The claims have always been dubious, according to experts on state privacy and labor relations statutes. Law enforcement officers are strongly protected by both state laws and a controversial court interpretation of those laws. But rank-and-file government managers and employees who make mistakes have long been exposed or protected at the whims of city managers or mayors or school district superintendents.

The California First Amendment Coalition notes that governments officials often assert that personnel, medical and similar files are exempt from disclosure: “This exemption is routinely invoked when the public agency believes a request seeks information pertaining to identifiable public officials or employees that is private, sensitive or controversial. But in fact, the information may only be withheld if its disclosure ‘would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ (Government Code § 6254(c)). That is, and is meant to be, a high threshold.”

Now a potentially landmark case is unfolding in San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, that could expose the discretionary nature of government officials’ sweeping claims of privacy for employee conduct.

Near the end of the 2013-14 school year at the district’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, Superintendent Cindy Marten refused to disclose the specific details of the decision to abruptly reassign Principal Mitzi Lizarraga and lock her out of the school. Rumored penalties given to a school counselor were also judged as protected by privacy laws.

But then the heat built on Marten and school board President Marne Foster over several Foster actions that raised questions about her ethics and judgment. A May 2015 grand jury report, without naming Foster, blamed a school board member for the School of Creative and Performing Arts’ shakeup. The grand jury corroborated what school activists had said about Foster reacting with fury to a negative college recommendation for her son, who was a senior in 2013-14, and said the district needed better rules to prevent improper board member interference.

Three months later, in the district’s official response, Marten dismissed the grand jury report as too vague to act on and as calling for safeguards against board member interference that were already in place.

School district cites privacy exemption, then says never mind

But Voice of San Diego pursued the matter and landed the first interviews with Lizarraga, now principal of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and  Kim Abagat, a counselor who had been suspended for nine days.

Both described Foster as a nightmarish force at their school. Abagat said she had been punished for accurately describing her son’s record at the school. Lizarraga said she was abruptly reassigned by one of Marten’s top aides after Foster’s son was barred from the prom because of behavioral lapses.

This led Marten to issue 61 pages of internal district documents, including a private investigator’s report, that she said showed that she and the district had responded properly to Foster’s interference at the school and that the district had been justified in its personnel decisions. The superintendent said because of their interviews, the district was now justified in releasing information about Lizarraga and Abagat it had previously said it could never release.

But Lizarraga and Abagat didn’t agree, and they have hired a San Diego criminal defense lawyer, who strongly hinted a lawsuit was to come because the privacy rights of his clients had been abused. Such a lawsuit could be a landmark in that it might establish just how much of a right to privacy that school employees have, and if those rights are somehow vacated when they publicly respond to criticism of their job performance.

There is a bizarre element to the case. District documents credibly showed why Abagat’s punishment may have been deserved; counselors with deep concerns about students are supposed to pass college evaluations on to colleagues who may have a different opinion. She also got basic information about Foster’s son wrong.

However, Lizarraga wasn’t punished; she was reassigned to a position invented for her that she held for a few months before taking the Los Angeles job.

So San Diego Unified officials are in the peculiar position of saying Lizarraga’s job performance was so bad they had to abruptly promote her and that the decision wasn’t influenced by Foster’s fury over her son being punished and judged a poor college prospect but by a long accumulation of management miscues.

Lizarraga may not have much of a case that her privacy rights were violated. As the principal of a high-profile high school, reasons for her reassignment should be public record, according to the First Amendment Coalition. But when it comes to a defamation case, San Diego Unified’s vulnerability appears high.

This is from VOSD’s weekend report on the odd way the scandal is unfolding in California’s second-largest school district:

Last Tuesday, trustees emerged from a three-hour closed-session meeting and announced they’ll vote this week on hiring an investigator to look into a private fundraiser Foster held for her sons, and whether Foster was behind a complaint that sought $250,000 in response to a negative college evaluation letter written about her son.

 

Trustee Richard Barrera said he will ask the board to consider which issues are truly relevant to the school district.

