their magnet status, expressing sincere concern and offering help. She’s an intelligent and thoughtful person, and she has the integrity to question the unfortunate and apathetic status quo in TUSD.

5. Ms. Sedgwick is a well-intentioned newcomer. She is walking into…what shall I call it? World War Z.

   The human beings connected with this Governing Board have long since been scratched by zombies or bitten by vampires or had their brains removed and replaced by aliens. They are all obsessed with moving their own sick, self-interested agendas forward (Grijalva, Foster, Stegeman) or they are operated via remote control by one of the main players (Hicks, by Stegeman; possibly Foster, by R. Grijalva via A. Grijalva and / or HT Sanchez, who is supposed to be Foster’s employee but is actually her boss).

   Ms. Sedgwick: They are trying to get you to resign. Don’t do it. If you do, they will get their pawn the Pima County Superintendent Dustin Williams, who is operated via remote control by the multi-talented “Mr. Conflict of Interest” Grijalva-network-player Ricky Hernandez, to appoint your replacement.

6. If there is an effort to change administrations, you had better have an idea about who you would want and why that person will do a much much better job than the incumbent. Big district administrators who are highly successful are rare, and expensive. It’s like looking for a new college football coach. You don’t like the incumbent but many ADs have no idea who is better, they do a national search and “settle” . The Nevada legislature passed a bill in 2015 to break up the Clark County (Las Vegas, fourth largest in the USA) school district under the theory that better performance will ensue. The only problem was the legislature had no idea how to do the breakup and had a contentious commission draw up the break up plan AFTER the legislation passed. Millions on consultants later, it’s still a mess. So you had better know what’s better AHEAD OF time rather than be a fish flopping on a rock. And not the usual nilhist comments herein like “anything is better!” which is never true.

7. Yes, “Frances,” and they completely BOTCHED the hiring process last time they did it, when the Board was under the control of a majority none of whom had the faintest clue about proper process in public institutions or proper qualifications for someone occupying such a difficult role and the district has been suffering from that shockingly poor hiring decision and members of the network have been lying to cover up the damage it has created ever since.

   Whistling in the dark (and lying “bravely” to the public about what is actually going on) does not improve matters.

   TUSD is a dying beast. Various commenters write funny things here occasionally, but what we’re witnessing is a tragedy, not a farce. Tens of thousands of students are stuck in this thing. Your comment above is correct in one respect: what is needed is sober, honest analysis of the current lay of the land and deliberative, rational planning in a non-politicized environment about what steps need to be taking to treat the sick beast.

   Attend a TUSD Board meeting some time and see if you think anything resembling “sober, honest analysis” and “deliberative, rational planning” could take place in this setting, among these people, who all (with the possible exception of the newcomer Sedgwick, who clearly has much to learn before she can become effective in this environment) represent factions that are in a bitter struggle over control of the power to allocate the between 300 and 400 million dollars in the district’s annual budget.

   As has been said in other comments recently, the reformers were right to ask whether the structure of districts like this enables reform to take place.

   Tragically, the answer is no.

8. Isn’t she Rachael “do you know who I am?” Sedgwick?

9. I only wish the author would step, just for a moment, out of Fosterlandia and into a TUSD Board meeting. (No, he doesn’t attend meetings he has told me repeatedly, and he never did in his 30 some odd years of teaching.) If he did, he would not have to look so hard for evidence, and he would actually be able to “sort out fact from fiction or determine the difference between cause-and-effect and random incidents.” The Superintendent’s history of telling lies in Board meetings, on the public record, and of evading issues by repeating his own misleading information would quickly sell any critical thinker on the fact that this Administration does not pass the smell test. A quick watch of the hyper-defensive leading questions that Foster asks anytime her Superintendent is asked a question would immediately show the game for what it is.

