Mendocino Not-So-Unified's New School Board

by Bruce Anderson

A little ways into Mendocino Unified's inaugural school board meeting presided over by its four fresh trustees, Jonathan Shepherd read a letter from Ken Rice, the man most responsible for reviving educational hope in the district, and the man most responsible for the four new faces beaming out at a wary, packed house anxious for optimism. Rice said he was pleased "that the right people got elected," and promised "to stay involved to help make the schools better."

The gallant Rice has absorbed years of insult and abuse from the entrenched, self-interested cadre that has dominated Mendocino school affairs for two decades without succumbing himself to ungentlemanly behavior. He was unable to attend the first meeting of what he and almost everyone else hope is a reform board because he is fighting a much bigger fight against the leukemia which has temporarily weakened him.

As Shepherd concluded Rice's message and was almost out the door of the room, newly appointed trustee Cynthia Doll, an elegant, aristocratic-looking woman, had the good grace consistent with her appearance to say, "Thank Ken, please."

Mendocino's four new school trustees mostly met their wary public with Nipponese nicey-nice and smiley-smiles wrapped in sincerity so excruciating it felt like the whole room was silently screaming.

But for now, all daggers remain sheathed.

The Mendocino Schools are budgeted at $5,384,749.68 for this school year. Its over-large administration says it will spend $5,369,266.40 which will cause a deficit of $15,483.28.

These being public school figures they are subject to a margin of error of roughly half a mil negative cash flow. And given these givens don't be surprised if a half a mil deficit is a conservative estimate. Mendocino Unified will achieve the teensy projected deficit of $15,483.28 the district is optimistically waving in the face of the gathering fiscal gloom only if state spending on education remains at pre-Terminator levels, and only if there is a sudden influx of funding units, aka students, into the Mendocino schools.

Mendocino Unified, then, is running at a small current deficit but it is also running a student deficit. Fewer students, less money. The retired rich people who've moved into the hills surrounding Mendocino, Elk, Albion, and Comptche raised their consumer broods elsewhere. They may send an occasional grandchild to Mendocino schools but not often enough to make up for a steadily falling enrollment. Working people can no longer afford to buy into the areas "served" by Mendo Unified. They can't rent either because rentals consist almost entirely of oceanview aeries designed for people who think two of them need 10,000 square feet to die in. And few Fort Bragg parents send their children down Highway One to Mendocino because the Mendocino schools, Fort Bragg parents suggest, are no longer superior to Fort Bragg's. If they ever were.

But the Mendocino schools continue to peg their budget to a false assumption that somehow everyone employed by the district can continue to expect ever greater compensation.

And Mendo Unified's teachers and support staff definitely want more money. Which they deserve but haven't gotten because the district pays for an administrative apparatus larger than it needs.

Something has to give, but nobody's likely to budge, hence the five hours of suffocating piety at the new board's first session two Thursdays ago.

With former trustees Chuck Wilcher and Doris Hammer looking on — Hammer seated puppeteer-close to high school principal Mike Matheson — the meeting got underway at 4:30pm.

The new trustees burble-gushed introductions of themselves, vowing the usual school board vows of unity in the face of adversity and promising to search every Pacific-bound cloud for its silver lining. There were references to the "brave people" who'd managed to pilot their SUVs and double-cab pick-ups through the previous day's rain and power outage to observe "the kids" in their learning habitat as if journeys of a mile or two through an inch of rain, 20-mile-an-hour winds and a single water spout off Caspar were a kind of latter day Donner Party expedition rather than those of people with enviable amounts of free time in the middle of a work day. But, as noted, among the four new trustees and a few of the more credulous members of the audience, there was indeed at least a rhetorical Donner Party resolve to get the new board regime off to a "positive" start.

Repeat. There is no more money for schools or any other public amenity. Push has come to shove because both political parties are afraid to tax the rich. Comprende? Years of bi-partisan public profligacy has caught up with us, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The high school's science club led off with a brief demonstration of an award-winning robotic gizmo they'd devised. The new trustees, and holdover trustee Jaynie Paulson, then elected board officers. Michael Schaeffer of Comptche, mustering a plausible false modesty, led off with, "Well, ahem, I ah, yes, I'd be interested in serving as board president." Gloria Liner, the only one of the new trustees who had an opponent in the election, and the only one of the four who'd served as a trustee of the district back in the days it more or less functioned as it should, suggested it might be wise for the novice trustees to undergo a "board training" before electing its leaders.