 

“With the legal claim, we need to be thoughtful about what is in the district’s interest considering that this claim was already dismissed, and no money was paid,” Barrera said. “From the district’s standpoint, the matter is settled.”

 

Barrera said conversation about the allegations should be tempered with a show of support for Foster’s efforts to promote equity for all students. That’s why he and trustee Mike McQuary moved forward on the proclamation.

 

“I’m concerned there’s a single story getting out there about Marne,” Barrera said. “I just want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the work she’s done.”

Powerful union leader backs his protege

Barrera’s emergence as a Foster defender is a big development in that he has far more political clout than all the other board members combined. His full-time job is as secretary-treasurer of the San Diego Labor Council, an omnibus union group. He helped persuade Foster, a community college teacher and school activist, to run for school board.

It’s also good news for district Superintendent Cindy Marten. Many school boards would have reacted differently to news of a superintendent countenancing a board member throwing her weight around and causing major problems at a respected district school because her son didn’t get a favorable college reference.

As CalWatchdog reported previously …

Kim Abagat, a school counselor, came forward to tell the Voice of San Diego that she had been suspended by the district for nine days for not writing a laudatory college recommendation for Foster’s son, who was ranked 100th in GPA in a class of 147. Abagat said she was punished for telling the truth.

Mitzi Lizarraga, the school principal, also was punished for the actions of her staff. This is from the Voice of San Diego:

Lizarraga said as the 2013-2014 school year drew to a close, Foster’s son had unresolved behavioral issues. Students have to meet with a school committee to review the issues before they’re allowed to participate in end-of-the-year activities. Foster’s son did not appear for the review, Lizarraga said. For that, he couldn’t go to prom – the same consequences students in similar situations face.

 

Not long after, Lamont Jackson, the area superintendent responsible for the school, requested a meeting with Lizarraga. He was there to tell her Foster’s son would be attending the dance, she said.

 

“At that point, I just threw my hands up and said, ‘Fine. I’m so sick of Marne Foster. I’m tired of her throwing her weight around and her thinking the rules don’t apply to her,’” Lizarraga said.

 

She said she was shocked by what came next.

 

“He said, ‘Good. Now that that’s resolved, let’s talk about where you’re going to be next year. We have some questions about your leadership at this school,’ ” Lizarraga said.

 

Lizarraga would not complete the year. Jackson asked for her keys to the school, she said, and she was not allowed to attend the school’s graduation ceremony.

The same article details how Barrera made Foster his handpicked candidate to run for the school board in 2012.

Foster is up for re-election in 2016.

Marne Foster

For the second time in recent months, San Diego Unified School Board President Marne Foster is facing official scrutiny over her conduct.

The California Attorney General’s Office has questioned the legality of a raffle held at an unusual July 25 fundraiser in which Foster sold tickets to pay for college debt and expenses of two of her sons. This account is from the Union-Tribune:

Organizers of a fundraiser held last month to help pay off debt and college costs for the sons of San Diego school board President Marne Foster have been given until Sept. 9 to show that a raffle-like drawing held at the event was conducted legally.

 

The state Attorney General’s office sent a letter to C. Anthony Cole Repertory Dance Theatre on Aug. 10 to inquire about the drawing that generated money at the Brothers 2 College benefit held on July 25 at the Neighborhood House Association headquarters.

 

The letter includes a summary of state legal requirements for holding raffles, including the code provision that authorizes eligible organizations to conduct raffles provided they are registered with the California Attorney General Registry of Trusts.

The fundraiser was already in the news because of conflict of interest questions. A flier for the event featured San Diego Unified’s logo; it was also publicized on the Facebook page for Foster’s district. The fundraiser was held at a local facility that has a school district contract that Foster voted for last year. The event was attended by representatives of groups, such as the local teachers union, which hope to stay on Foster’s good side.

Grand jury knocks interference at son’s school

This controversy comes in the wake of a May report from the San Diego County Grand Jury calling on the school district to impose tougher rules for board member behavior because of Foster’s alleged interference with teachers, counselors and the principal of the School of Creative and Performing Arts, a high school attended by her son. The Voice of San Diego detailed the allegations.

