Brown Act Violation?

Our ANTI friends have been having a 'feeding frenzy' over a non-existent Brown Act violation by the three hardworking women on the board. There was no violation. The North County Times, hardly a friend of our VUSD teachers, reported that there was no violation.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/03/06/news/coastal/vista/zafeb0db720418fa8882575710068a8e6.txt

After a very tough board meetings Elizabeth Jaka and Angela Chunka separately decided to stop by at their friend's home, Carol Herrera to unwind after all the stress. Neither Jaka or Chunka knew the other would be there.

At the School Board meeting, the four caring and good members of our board had been forced to deal with massive budget cuts at VUSD. These cuts in our budget were made necessary due to cuts in funding from Sacramento.

It appeared that the only solution was to eliminate K-3 class size reduction which would have increased the number of students per classroom by at least 50% and eliminate one out of every three K-3 teacher positions.


Having once been a superintendent of a small district, I know that it was the superintendent's job to suggest to the School Board the best way to close the deficit. Joyce Bales and her team must have suggested cutting K-3 class size reduction as the best solution to solve the deficit.

The board meeting where this happened was long and contentious with many, many parents and teachers wishing to speak. All were allowed to.

With heavy hearts and great sadness; our caring, concerned, and rational school board members went along with the recommendation and voted to cut K-3 class size reduction. This decision was extremely draining, even traumatic for them. No one likes to increase class size and lay off teachers. As a result, they independently decided to go to their friend's home to try to re-gain their equilibrium.

When Jaka and Chunka arrived, they were let in the home by another friend and suddenly Herrera found herself in the same room with them. Almost immediately having dealt for years with ravings of the ANTI zealots, Herrera realized that the paranoid ANTIs would scream Brown Act violation if three board members happened to be at the same place at the same time. Hererra left the room immediately.

Of course there was NO VIOLATION. The only way there could be a violation is if they discussed school board business privately and not publicly at a school board meeting.

They said they did not discuss a school board business at all. Case closed.

In this country friends are allowed to visit friends.The Brown Act does not dictate who a board member can be friends with. It is only meant to make government transparent.

Had the three forgot themselves and brought up school board business. There is a remedy proscribed by the Brown Act. It is to discuss that business publicly at the next board meeting not that they needed a remedy as they did not discuss anything at Herrera's home and there was no Brown Act violation.

The particular "heinous" Brown Act violation, our ANTI friends accuse them of violating, is to discuss a way to not lay off teachers and not increase class size. Can you imagine our ANTI friends being upset that class size did not increase and teachers were not laid off? Seems to me that finding ways to keep budget cuts out of the classroom is exactly what a board member should be doing.

The discussion about finding a way not to eliminate class size reduction happened PUBLICLY at the very next school board meeting. Because in the intervening weeks the four rational caring board members had gotten Joyce Bales and her team to find another way to balance the budget. It is to the great credit of the four good and caring board members that they were able to come up with a better way to balance the district's budget than to increase K-3 class sizes and to lay off massive numbers of teachers.

These four members found a way out. One out of every three, K-3 teachers did not need to be laid off and VUSD K-3 class size did not need to increase by at least 50%.

Other cuts were made. Other savings were found. All together the amount saved and cut equaled the amount the district would have saved by laying off teachers.

That decisions was met with jubilation and gratitude by K-3 parents and their children's teachers. All good people of the district are happy with the decision and with the excellent work of our four good caring board members. Aren't our ANTI friends strange folks to be angry about a good and positive development?

Here is what an expert in Brown Act violations was quoted as saying by the NCTims in the article they wrote about it:

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said the get-together wouldn't violate the state's open meeting law, known as the Ralph M. Brown Act, unless the three trustees discussed district matters.

And even if they did violate the act, he said, they may have remedied the situation by discussing the class-size issue publicly at Thursday's meeting.

"The only remedies that the Brown Act provides for are curing your violation by going back and ... doing it legally," he said. "If they did get together and then had a legal meeting .... there's not much that can happen."

NORTH COUNTY TIMES EDITORS OPEN BIAS AND INFLAMMATORY RETORIC

The North County Times editorial staff, who has a visceral hatred for all public unions--police, fire, teachers, city employees--forced the reporters to turn this inadvertent meeting into a news article.

Days after the article, the openly one sided editorial staff wrote an editorial about it using inflammatory language (cabal, smells, lousy,) and making demonstrably false statements--calling the get together "illegal." It was not. Nor was it "secret," lots of people came.

The editors also lied and said, "The public is well aware that the Vista teachers union has a great deal of sway with the board" What public? who? where? when? VTA has almost no sway with the board as the previous post shows. This lie is a charge the ANTIs have been making against the rational caring board members for years. The NCT editors just repeated an old piece of ANTI campaign propaganda.

Instead of writing a sober editorial with well thought out criticisms, the increasingly unhinged troika at the North County Times editorial staff wrote a diatribe that any local high school newspaper would have been embarrassed to publish due its wild rhetoric, paranoid accusations and demonstrable falsehoods.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/03/19/opinion/editorials/z6c8708bdae7bf04f8825757b007294d4.txt
EXAMPLE OF ACTUAL BROWN ACT VIOLATION

To see an real example of a Brown Act Violation read the following:

http://www.recorderonline.com/news/law_40982___article.html/council_week.html

It concerns an information item on the agenda at a recent California City Council meeting being turned in an action item without waiting for the next meeting. Worse once the City Council members improperly turned it into an action item, they voted to spend City funds on it. No one who read the agenda ahead of time and decided not to come based on the published agenda could have known that the Council would "illegally" change it into an action item. The public in general had no chance to speak against the motion. The procedure was not fully transparent, hence the Brown Act violation.

What Chunka, Herrera and Jaka did was not a Brown Act Violation. Even the biased, in the bag for Gibson editorial staff of the NCTimes could not find a way to charge it as a violation.