But Superintendent Shock, who obviously sees Schaeffer as his kind of guy, and probably the swing vote who will save Shock's job for him, said he thought "Michael" should be president and Mrs. Doll, appointed to the board from the Elk area, might well function as board secretary.

Translation: Shock sees his survival in Schaeffer, Doll and Paulson.

Prediction: Trustees Rod Jones and Gloria Liner will be cordoned off by Shock with trustees Paulson, Doll and Schaeffer supplying the rope. Or the stun guns when it really comes down to budget crunch time and it becomes obvious that the superintendent's position is a luxury sinecure the district can no longer afford.

Reality briefly intruded via an impressive presentation by Alice Flores of the classified employees' union. Ms. Flores neatly summarized the true state of district affairs:

Hello. I'm Alice Flores, President of CEMUS, the classified employees' union.

I'm very pleased to be standing in front of this newly-configured board. Welcome, and good luck. The classified employees have high hopes that a real dialogue will be possible between the representatives of our unit and this board. We look forward to working together on some of the gnarly problems that face everyone, on every level, in this district. You are brave people; you've stepped into a convoluted and difficult situation that is not of your own making. I appreciate your willingness to tackle both the unresolved issues that have clouded the past as well as the current issues (both local and statewide) that threaten to cloud the future. I hope that we are creative enough to find the silver linings in all of these clouds and that a sunny new day is dawning for Mendocino Unified.

I think you will find it necessary to hit the ground running. There will be very little slack as you are asked by CEMUS, and everyone else, to begin dealing with some very important issues that can affect the direction, the viability and the harmony of the district. You will soon be receiving a list of our proposals for negotiations and those proposals reflect areas of discontent and dysfunction that still seethe within the classified staff. I've brought up the very real, yet somewhat ephemeral, issue of staff morale previously in these meetings. Morale remains compromised and it is an area where we need to do some serious work. CEMUS will continue to propose solutions that will be low-cost monetarily to the district, but will produce a big payoff in improved performance and esprit.

I'd like to introduce CEMUS's vice president, Cindy Rose. You will probably be seeing a lot of me and Cindy. We intend to keep pulling your coats, bringing our issues into the light, and working to improve conditions for the classified employees. Be ready to discuss restoration of a few hours and positions which have hit classified staff (indeed, all staff) pretty hard over the past couple of years with very little improvement to the bottom line of the district. Some of these cuts have been petty, nickels and dimes in the district budget, hardly worth the resulting angst and grumbling among the affected employees. But those lost hours have resonated throughout the district, in a sort of trickle-down effect, making things harder for everyone. We'll be presenting you, through Superintendent Jim Shock, lists of minor adjustments that could be made in classified positions which would provide major improvements in efficiency and morale.

The budget can't endlessly be balanced on the backs of the employees, certificated or classified. If the board is able to improve the climate in the community, some very interesting possibilities become apparent. A unified, caring community can support its schools. This is the town that bought Big River — there is money here for causes that receive widespread support. The board will have to find ways to uncover and inspire this support. This is just one challenge facing you now.

I won't use your first meeting to start detailing our various concerns and proposals. I realize that you have a period of acclimation and education ahead of you and I trust that you will be working hard to get up to speed in the next few weeks. CEMUS feels excited about the possibilities before us. Again, I sincerely wish you luck and a strong wind at your back. See you next month.

Freshly elected Board president Schaeffer, who clearly has chronophagic tendencies, blessed Ms. Flores as if he were Pope and she a cripple who'd just thrown down her crutches and boogied on out the Vatican door.

"I found that quite articulate," Schaeffer declared.

Rod Jones, Caspar representative, parent of a high school student, ace attorney, possessor of a fully functioning bullshit detector, said, "It is delightful to have this wonderful honeymoon period although we have a very difficult problem in short funding," a comment that didn't elude Shock's notice.