Foster’s son was a student at SCPA. Foster and [Principal Mitzi] Lizarraga did not like each other. This is one of the few things on which they agree.

 

Lizarraga said Foster regularly used her position on the school board to push for special treatment for her son. She pressured his teachers to tweak grades and attendance records, Lizarraga said, and demanded a counselor for her son with whom she had a personal relationship.

Lizarraga says her staff was forced to write a favorable college recommendation for Foster’s son and that she was ousted as principal at her behest. She left San Diego Unified last year and now is principal of an arts school in Los Angeles.

Foster denies any wrongdoing. She has not commented on the attorney general’s questions about her July 25 fundraiser, but depicted criticism of it as politically motivated.

Foster says if there was any improper behavior at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, it was by staff members, which took out their differences with her on her son.

In its formal response to the grand jury report, the school district challenged the assertion that it had inadequate ethical standards and said the allegations against Foster were too vague to act upon.

San Diego Unified is the second largest school district in California, with more than 130,000 students.

Foster, a community college teacher, was elected to the board in 2012.

Previous bond oversight language was far stricter. It only allowed the use of long-term borrowing to pay for school buses if there were a reasonable expectation that they would last at least 20 years. But in Proposition 39’s wake — especially when operating funds were squeezed because of the state revenue plunge from 2008-2012 — bonds have been used for everything from graffiti cleanup, minor repairs and painting to purchases of short-lived laptops, iPads and other tablet computers.

SEC wades into LAUSD mess

But now regulators with the federal Securities & Exchange Commission are questioning the propriety of what California school bonds have been used to buy. Their angle isn’t the legality of these uses under state law. It’s whether these uses conform with what bond buyers were told — specifically when it comes to L.A. Unified’s troubled iPads-for-all program:

The federal agency is charged with protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets. Its enforcement division frequently looks into “misrepresentation or omission of important information about securities,” according to the commission.

With the help of an outside law firm, L.A. Unified prepared a presentation, dated March 31, that outlined measures it took to inform the public and potential investors about how the taxpayer-approved bond funds would be spent. …

California law allows school construction bonds to be spent on technology; districts also list the intended uses of bond funds in ballot materials available to voters.

L.A. Unified clearly designated funds for technology, but did not mention tablets. At the time of the district’s most recent bond issue, in November 2008, iPads were still two years away from entering the marketplace.

But officials have maintained that tablets are a modern equivalent of the traditional computer lab and therefore a legal and appropriate use of bond funds.

That’s from the L.A. Times.

Boilerplate bond language used across state

Though the SEC probe is informal for now, it could have alarming implications for school districts throughout California that have used 30-year borrowing on short-lived electronics. That’s because the bond descriptions that LAUSD provided to potential buyers were boilerplate of the sort routinely used by all districts.

If the SEC decides the language is so vague as to be illegally deceptive, that would be a problem for dozens of school districts, only starting with LAUSD and the state’s second-largest district, San Diego Unified.

The most obvious example is the fact that California has a 1971 state law — the Stull Act — that mandates student performance be included in teacher evaluations. This is just the sort of approach that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan like as part of their push to eliminate the 10 percent or so of teachers they say are too incompetent to be allowed in the classroom.

But guess what: The law has been ignored for decades in California. Why? Because for at least 20 years, the most powerful special interest in the state has been the teacher unions — the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. Keeping the CTA and CFT happy has been a higher priority in local school districts and in the Legislature than actually honoring a clearly written state law.

No job matches your specialty? So what? Here's your check

With monotonous regularity, stories come along to remind us of this dominance of the teacher unions. In the past two years, the main example has been the disgusting Mark Berndt scandal and fallout in California's largest school district. The veteran teacher couldn't be fired by Los Angeles Unified for feeding semen to students; he had to be paid $40,000 to quit. Since then, the Legislature has blocked measures to make it easier to fire classroom sexual predators such as Berndt. Instead, a fake reform passed this year actually would have made it tougher to fire pervert teachers. Thankfully, Brown vetoed it. He'll kowtow to teacher unions on a lot of fronts, but he draws the line at the Pervert Protection Act of 2013.

