Vol. 3, Issue 11, March 13-19, 2008



By Nathan Wright and Jonathan Volzke

San Clemente Times



District’s leadership faced a barrage of bad news this week, including recall, layoffs and infighting



Summer vacation—three months of travel, leisurely sunny days and forgetting about work—can’t come soon enough for Capistrano Unified School District. These days, bad news has been coming as frequently as excuses for missing homework.



This week district officials learned that a recall effort targeting two longtime school trustees had enough signatures to reach the ballot. Later news broke that the Orange County District Attorney’s Office decided that trustees violated the state’s open meeting law—again. Then came the confirmation that pink slips would go out to 271 teachers that week. To cap it all off, two trustees traded insults during a bitter 12-minute exchange in front of a packed board meeting.



The recall effort has been under way since August, but on Monday the Orange County Registrar of Voters announced that the group in favor of the recall had gathered enough signatures to bring the issue to the ballot in a special election this summer.



The recall targets Sheila Benecke and Marlene Draper, the senior two of the seven-member trustee panel elected to govern the operations of the school district and its $422 million operating budget. CUSD includes 55 campuses with 50,000 students and 4,000 employees, one of the largest government agencies in the state. The city of San Clemente, by comparison, has a $50 million budget, 13 percent of the district’s budget.



The recall thrusts the ongoing battle between CUSD and district critics further into the public eye, asking 209,000 registered voters to decide if Benecke and Draper should remain in office.



Benecke and Draper are longtime faces in local education. Benecke, a Laguna Niguel resident, was first elected to the board in 1992. Draper, a resident of San Juan Capistrano, was elected in 1988. If recalled, new candidates would replace them. No candidates have announced intentions to run for the seats if they are recalled.



Reached after the Registrar of Voters’ announcement, Draper said she would fight the recall, albeit a low-key effort. “I do plan to run a campaign, although it will be much more grassroots and geared toward individuals who have a vested interest in the school district, namely parents with children in the district,” said Draper. “I feel that it’s especially important at this time when we face such a dire financial crisis from the state that we have board members with experience deciding the budget.”



Draper also reaffirmed that she would not seek reelection in November, a decision she said she made prior to the recall effort.



After Monday’s board meeting Benecke said she wasn’t sure if she’d organize opposition to the recall. “I really haven’t given any thought to that,” she said. She also hasn’t decided if she would seek reelection this November.



Draper questioned the value of the recall, when the district faces a funding crisis and her term ends in November. Because of election laws, the soonest any recall election could be held is June 20, and the latest is July 22. The district is expected to announce a special meeting later this week to select a date for the election.



That window of possible election dates misses the June 3 primary and doesn’t correspond with any regular election, Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley said. While the Registrar of Voters absorbs the cost of the signature verification, the district will have to pay the costs of a special election—which could top $750,000 or more.



Anthony Beall, the mayor of Rancho Santa Margarita and one of the recall leaders, said any responsibility for wasted money or effort falls on the trustees. “It’s a moot point now,” he said. “That was an issue before we turned in signatures. We gave those trustees every opportunity to resign and they chose not to, that’s a question for them.”



BROWN ACT VIOLATION



Recall proponent Tom Russell brought more bad news to the district: a letter from District Attorney Tony Rackauckas concluding that the school board had violated state open meeting law last year. On December 10 trustees approved the bidding for a two-story classroom building, an aquatic center, a synthetic track and a stadium complex under an agenda item titled “stadium complex.”



District critics cried foul after discovering the decisions, and in January, Beall submitted a letter to the District Attorney reporting the incident. The reply appears to confirm his accusations. “Since each project had been planned and discussed separately, and since all the projects are controversial, each one should have been individually noticed in the agenda,” says Rackauckas in the letter.



But the letter states that the board’s decision to rescind the vote on February 11 corrected the violations, leading the District Attorney to conclude that no further action could be taken.



The news comes months after the District Attorney’s Office announced in October that the board had repeatedly violated the state’s open-meetings law in the past, requiring them to admit the violations and undergo training or face a civil lawsuit. Rackauckas’ letter warns that his office will keep an eye on the district.



TRUSTEES FEUD



Tensions among senior members of the CUSD Board of Education and three new “reform” members boiled over into a pair of critical six-minute speeches Monday, with Board President Mike Darnold questioning the commitment and qualifications of his new colleagues, one of whom responded by pointing out she was elected to “clean house.”



Shortly after Russell addressed the board, Darnold read a prepared speech criticizing the local media, inattentive voters and three board members who were elected as a slate in November 2006. He blamed the recall and other troubles in the district—where former Superintendent James Fleming was indicted by the Grand Jury and the board was forced to apologize for repeated violations of the state public-meeting law—on a “handful of very strong minded and self-serving people” out to “destroy us.”



He later singled out the three newest trustees. “Since the new members have joined us we no longer have continuity and progress,” he said. “Instead we have confusion and diversion.”



After he finished, Trustee Anna Bryson replied with her own six-minute barrage. She pointed out the previous board had voted unanimously on every issue for three years, and that large district contracts for services such as plumbing and architecture were routinely extended without seeking competitive bids. She also noted that the Board of Education had spent more than it took in for five of the prior six years, draining reserves down to the state minimum.



“No one questioned anything,” Bryson said. She said she and her colleagues listened to voters’ concerns in November, when they won office against two incumbents by a 17 percent margin. “You asked us to clean house in the financial arena here, and we are doing it,” Bryson said. “And we have done it. And it has been very difficult.”