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Writer's pictureScott Davison

Board Meeting Summary - 11/15/2023: A Coverup Trifecta - Enrollment, DEI and Parental Rights

We've had some wild board meetings this year, but believe it or not, the November meeting takes the cake. If you want to see what a rogue Superintendent can do with an incompetent school board, read on!


The Little White $2.5M Lie: A Formal Complaint Against the Superintendent

At the September Board Meeting, you might recall how Superintendent Churchill provided an alarming report that student enrollment had declined by 142 students. He then tried to downplay it by claiming he wasn't surprised because regional birth rates "began" to decline in 2017, so this year's Kindergarten class was predictably much lower than expected. The problem? Everything he said was a lie. You can read more about it here: https://www.opencusd.org/post/our-superintendent-is-lying-about-student-enrollment

 

Now, we catch the Superintendent lying to us a lot. But this particular lie is going to cost CUSD ~$2,500,000 due to the lost revenue from the empty seats. That would pay for 25 teachers! The Board knew this was a lie, but they sat silent. So we decided to force the issue. We filed a formal complaint against the Superintendent for violating Board Policy 1312 on "dishonest conduct," forcing the Board to investigate and state if they are okay with him lying…to you, me and them…about the financial crisis we're facing.


Before they deliberated about the complaint in closed session, I gave them one last incentive to make a public statement about it: they could prove me wrong! =) https://youtu.be/cDG489_fz9w?t=99


Guess what? They're okay with the lies. The Board took no action against the Superintendent. Not even a "please do better." Why? Well, they might approve of his behavior, since his failure is their failure, and his lies protect them both.


We're facing years of future budget deficits and declining enrollment, and the Board and Superintendent are hiding it. Meanwhile, the teachers' union just demanded an even bigger raise (https://www.opencusd.org/post/board-meeting-summary-10-18-2023-superintendent-cannot-condemn-hate-cuta-already-wants-a-raise), which they'll probably get, because the Superintendent and his wife (a CUSD teacher) will also get that same raise.


Do you want better for our Carlsbad community and our public school system? Ask the Board to be transparent about our enrollment problem: boardoftrustees@carlsbadusd.net.


DEI Review: Total Transparency? How About More Secrets

The Staff was asked by Trustee Vurbeff to provide a status report on the DEI Plan. Remember this Summer when the Board approved the DEI Plan based on a unanimous stipulation that "we have total transparency...every staff training, every unit that will be presented to students, every suggested reading list will be posted on the district website." Guess what? They never meant it.

 

We've been tracking the DEI Website since August, and it's never come close to basic transparency, let alone total transparency. Numerous schools already formed DEI committees, gave DEI lessons, held trainings and selected No Place for Hate (NPFH) Activities without providing any information on the website.

 

Why is this a problem? As we've pointed out before, some of the NPFH Activities and Lessons are extremely offensive and explicitly based on Critical Race Theory, including their Sample Lesson designed for 4th-8th graders which teaches kids that racism is "the disrespect, harm and mistreatment of people of color based on made up ideas that white people deserve to be in charge and treated better." In other words, only white people can be racist. The rest of the lesson is an op-ed from a successful black child actor explaining how "America shows me that my Blackness is a threat, and I am treated as such."

 

So no surprise that when Assistant Superintendent Nye was asked if he was planning to post a list of all the Activities and Lessons from the NPFH website that students might receive, he said he was "hesitant to post those" activities because they weren't necessarily the activities that schools were choosing. So not only do they not want to post a partial list of activities, they apparently have a secret list of activities they won't share. Does this sound like "total transparency" to you?

 

Did the Board demand that the Staff provide the list? Of course not. As we expected, neither the Staff nor the Board had any intention of being transparent about the DEI Plan. If they did, we would see firsthand that it includes all of the divisive and controversial topics which do anything but promote diversity, equity and inclusion.Until we can elect new Board Members who don't make promises they have no intention of keeping, we need parents involved with every NPFH Committee at every school so we know which lessons and activities are selected. Email your principal today and ask to join! In the meantime, email the Board and ask them why they don't intend to fulfill their promise for "total transparency" about the DEI Plan. boardoftrustees@carlsbadusd.net.


The Parental Rights You Don't Have

As we all know, the biggest crisis in public education is the lack of parental involvement. And as many of us also know, schools have only accelerated this divide over the last few years by ignoring and excluding parents from having any say in some pretty fundamental issues, like whether or not your school will even be open.

 

Parental rights are being threatened even more, as schools double down on issues like keeping gender transitions secret from parents or avoiding requests for transparency about controversial curriculum (see yesterday's post about the DEI Plan). We wanted to give the Board an opportunity to repair the damage, so we drafted a Parental Involvement Month Resolution and asked the Superintendent to present it to the Board at the November meeting.

 

The resolution summarized all of the fundamental rights that parents have to be involved in the education of their children, and summarized all of the evidence that the primary factor in student success in school is parental involvement at home. The Resolution then asked the Superintendent to send out a notice every November to remind parents of their rights and ask them to be more involved at school.





 

How did Superintendent Churchill respond to this request? He deleted it.

 

Then he drafted his own resolution which removed many of the parental rights we mentioned and removed all of the parental rights we requested him to send to parents.

 




Interestingly, this is a violation of State Law, which we warned Superintendent Churchill about before sending a formal warning letter before the Board Meeting to ask them to present the original resolution at the meeting. No surprise - they ignored it completely.


Why is Superintendent Churchill so afraid of promoting parental rights that he removed several of them (and the state statutes they are based on) from the resolution? So afraid of parental rights that he's willing to violate state law to prevent a citizen's resolution from even being considered or discussed before the Board? These are great questions to ask the Board! Email them: boardoftrustees@carlsbadusd.net

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