The Angry Ones

I wrote the following comment to NCTimes comment section after a Guffanti supporter called Elizabeth Jaka "a meddling mom." That rude comment was posted by the comment censor at the NCTimes but my response below was not. Gee, is there a double standard at the NCTimes by any chance?

Interesting how angry the anti-public education crowd is on this forum. I cannot help but wonder why? How many of them have ever had one child who attends or ever attended any school in Vista Unified? My guess is zero. Yet still they launch vicious tirades against those who believe in public education and building new schools. I wonder why? Do they get some kind of perverse pleasure from berating those with better motives than their own?

The angry ones who post here pay just a few dollars a year for new schools that educate the children of our community. For those paltry few dollars they get new schools our community can be proud of and an educated workforce. Yet they malign us as "meddling moms" or teachers who do not want to "actually teach."

I hope the good intentioned people of our district and all good hardworking teachers read these posts. The angry anti-public education group is currently just one voting member from controlling the VUSD board. If they get that third board member elected in November, these black and white thinkers who view "government schools" as evil will have complete and utter control over our district.

I pity the teachers and administrators who are forced to live under their malicious and capricious rule. There will be no appeal to reason or fairness. They can close schools, sell off VUSD school sites, and irretrievably splinter this proud district into dozens of tiny powerless charters. Once broken, VUSD can never be put together again. Its shattered remnants will be a blight on our community for years to come, the proud legacy of the angry ones.

Protests or appeals to fairness were useless when the angry crowd controlled our district in from 1992-1994 and I expect it will be useless again if they re-gain a majority. As before, it will be their way or the highway.

I hope readers of this blog notice that this angry group supports Dr. Joyce Bales. They applaud ever action she takes in VUSD. These angry blog writers are not finesse and compromise types which is probably why they love Dr. Bales. Her management style seems to so closely mirror their own views. Already VUSD has lost more than a dozen of our best administrators. I fear young teachers with options are already leaving to other more education friendly districts and that older, experienced teachers will be retiring too soon.

The angry ones were in the majority a decade and a half ago. It was the most tumultuous time in the VUSD history. It was the only time that articles that VUSD board meetings made the front page of New York Times. I have clippings from the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times as well. Dozens of news stories making it into out of town papers about OUR VUSD school board meetings.

There were news vans and satellite trucks (including CNN, CBS, NBC etc.) parked in front of school board meeting locations. I remember one meeting where I counted ten such trucks parked in the (bus?) circle in front of Roosevelt Middle School for a special board meeting held in The RMS cafeteria. The board meeting was moved to RMS cafeteria to try to accommodate the overflow crowds. Even the RMS cafeteria site was not big enough. Several hundred people were seated inside, but scores more who could not fit inside milled around outside in the lunch area. It was a circus. Today we are one voting board member from that chaos again.