   The game is to protect the Superintendent and his bloated salary at all costs, despite the Districts’ poor test scores and worse performance in terms of complying with the USP. Part of that is bringing up the vocal circle of TEA redshirts to pledge total fealty to an Administration that uses THEIR money to pay debts, appears to send a mountain of teachers packing because of discontent, and promises teachers 123 money to get their vote and then doesn’t give it to them. Another part of it is bringing out community activists to claim THEIR fealty because, as white childless people on the southside, they can tell he’s doing a good job because he speaks Spanish and is only HALF white, or others who claim theirs because that other half is Latino, so he must be perfect…its a perfect storm. When you can get a guy who feeds the hungry to claim undying loyalty to someone who makes half a million dollars a year, your game is successful. When you can get a number of Principals to stand up and say they are receiving wonderful support from the administration — which happened just a few years before some of the most ardent of them lost their magnet status –you’ve got some powerful kool-aid at work (funny, auto-correct wants to turn that into “kook-aid” which works too!)

   The point is, you can learn a lot from meetings. “The fighting is fierce, filled with leaks, rumors, accusations and strange bedfellows.” Yep–and many of those things are trademarks of the very camp that the author is allied with: again, something he would know if he went to meetings. Has he met with Rachael Sedgwick? Or does he just assume his BFF’s analysis of her when he says that she is “impulsive and quick tempered”?

   Without watching meetings, you miss just how strange the bedfellows are. You miss Foster and Grijalva fighting for the necessity to keep all of the Board meetings out on the East side of the district, just right down the street from UHS and Sabino, closer to Freuchtendler–where the better heeled parents of the district can easily come to Board meetings and make their voices heard. You miss the irony of Hicks and Stegeman asking for greater access for parents on the westside to attend Board meetings while Grijalva and Foster effectively veto the idea. You also miss the irony of Stegeman, TEA’s favorite demon, championing the turn-around of a little cheating mis-step that the District and the union made that resulted in teachers not receiving their earned 301 money this year. Did the union turn that around either when it happened or now, months later? No, they did not, and they even publicly defended their actions (which were to raise the cut scores for different grade levels of performance pay AFTER the 301 criteria had been voted on by their membership). But Stegeman, “demon of the district” did. The author would have been squirming in his seat as his favorite Board members spent about 20 unnecessary minutes trying to figure out how to make Stegeman look bad for actually figuring out a way to give the teachers money they deserve!

   The point is that the confusing becomes much less so when you actually show up. If you don’t you are always relying on someone else’s interpretation of events. And in a circus like this, with all the fun-house mirrors, that is really dangerous.

10. Main point: 100% correct, Betts. Safier does need to get off his ass and attend the governance meetings in the district on which he presumes to issue his ludicrously poorly informed opinions. The fact that people as ignorant as he is of what actually happens in the district are allowed to lead public opinion (or the PCDP / DGT portion of it) is a large part of the reason why the only sane choice for parents who recognize what is going on here is to remove their children from the sinking ship.

    Supporting detail: mainly correct, with the notable exception of the fact Stegeman was on the Board during the three years when the 301 funds were accumulating in the district’s bank accounts and he, in spite of his much-vaunted economic expertise and mastery of the financial details of the district’s operations, either did not recognize it was happening or did not choose to bring it to the public’s attention and do anything about it. At the point you refer to, when the build-up of 301 funds had been recognized and brought to the public’s attention by others, he stood to gain points in the eyes of well-connected and locally influential supporters who were taking an interest in the issue (e.g. those connected with TUSD Kids First) by moving the issue forward in a Board meeting and putting Grijalva and Foster on the spot about it in public. More political theater. There are no white hats in this drama, just shades of gray, some closer to villainous black and some further from it.

    The main problem here is that the political party which, by-in-large, has run this district for the last several decades, does not at this point have decision makers in it who are standing up for the right things: paying attention to the details, utilizing proper process in public institutions, ensuring transparency. Decisions are made based on faulty information and lies; lies are believed because someone who has wheedled their way into the center of the network (like Kristel Foster) whispers in the ears of people who don’t want to do the tedious work of fact-checking her fantasy-land representation of what is happening in the district, which bears little or no relation to REALITY.

