Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Mendo School Board Election

by Bruce Anderson

FROM A SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION AD in last week's Mendocino Beacon: "Anne has a practical as well as a positive attitude regarding the challenges that our district faces. She has not written accusatory letters in the paper, supported recalls, advocated subsuming [sic] our district into the Fort Bragg District, or focused on the past. Anne looks for solutions that are fiscally responsible and good for students. In these times of fiscal demands upon all of us and shrinking budgets it is important to have a creative but reasoned approach."

TRANSLATION: "Anne is practical and positive, Gloria is impractical and negative. Anne is good, Gloria is bad. Positive Anne, unlike Negative Gloria, hasn't written accusatory [sic] letters to the local paper or any other kind of nugatory letters calling for recalls, in-service exhumations, seminar syphilis, or seaweed suppositories. Furthermore, the present state of the Mendocino schools is obviously unrelated to past management practices, and Anne, as a positive person, is naturally fiscally responsible unlike Gloria, oh that Gloria! Gloria will convert school funding to cash and run downtown to the liquor store and toss it all to the street people, which isn't good for students except the ones into bum fights. As we all become poorer and school budgets shrink because superintendent greedyguts and his two grasping principals stole all the comp time because they said they had it coming and sue us you negatives if you want receipts. If Anne isn't elected and Gloria is the whole school district will go to pot, including the two 4th grade students who don't smoke it, although pot prices are down to $1,100 a pound because the Mexicans are planting it like Nebraska corn fields west of Boonville."

POLLYANNA and the Positive People's Children's Choir aside, Mnemonic's school board election has generated a lot of interest because much of the community is seethingly unhappy with the management of its school system. Gloria Liner will be elected to the school board today (Tuesday, November 4th) because she brings "a creative but reasoned approach" to school affairs and carries the hopes of most district parents for student "good." Anne means well, as do the other sitting trustees, but Superintendent Shock has clearly shocked his school board into lockstep irresponsibility. Ms. Liner and her new colleagues on the reconstituted Mendo school board — the unopposed Rod Jones and Michael Schaeffer — may also be lulled into the stupefied stoogedom uniquely characteristic of American school boards, and again the nattering nabobs of negativism may have to saddle up and put the sword to the smiley faces, but anybody who can reduce serious political beefs to feeble-minded personality assessments like vote for her because she's "positive" but don't vote for her because she's "negative," needs to go back to school himself.

SOME OF MENDOCINO'S "kids" broke into their school a couple of weeks ago where they left all the water faucets and propane valves wide open in an Old Testament attempt to destroy the place via fire and flood. The high school principal subsequently announced he wanted "all rumors" about the Biblical assault on the premises reported to him. Drop-fall drinking and doping is so widespread among "the kids" in Mendocino that the saner among them have announced they'll maintain a breathalyzer at the door of school dances. As if the Mendocino schools don't have enough problems without student saboteurs and an ongoing fiscal crisis, there have also been a series of nearly fatal students-driving-under-the-influence accidents, with one set of parents now suing the CHP for not preventing their drunk daughter from an accident she caused while driving drunk. The officer was sorting out another drunk driving accident involving "the kids" on the Comptche-Ukiah Road when this second student drunk driver stopped to lament the crash caused by one of her loaded classmates. The cop, this outrageous but parentally indicative suit alleges, was supposed to have noted that the second young woman was loaded and suppressed her on the spot, although anyone who has ever dealt with a drunken female teenager knows it is impossible to distinguish between the effects of alcohol and screaming meemie hysterics.

BECAUSE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS work on contract without the kind of job protection most public employees enjoy, their first educational priority is to grab off as much pay as they can, then fortify themselves against unemployment by surrounding themselves with as many toadies as they can jam onto their school boards and faculties, the net result being the present state of not only Mendo Unified but the present state of public ed in the state — a self-interested, self-perpetuating sinkhole of fear, ethical corruption, cooked books, and an end product that typically is awarded a high school diploma without the ability to do the simplest calculations, write an error-free sentence, or read a credit card application well enough to defend himself against the usurers.

MENDOCINO'S two top administrators hustled themselves new multi-year contracts via a hastily-called school board meeting on a work day afternoon earlier in the year because if they hadn't the new school board may not have re-hired them. The new school board thus inherits major, built-in hassles bequeathed them by the outgoing board.

THE MENDO SCHOOL PROB? An over-large and over-expensive administrative apparatus, declining student enrollment, a flagrant, and flagrantly failed, case of expensive nepotism, too many golden parachutes recommended by Santa Rosa lawyers who don't have to pay for them, a demoralized high school faculty, and an alienated parent-student population. Complicate school management with a lot of state-level funding confusions that need not exist, throw in a gang of Santa Rosa lawyers, and local school boards are easily convinced that they need to pay a baloney artist, i.e., a superintendent of schools, a whole lot of money to figure it all out. But school districts, even the big ones, are run by very smart women paid a quarter of what Superintendent Baloney is paid. The smart women who run school districts are called "School Secretary." In Mendocino the person who does the heavy lifting for the district — sifting the reams of state and federal bushwa for the rare fact, kinda like an old sourdough pans for the occasional gold nugget in the upper Klamath — is Ms. Swan. She probably makes a third what Superintendent Shock gets. Mendo Unified doesn't need two people to do one job. All it needs is a Swan, not a Swan and a Goose. (What's that beautiful line from Othello? "I will play the swan, and die in music?" There's your solution, Mendocino! Go for it!)

