School board looks back on a tumultuous year

Hostility, divisiveness and a tense relationship with district staff were all serious problems facing the Mountain View Whisman School District’s school board this year, and now the trustees are looking to turn a new leaf.

On Sept. 25 and 26, the board spent two days at a board retreat going over case studies of where things broke down over the last 10 months, including problematic decisions made by both the board and district staff.

Led by a facilitator, board members generally agreed that the process for deciding whether to open or close a school in the district was fundamentally flawed, and cited miscommunication with the superintendent as a big issue that, on occasion, puts district staff and the board at odds with each other.

Closing schools

During the first six months of the year, then-Interim Superintendent Kevin Skelly formed a committee of community members to decide whether it is feasible to open a new school in the Whisman and Slater neighborhood area. When district staff came to the committee with its first batch of options, almost all of them proposed closing existing schools, including Theuerkauf and Stevenson Elementary.

Board member Bill Lambert argued at the retreat that they essentially designed a committee that was given an impossible situation. The district provided members with parameters showing there weren’t enough students in the district, nor was there enough enrollment growth, to support a ninth school. Asking them to draw up boundaries for a new campus, he said, created a situation where the public was “traumatized by virtually every school closing in north Mountain View.”

While the committee’s work prompted one uproar after another from parents in the district, board member Greg Coladonato asserted that it wasn’t really the board’s fault — it didn’t decide to make the task force or box the group into an impossible situation. Lambert disagreed, and said the board should have known how residents in Mountain View would react.

“We enabled it to happen, we allowed it to happen and we watched it happen,” Lambert said. “Superintendent Skelly just did not understand the political situation and created something that, if we had really thought further about it, was an inappropriate thing to do.”

Last March, Skelly told the Voice that it was easy to be critical of the task force members, but that they did as well as they could have. He said people were upset about the task force even considering closing or combining schools, but that it was important to look at all the options and alternatives to get the best results.

Spending bond money

How to spend the remaining Measure G bond money on school facilities is also a serious board-related issue, according to Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph. At their June 24 meeting, board members were put into a position where they had to decide, item by item, what should be cut from construction plans at Castro and Mistral Elementary. Rudolph said that level of micromanagement should never have reached the board.

“The decision fell on you to start striking things out. That changed the public’s perception of the board,” Rudolph said. “It put the public against the board when what you were doing was the right thing.”

A tense relationship

The deep-seated tension between district staff and trustees still appears to be a problem. Rudolph explained that staff continues to see the board’s comments and actions as combative.

A recent example was at the Sept. 17 meeting, where the board reviewed the results of the newest state standardized tests. Coladonato asked Rudolph for more information on how the state’s “targeted” funding for low-income and minority students was allocated in the district prior to the meeting. But it wasn’t clear, Rudolph said, that he wanted to have a larger discussion on how that funding was being spent, making it seem as if staff was unprepared when it came up at the meeting.

“What it looks like is the board is going after the district office (for) not having that information,” Rudolph said.

While it wasn’t a big issue for Rudolph, who said he didn’t take it personally, it was a problem for other district office staff.

“I can tell you the next day when we had our district office meeting, what it reinforced is ‘the board is still against the district office and the schools,’ and that’s reflected in the way that the community thinks about us,” he said.

Rudolph said that part of his job is repairing the relationship so staff members don’t feel like they’re “constantly being accosted” by the board, which he said has been an issue since former Superintendent Craig Goldman stepped down in December. When there’s an altercation at a school board meeting, Rudolph said he can walk away without feeling as if he is personally attacked — but he’s an exception.

“My perspective is different because I wasn’t here. With the staff, they have what happened with Craig (Goldman), what’s happened with Kevin (Skelly). All of that historical stuff, those feelings come back up,” he said.

Miscommunication via email seems to be a recurring problem for the district. In one instance, Rudolph mentioned that board member Steve Nelson had made a Public Records Act request that led to Nelson threatening legal action.

Nelson had requested a copy of the Uniform Complaint Procedure, which is a statement families can fill out if they feel the district has violated a federal or state law or regulation. Rudolph misinterpreted the request to mean Nelson felt the form ought to be more publicly available on the website. That’s when Nelson said he wanted to pick up the document later that day, Rudolph said, and that he would challenge the superintendent if he didn’t follow through with the request.

“His response was … ‘If you don’t want to do that, then I’ll get my own lawyers and I’ll start a lawsuit,'” Rudolph said.

A loyalty pledge?

In an effort to mend these problems and get along better at future board meetings, Bill Attea, the retreat facilitator, encouraged board members to have mutual respect for one another and find ways to overcome their divisiveness in the future.

“When you proceed to be divisive, you are working against the role you were elected (to fill),” Attea told the trustees.

Board president Ellen Wheeler agreed, and said board members need to start supporting board decisions once they have been voted on and approved, whether they agree with the decision or not. That way, individual members aren’t railing against decisions that were made and creating a schism on the board.

“I 100 percent think it’s critical to the success of our board and to the schoolchildren of this district,” Wheeler said.

The board could not take action at the meeting, but members were informally polled to see who would agree to Wheeler’s proposal. Lambert said it is important to support decisions, at least publicly, whether they agree with the decision or not — particularly in light of having a new superintendent, a new chief business officer and a new board member to start the year.

“The school district is tired of all the antics on this board and we have an opportunity to start fresh and stop all the divisiveness, and this is a step in the right direction,” Lambert said. “I think all of us have to accept that during the past three years this board has had a culture of undermining each other’s actions.”

Board member Jose Gutierrez said he did not want trustees to agree to any kind of loyalty pledge, but that he agreed members ought to start looking at their actions as a board, rather than as individual viewpoints.

Nelson took a decisively contrary view to Wheeler, saying it is important for him to take a strong stand on political issues, including teacher salaries and adding a new school. He compared himself to the Americans who fought against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, rather than going with the status quo.

“Ellen (Wheeler) and Bill (Lambert) have a different idea of how legislative a school board is,” Nelson said.

After the meeting, Rudolph told the Voice that the meeting went well and everyone who participated appeared to get something out of it. Coladonato called the meeting “productive” and said members were cordial in going through the difficult issues facing the board.

“I feel like the board worked together reasonably well. We left the meeting with some strong directions to go in,” Coladonato said.