Someone has got to do something. School officials in Wiseburn are complaining, and rightfully so. They get dinged for property taxes twice, and they do not get their money's worth when it comes to their forced, coerced investment in Centinela Valley Union High School District.
Centinela Valley Union High School school district does not serve students, but merely serves bureaucrats and administrators who want an easy paycheck to take home. They do not deserve students, the district office, leaderless bureaucrats, and unaccountable school board.
The superintendent received a 150% loan for a home, even though he has already filed for bankruptcy.
The school board members have received lavish insurance policies, which they can cash out at any time.
The whole reason for having a school board was to keep the Superintendent accountable. When Fernandez was hired, the members of the board included a stipulation in the contract that four of the sitting members would have to move for his dismissal. This is not acceptable.
Lawndale's award-winning principal Vince Bravo was moved up, moved around, then pushed down. I even closed his class at Leuzinger High School last year – and the insanity continues. The elephant of unaccountability, professional disrespect and disrepute continues unabated.
I do not understand why people keep going to work in that district. Do people not see, not smell, the elephant in the classroom?
How many more substitutes, like myself, will get fed up with mere crowd control without any support? Security should not have to rush in a put a class in place so that a teacher can proceed with a lesson. Teachers are called to teach, students have a right to learn, no one has the right to interfere with this august, even a handful or rowdy elements who refuse to cooperate with any authority on campus, fully aware that no one will hold them accountable.
But the short-lived successes of unruly elements is a long-term certainty of failure and dysfunction, with destruction or incarceration soon to follow. This is not the future, this is not acceptable.
True, there have been marked improvements in some of the schools, but for whom, and at what cost? How many students have been shuttered out of the three comprehensive schools and into Lloyde Continuation School? Students get D's and F's for the first two years of school, then get dumped into the local stagnation school. This is a travesty. Granted, Leuzinger has earned high marks this year, exceeding previous Standardized test scores, but what of all those students cast out so soon? One at Lloyde, very few students return to the comprehensive school fold. How can anyone sit back and do nothing? Why is all of this nonsense going on at length and no one raises cries out: "Enough already!" The student population at Lloyde High School has probably reached over one thousand, according to what's on the books, but then how many of those students go to class every day? Those students deserve an education, one in which teachers are authorized to command respect., one where administrators will lead instead of pander to district officials and back up students at the expense of the teachers trying to teach.
The district just shut down the vast majority of funding for the adult education program. The district cried foul, claiming that there is no money. How many trips do district personnel take? How much money has been wasted in fruitless improvements and innovations. I remember a dodge ball wall at the North End of Leuzinger High School some years ago. $20,000 dollars were blown on that board, according to one of the on-site janitors, and for what? The wall has since then disappeared, along with all of the money.
What is the point of a school board if distant people make decisions that have nothing to do with the day-to-day runnings of the campuses? These schools were good schools once, and they can be better. Reforms on the inside are simply no go. That time has come, in my opinion, for the residents, the voters, the community at large to demand the dissolution of the high school district and lease out the necessary funds to the feeder schools, so that they can take on the students in their home districts.
Students deserve choice! Parents deserve quality. Wiseburn deserves a break from the heavy taxes wasted on the temporal, ephemeral, and just plain insignificant. The county and the state and the country deserve a model of public education which is not distant, but decent and decentralized for all involved.