    If the largely Democratic electorate in the district had been looking to select candidates who were well informed about the district and committed to the ideals other branches of the Democratic Party have been committed to in the past — equity in education, transparency in and competent management of public institutions — they would have selected different leadership. But they keep re-electing their own dysfunction, and, with the new “leadership” team which includes two re-elected incumbents and one newcomer who is off to a very rough start, we are now seeing — yet again — the latest version of the sad results of that.

    It’s admirable in some ways that you are still at it, observing and providing commentary, but before you give more years of your life to this project, I suggest you ask yourself: Who is listening to you? What, given what you’ve seen for the past 12 years, do you honestly believe can be achieved to improve conditions in this rapidly deteriorating institution, where the local “leadership” network has proved time and time again that they prefer lies to the truth and self-interested schemers to competent Board members and administrators?

11. I have been to a few school board meetings and heard them discuss agenda items that had actual little kids and educational programs under careful discussion: just a boring but productive recollection that has no relevant connection with the current reality. Some commenters here write like they want to hurt somebody, at the least.

12. Were you at the Board meeting where they voted to award a $21 million contract to ESI, a manager of outsourced labor, “Sun Riser”?

    What did that agenda item and vote mean? It meant already underpaid, long-suffering long-term subs, working one of the most difficult jobs people do locally — walking into classrooms full of kids you don’t know and trying to deliver something resembling “instruction” in very challenging circumstances — had their wages reduced and their ability to qualify for benefits destroyed. Why? So that the district could off-load the tremendous management problem it had created for itself when their newly recruited, inexperienced 30-something-year-old Superintendent redistributed Title 1 money to reduce class sizes. This redistribution of federal funds meant to benefit poor students had the effect of creating a lot of impossible-to-fill positions in schools on the west and south sides serving primarily low income families. Long term subs, who in most cases don’t have teaching certification, had to fill those positions. And then their labor was outsourced. And then an executive in the company to which the labor was outsourced gave two $5,000 donations to TUSD Board members running for re-election who had voted in support of the awarding of the $21 million contract. And no donation to the TUSD Board member running for re-election who had NOT voted in support of awarding that contract.

    These are the sorts of things that can be observed in and around TUSD Board meetings if you are well informed and have done your homework, and if you are not distracted by the student mariachi bands and other BS that is trotted out in every meeting, specifically to entertain and mislead people who DO NOT do their homework.

    I haven’t read any commenters here that give me the impression they “want to hurt somebody,” but I have read many commenters who give me the impression that they want this toxic, dysfunctional district to stop hurting its poor and minority students.

13. So the Superintendent should be fired because of the complexities arising from his reduction of class size?

14. The Superintendent should be fired because:
    1) He was not experienced enough to recognize that this is what would happen when he attempted an across-the-board reduction in class sizes in a district with the composition TUSD has. The result was a massive mis-use of federal funds and a reduction in the quality of services offered to the disadvantaged, both fire-able offenses. Sanchez has always been conspicuously underqualified and unfit for the job. He was brought in through an insufficiently transparent process that did not involve appropriate levels of community participation and his inexperience has been showing up in his mismanagement of this and other matters since Day 1. (Yes, it is appropriate to expect that the district will hire someone whose previous experience actually equips them to do a competent job in a district like this, with the characteristics this district has. Why would anyone question whether an administrator’s inability to anticipate and manage the consequences of their administrative actions in the institution of which they are head would be a fire-able offense? Of course it is.
    2) Credible sources have noted he was given advice about what the consequences would be, but he was too arrogant and self-willed to accept advice from people who had real experience managing districts of this size and complexity. If you are too inexperienced for the position you occupy, it’s best not to reject the guidance of those who know what they are doing when they try to warn you off a dangerous course.
    3). After bungling class size reduction, he did not need to outsource subs, which only made conditions worse both for the subs and for the students in the classrooms they were trying to manage.

    He is incompetent and should be fired. End of story. Continuity of dysfunction in a public school district is not desirable to anyone except privatizers like our state level leadership, who clearly want to keep Sanchez in place for reasons that have nothing to do with STUDENT BENEFIT . Competent and honest leadership is what’s needed. If Ducey et al. would stop colluding with Sanchez et al. to put lipstick on this very ugly pig, perhaps TUSD might have some chance of getting it.

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