Now comes an example from the state's second largest school district. San Diego Unified has been pleading poverty for years. Now it turns out the allegedly fiscally bereft district is actually bereft of transparency and common sense. This is from the U-T San Diego:

“Teachers are [classified as] excessed when their positions are eliminated — usually due to an enrollment drop, increase in class size or — in the case of middle and high school — the discontinuation of a course or program. …

“San Diego Unified’s 2013-14 budget counts on some 300 teachers having retired or resigned last school year to save $27 million. …

“This week, excessed teachers will gather at a district forum to bid for vacant jobs, positions that will be awarded based on seniority and credentials.

“At the end of the forum, if there are more teachers than jobs, the district must create new positions since excess teachers are tenured employees who are guaranteed employment. …

“San Diego Unified employs more than 6,000 teachers. The number excessed each year varies — from 658 last year to 696 in 2011-12, 560 in 2010-11, and 347 in 2009-10, district records show.”

San Diego's version of “rubber rooms”

If anything confirms the fact that California's K-12 school system is more about providing union jobs than it is about providing students with an education, this is it. A school district that is allegedly so hard up for cash that it uses 30-year borrowing to pay for graffiti removal keeps hundreds of teachers on the payroll who don't teach.

This isn't as outrageous as the “rubber rooms” of New York City where hundreds of violent or deranged teachers sit around all day and collect pay to do crosswords and listen to their iPods. But it's just as revoltingly stupid.

By Chris Reed

It’s time for a tale of comic-book villainy from San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district and one in which voracious unions so dominate decision-making that a stunning 92 percent of the operating budget goes to employee compensation.

When 11 of every 12 dollars goes to pay and benefit, the squeeze on the rest of the budget is enormous. And so you see students forced to pay for educational supplies, in defiance of the California Constitution. And so you see 30-year-bonds used to pay for routine maintenance and short-lived electronics like laptops and iPads.

And you see money specifically designated to be used to subsidize school lunches for tens of thousands of students from poor families grabbed for adult employees — over and over and over.

Adult employees 3, poor schoolkids 0

This is from my U-T San Diego editorial:

“On scams and scandals large and small [in California], the motivation is often protecting the interests of public employees, whether or not it serves the public interest. …

” … when it comes to sheer obnoxiousness, a local example is tough to beat. We refer to the three reports this year of San Diego Unified improperly diverting money to adult employees from school lunch programs meant to help low-income students.

“In February, a state Senate report blasted the district for improperly taking at least $4.5 million in federal lunch funds to help pay for the salaries and benefits that consume more than 90 percent of the district’s operating budget.

“Last month, the state Department of Education demanded a refund of $13.4 million from San Diego Unified because it had used funds from a federally reimbursed state program meant to subsidize lunches for poor children for other purposes, starting with $10.9 million in employee salaries.

“Last week, the district announced it would stop using funds that are supposed to subsidize lunches for low-income students to pay for gifts to encourage good “attendance” and other positive behavior by cafeteria workers. About $300,000 had been diverted for that purpose over the past 12 years.

“We suppose this represents progress, because in the first two cases, the school district flatly denies it has done anything wrong — even though the state laid out a lengthy, specific, unrefuted list of district violations in its May 15 letter demanding repayment of the $13.4 million.

“Nevertheless, San Diego Unified officials seek to depict these reports as inter-government squabbles over accounting procedures. Instead, they’re more properly seen as a pathetic serial scandal involving a district that repeatedly raids funds meant to help tens of thousands of low-income students so it can give the money to adult employees.” 

Even for California, this is pathetic

Even by the appallingly low standards of California governance, this is pretty extreme.

San Diego Unified’s leaders should be ashamed. If they’re capable of being ashamed.