HERE IN BOONVILLE, our schools were run for an entire year by school secretaries while the superintendent, a guy named Peterson, was passed out drunk in his office the one or two days a week he managed to find his way to work. The rest of the time the superintendent called in from venues in whose backgrounds one could hear clinking glasses, raucous laughter and maybe even a stanza of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and good for anybody who can grab an hour of joy in an often joyless world, but I really don't think I have an obligation to fund it for someone else. The superintendent would say he was "in-servicing" or "in Sacramento at a conference." You won't be surprised to learn that this fellow left Boonville to become an educational consultant to a State Senator named Nielsen — a policy maker! Which is about right, I'd say, in my experience with edu-world.

THE DRUNK was succeeded by Phil Crawford, aka Wobbling Eagle "because he was too full of it to fly." W.E. was literally sold to us by a glib woman in her late middle years named Doris Hammer, then hustling unemployables for an organization of jobless school administrators. Ms. Hammer, a very, very positive person, functioned as job recruiter for these characters. Every time she off-loaded one onto an unsuspecting school district she got paid. She apparently off-loaded tons of them because she retired to Mendocino where shacks sell for half a mil minimum. Ms. Hammer was soon a member of Mendo Unified's school board, which was just as soon saw an increase in low-level corruption deriving from the cronyism, travel and conference chiseling, and other forms of edu-hustling characteristic of public school employment, not that her arrival on the school board and the up tick in misdemeanors were mutually dependent.

BACK IN BOONVILLE, we soon caught Superintendent Wobbling Eagle stealing office furniture, signing off on fake administrative credentials, forging attendance records, and attempting to spend a lot of money on an alarm system he said was necessary in case of student riots. (We had about 80 students in the high school at the time, all of whom apparently terrified the guy. He'd probably heard about the day the year before when his predecessor, peacefully pounding down a fifth of scotch in his office when, about noon, several male students climbed up on the roof and began squirting fire hoses down through the vents, including the one where Superintendent Peterson had just knocked off his first fifth of the day. Peterson, totally stressed out by the insurrection, his suit soaked by the hoses wielded by the marauding youth on the roof, fled the premises, as did the faculty. Order was eventually restored by an emergency team of administrators awakened at the County Office of Education and hustled to Boonville where they heaved their pudgy bods into the authority breech.

WOBBLING EAGLE did not want a repeat of Fire Hoses Through The Vents Day. One of his first moves was to set up an office for himself at the Elementary School, two miles from the ominous teenagers. And at the Elementary School he positioned his double-wide so as not to see so much as a single gamboling tyke, thus isolating himself from even the possibility of contact with a living student.) W.E. was also big on all-expenses-paid, out-of-town trips for himself and his wife, Bunny. "Know why they call me Bunny? I have 15 kids!" All of whom, it seems, were sequestered in a distant hutch because we never saw any of them. Bunny was a good foot taller than Wobbling Eagle, too; we always wondered who was hopping whom in the Eagle home, but they seemed happy together and we all know love is often literally blind.

SUPERINTENDENT EAGLE went on to fleeting fame in two subsequent school districts, both of them much larger than Boonville's. His on-site behavior was so extremely bizarre it got him on television down in Inyo County at a place called Bishop when the whole town marched on his office demanding his immediate removal. A hundred years earlier he probably would have been lynched. I don't know exactly what he'd done to ignite the whole town, but whatever it was it had caused the local television station to send a team all the way to Boonville to ask random citizens, "Who exactly is this guy?" Whatever it was W.E. had done the desert people didn't approve.

BECAUSE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS, no matter how crazy or incompetent or crooked they are, merely move from one community to the next, from one end of the state to the other, roaming I-5 and the rest of our major highways like freeway killers, Wobbling Eagle, on the run from Inyo County, soon got himself a job as the lead "educator" in a big school district just outside Sacramento. Within a week of his arrival, there was a mass student-staff-custodian-teacher's aides-school bus drivers walk-out protesting his administration. In a matter of hours, W.E. had managed to unite the entire school against him. By the end of the week the whole town was clamoring for his head. Crawford had become a state-wide symbol for contemporary public school administration and, being close to Sacramento where there are major media outposts, a media magnet. Wob was so spectacularly incompetent he seemed well on his way to becoming State Secretary of Education, maybe even Secretary of Education for the whole country! The prospect must have been a little too much for somebody in the state edu-apparat and Wobbles' wings were soon clipped. The state took his credential away from him. Last I heard W.E. was running a 200-kid school district in Wyoming, but that was twenty years ago.