Superintendent Shock visibly stiffened at "honeymoon."

Ms. Flores observation that, "This is the town that bought Big River," cut right to the local, state and national funding bone. As most of us know, there's a lot of money in America, and there's a lot of money among the people living within the Mendocino Unified School District. But how to get at it? The bi-partisan dictatorship is afraid to even mention taxing the rich — presently untaxed at anything approaching fair levies — and Mendocino Unified's rich are unlikely to contribute to the support of the Mendocino schools for several reasons: (a) the schools haven't been well-managed lately, (b) the well-to-do retire to Mendocino but raised their own consumer broods elsewhere and are not inclined to contribute to the education of children they don't know, (c) the public schools generally are poorly managed, an ongoing disincentive to public support because the public sees the poor management and doesn't want to solidify it by encouraging more of it

Nevertheless, at Thursday's meeting it was announced that donations for this, that and the other school thing had been received from the Mendocino Art Center; Colvin McCambridge; Patty DeMatteo; and even the rummies at Dick's Place had coughed up a small amount of rheum-soaked cash.

A third of the K-12 student body had been out with the flu, another piece of unwelcome funding news as school funding is largely pegged to attendance figures, and attendance figures, unlike the loose accounting days of the recent past, are actually checked against notes from home explaining why the kid wasn't present. (Here in Boonville under the legendary reign of Superintendent Wobbling Eagle, an educator foisted off on us by the previously noted Ms. Hammer, every kid was marked present for every school day for an entire school year, a statistical improbability that roused to action even the usually inattentive funders of Sacramento who subsequently required that Boonville cough up a hefty, reality-based refund. It's the legacy of this kind of sloth and chicanery that schools suffer from to this day. Out in the real world, people either know or suspect that California's schools are run by spendthrift incompetents.

A group of Boonville students and adults had shown Mendocino Middle School students Boonville's impressive, hour-long documentary on the ravages of methamphetamine, "The End of Silence." The film features local victims and, one would think, should deter even the least imaginative young person from involving him or her self in Mendocino County's thriving drug underground. A Mendocino Middle School girl had reportedly said that so far as she knew she was the only child her age to have been brought down by the drug. It was further speculated that crank is pretty much confined to the Mendocino Coast's young adult population between the ages of 18 and 25.

A few minutes later, trustee Schaeffer asked high school principal Mike Matheson "how the breathalyzer went over," the reference being to the loop-o-meter installed at the door at a recent high school dance to exclude drunks. Matheson replied that student reaction was "mixed." Some students (teetotalers?) approved, others (teen dipsos?) didn't. Matheson said "shadowing" had begun at the high school, meaning some parents were now accompanying their sons and daughters to classes and staying with them throughout the school day to get a feel for what the school day is like. Incidentally, Matheson's report was much more animated and even a little more articulate than the halting, monosyllabic presentation the high school administrator typically delivers. It's as if he's done a crash course at Toastmasters.

Project Sanctuary will soon talk to district students about "healthy relationships, rape" and the hazards of other contemporary pathologies

School board meetings faithfully replicate the prevalent social schizophrenia; on the one hand, there are "the kids," slobber drool mawk. On the other hand, "the kids" fatter, dumber and more wildly over-indulged than ever, are careening stoned and drunk through the late night hills of coastal Mendocino County in daddy-provided Beemers and Saabs, occasionally pulling off to the side of the road for chemically energetic but unprotected boff-a-thons. But school boards talk about the little fools as if we were still back in the days of Maypole dances and ginger ale socials.

The interim principal of the middle school told the board that the faculty and administration had retreated to a Comptche ranch to get to know each other better.

And it was announced that the popular and capable high school counselor Tom Pepper had been re-hired on a part-time basis. Pepper's dismissal had outraged almost everyone in the community, and had doubly outraged the community when the district, paying an outlandlishly inflated salary, hired a consensus moron from Healdsburg to fill in for Pepper, one of many inexplicable spending decisions that inspired the community to reject a school bond initiative and, eventually, the bitterly contested election of Gloria Liner to the new board.

There's major trouble ahead for Mendocino's schools.