By Chris Reed

In the private sector, there are all kinds of laws that govern employment, conduct, conflict of interest and appropriate use of shareholder funds. They may not always be enforced, but in the best-run companies, they are usually taken seriously.

In the public sector, there are all kinds of rules and regulations that are supposed to cover these same areas, but they are ignored. And sometimes there are rules and regulations that protect misconduct and tolerate ridiculous conflicts.

Public sector mischief and worse: Ho-hum, nothing to see here

Examples are everywhere, but I stick to these four:

It took a lawsuit by parents of students in bad schools to get the Los Angeles Unified School District to begin heeding a 1971 state law that requires student performance be part of teacher evanluations.

In the same school district, administrators chose to pay off a perverted teacher who fed semen to first-graders because they didn’t think it was within their authority to immediately dismiss him.

In the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the longtime president of the board, incredibly enough, is the same guy who is the executive vice president of the California Federation of Labor. Boy, I wonder why CalPERS has acted so irresponsbily for so long.

Shut up, complainers, and butt out

Which brings us to California’s second-largest school district after LAUSD, San Diego Unified. The San Diego County grand jury issued a report last week that noted all the different ways the district has used taxpayer resources to promote ballot measures and bills in Sacramento in explicit defiance of state law. This is from a U-T San Diego story:

“[The U-T] last year highlighted a district email blast to parents with the subject line ‘Make Your Voice Heard — Support AB 2434,’ a proposal by Marty Block, D-San Diego, affecting the sale or lease of district property.

The story also looked at the district’s Education Issues Action Center, a website that urged residents to write their representatives or sign petitions asking them to provide adequate funding for schools. It also linked to advocacy websites for two tax increases.

“Another story highlighted school board President John Lee Evans’ use of his district email to coordinate a news conference with the region’s school board presidents to advocate for the passage of two tax increases, Propositions 30 and 38.”

Behind the flouting of the law? You guessed it

But as I pointed out in an editorial, San Diego Unified has already rejected the idea that it must use taxpayer funds legally.

“Last year, an attorney for the school district said SDUSD emails and a website advocating passage of a state bill were perfectly legal. So much for state courts’ established view that it is illegal to ‘use the public treasury to finance an appeal to the voters to lobby their Legislature.’

“There’s the law of the state of California, and then the one governing the San Diego Unified School District. That latter law amounts to, ‘We do what we want, and if you don’t like it, tough luck.’”

If this attitude sounds like standard union thuggish politics, bingo. San Diego Unified’s CTA-affiliated teachers union has its hooks firmly into four of the five school board members. The rules of the state just don’t apply, these members jave concluded — just the rules as determined by the bullies of Burlingame.

By Chris Reed

There are none so blind as those who will not see. EdSource does a 1,500-word analysis of a new study showing far higher turnover of superintendents in large school districts than smaller ones in California, discusses several theories, but never even mentions the fact that teacher union power is particularly extreme in big school districts — and teacher unions are fickle, demanding, hard-to-please masters.

In Los Angeles Unified, it took a judge’s ruling to get the union-dominated district to begin obeying a 1971 state law requiring that teacher evaluations include student performance.

In San Diego Unified, the state’s second largest district after L.A., employee compensation — primarily teacher salaries — consumes 93 percent of the operating budget. And that’s after the school board mustered the will to bargain to delay a 7 percent raise that all represented employees were supposed to get this school year. I’ve actually seen San Diego Unified documents that project employee compensation in coming years would top 100 percent of the operating budget.

Which is a mathematical impossibility.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent, much smaller, Poway Unified district, the union has much less clout, and the compensation chunk of the operating budget is only 85 percent.

In San Diego Unified, there have been three superintendents in four years, and the latest is a figurehead — a former admiral hired because the local union knew he knew his place. In Poway Unified, the superintendent is an aggressive, take-charge guy with job security.

Still wonder why big districts have more turnover of superintendents, EdSource?

Of course, EdSource is in good company. In 2009, The New York Times wrote 8,000 words about California’s dysfunction that ignored public employee union power, which remains incredible to this day. Given where this state was in 2009, that may never be topped.