Gloria Copeland Speaks Out! By Various Spies WHO CAN PASS up the nonsense that flows from 1010 E. 10th, the Tucson Unified School District bunker? This week's tasty fluff comes from TUSD board member Gloria Copeland, who spoke to radio gasbag John C. Scott a couple of days after the TUSD board approved a $330 million budget, with Copeland and mentor Brenda Even dissenting. The Texas-born Copeland illuminated her budget protest with a sparkling, crystal-clear explanation of the admittedly bloated and misspent desegregation fund that hit $42 million. Now praying to the voters she has dissed for four years, Copeland brilliantly skips over the years she voted to increase the same desegregation budget she now professes to deplore: "Approximately eight years ago, when all this started, the way that the district funded deseg changed. There was a bill in the state that was supposed to be a three-year bill that allowed Phoenix Union as well as TUSD just to assess, to write a check to the superintendent of the county, and they paid it. Well, it was supposed to be three years and there was no holdback with it and every time it goes to the Legislature, to change, TUSD goes up there and they have a very effective lobby and there is no changing. This year it came closer in Mr. (state Rep. Dan) Schottel's committee in coming out with some, with some guidelines and it failed. And it's unconscionable and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, especially when I see that the money is not being expended to, to, at the site level or to enhance or correcting the issues that have to do with the students."

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