Mary Dee Romney Mary Dee Romney

Extra special interest

School board members must distance themselves from the influence of nonprofits

By Mary Dee Romney 06/10/2010

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The PUSD Board of Education needs to start managing revenue opportunities and expenditures to benefit students rather than the “community partners” associated with election campaigns.
 
Two surveys informed the Board of Education that a parcel tax could not win the two-thirds vote required to pass. Yet, under pressure from the Pasadena Educational Foundation (PEF) and nonprofit affiliates, it chose to conduct a special, all-mail ballot election for a parcel tax aimed at raising $7 million a year over the next five years for public schools.  
 
This bad political dynamic cost the district more than a half-million dollars in election fees and raised important questions about who controls the district.
 
For 20 years, PEF-groomed candidates have formed the majority on the PUSD school board. Driven by the district’s remunerative poverty numbers, PEF grant programs have financed an entrenched political constituency of “collaborative community partners” demanding divided loyalties from elected school board members.
 
On a daily basis, the district must balance the interests of PEF’s established assortment of nonprofits bent on building their own “capacity” against the district’s obligations to meet the instructional needs of all students. 
 
At the same time, a revolving door of politically driven interests play to parent aspirations with constant agitation.
The campaign for YES on Measure CC was the most recent creature of this culture, a culture exposed by the routinely ignored Curriculum Management Audit (CMA) critical of the district’s excessive number of entrepreneurial deals lacking cost-benefit value while producing inequities, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness.
 
This is neither hyperbole nor yesterday’s news. It is the current and ongoing reality in the PUSD. 
 
Consider that while PEF-connected parents campaigned for $7 million a year for uncommitted purposes, PUSD Board Member Ed Honowitz, one of PEF’s own board members, engaged behind the scenes in self-dealing by directing a “community partner” grant to fund his wife’s Sylmar/Pacoima-style poverty program for Washington Elementary/Middle and Muir High students. This program will deliver remedial attention for so-called “pathologies” associated with students at these sites.  
 
On another level, PEF board member Peter Dreier continues to use his PEF position to organize acolytes for his ACORN-style “house meetings” and constellation of political organizations. Post-CC, Dreier wrote in the Pasadena Star-News that six Northern California school districts had successfully passed parcel taxes. Dreier apparently is unaware that these districts — unlike the PUSD — are Basic Aid Districts. As such, they reject state funding and rely exclusively on local taxation and principles of sound finance tied to the delivery of instruction.
 
If it is to exert credible authority in tough times, the elected Board must reject such malpractice, dysfunction and misinformation. 
First, the Board of Education is duty-bound to implement district-wide fraud and ethics training called for by the recent financial audit. To avoid embarrassment to the district and potential criminal investigation, each individual on the Board of Education immediately must, themselves, comply with state conflict of interest laws — just as required of each district employee. 
 
Each member of the Board of Education, regardless of past or current PEF affiliation or campaign support, must work with the PEF to change 40 years of secretive practices so that PEF meetings comply with provisions of the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, and are open to all members of the public. 
 
The Board of Education must take official action to assure PUSD parents that affiliation with PEF-prescribed nonprofits and attendance at Peter Dreier’s “house meetings” are not prerequisites to securing a competitive public education for their children.
The Board of Education must address recent audit findings that show an increase of $2.2 million in general administration costs while next year’s enrollment is projected to decrease to 18,300 students, requiring — by necessity — that some schools consolidate and others close.
 
To clear the way for these important decisions, the Board of Education must break ties with special interests, including the PEF, and engage in full and open debate about how its members can regain independent governing authority and preserve it into the future.  
 
This debate should include Superintendent Edwin Diaz who, in his May 20 opinion piece to the Star-News, affirmed his continued dependence on the status quo.
 
Once the Board of Education sets itself at an ethical distance from the numerous nonprofits clinging to poverty grants and political organizing, it will be free to shape the many fiscal pieces of the budget to ensure instructional focus built on solvency, stability and balance. 
 
This will inspire confidence from the community and result in sound decisions based on the facts, rather than hidden pressure from agendas and special deals set up behind the scenes.
Mary Dee Romney is a longtime resident of Pasadena and a former candidate for the Board of Education.

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The PUSD is riddled with corruption, nepotism, and cronyism. And they have the lotus eating non-profit crowd feeding at the PUSD trough, too. The only solution is to SHUT DOWN the PUSD and start all over again with a bare bones administrative staff (principal, vice principal, a few clerks), NO consultants, NO touchy feely programs, lots and lots of teachers and lots of opportunities for parental involvement. AND, neighborhood schools ONLY--no busing and no children allowed to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods.

posted by Ramon Hernandez on 6/11/10 @ 07:44 p.m.

Just one question and a few comments:

The author assesses;

"On another level, PEF board member Peter Dreier continues to use his PEF position to organize acolytes for his ACORN-style “house meetings” and constellation of political organizations."

Please tell me, exactly what similarities are really being pejoratively referred to here? I mean, ACORN -- before the conspiratorial felony crimes masterminded by Andrew Breitbart caused that community-directed activity to close down shop -- was, almost exclusively, a voter registration organization that signed up mostly non-Caucasian citizens who were in fact eligible to vote.

And from what I have been able to discover so far, on a national scale, ACORN remained true to its charter and never knowingly registered any person who was unqualified to vote. I think that, by comparing a multi-state voter-registration organization to a local community school board, you've transcended the apples and oranges paradigm to hummingbirds and fly larvae.

Also, even in the "apples-to-apples" context expose'd in the above article, just because there are a number of "conflict-profiting" nonprofits making their questionably-cost-effective dime off of PU school-tax revenues, it certainly does not mean that ALL nonprofits working with the PUSD are playing that rather subversive shell-game of hiding most of the granted funds in somebody's private bank account.

One prime example that I am historically familiar with is the Pasadena nonprofit called "Outward Bound Adventures (or OBA, not to be confused with the national organization called OutwardBound)." Contrasting with some of the conflict-oriented nonprofits identified by the author of this article, OBA actually brings additional money into the PUSD's coffers while functionally transferring none out at all.

(continued below)

posted by DanD on 6/13/10 @ 05:28 p.m.

(from above)
So, while I feel that Mary Dee Romney has written an insightful and very informative piece here, it is still not complete, as the brush that she paints all nonprofits with is far too broad and does not contrast the difference between what is tantamount to a crony nonprofit, and those that are not.

And Finally, Ms. Romney determines:

"... NO consultants, NO touchy feely programs, lots and lots of teachers and lots of opportunities for parental involvement. AND, neighborhood schools ONLY--no busing and no children allowed to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods."

What is meant by "touchy feely?"

And concerning an individual's "choice-to-attend" ... but only if that choice deals with the "not-Public School" system? Doesn't the last part of that last sentence kinda' interfere with -- you know -- some young capitalist's "freedom to choose?" I mean, what if Mommy and Daddy have the extra cash and a youth is willing to surrender the public transit time to attend a more peripheral, public learning institution that has a lower student-to-teacher ratio? Or maybe a jock-type just likes that more foreign school's football mascot better ... it is the (parentally monitored) student's life-to-experience first, and NOT some tyrannically bureaucratic school district's.

You know, America ... home of the brave and (some days) land of the free?

DanD

http://mediamatters.org/research/2010060...

http://freerangetalk.com/?p=22715

http://www.obainc.info/

posted by DanD on 6/13/10 @ 05:29 p.m.

Please assign an investigative reporter for fact-finding, with with highly accusatory story.

Please publish your findings.

posted by GeorgeHuff on 6/16/10 @ 10:04 p.m.
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