The propaganda points they constantly try to push on the unsuspecting community at large is that the Great VUSD Wars are and were between "reformer Republicans" and backward Democrats or between liberals and conservatives or 'Christians' and non Christians. These falsehoods were successfully used by them in 1992 to get a board majority. What they do not realize is these falsehoods no longer work in VUSD, but like an old dog trying to learn new tricks our angry ANTI public education detractors find trying to make new relevant arguments is not easy.
They occasionally use their dwindling influence on the editorial staff of the North County Times to run a propaganda piece as news for them.
Stacy Brandt was forced to write the latest one. Read it here:
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/vista/article_3c0dc7fe-3b28-5c6c-9d0d-b95189d8d262.html
He dutifully wrote such inaccurate propaganda statements as: "
"In recent years, one side has championed the efforts of Superintendent Joyce Bales and another has supported the views of the Vista Teachers Association.
Bales' allies tend to be more conservative, reform-minded individuals pushing for big changes in the district, while the other group is made up mostly of educators who are part of the teachers union and the PTA parents who back them."
"Many in the district have been bitterly divided since a union-supported recall election in 1994 removed two conservative trustees.""Herrera, a liberal Democrat, was backed by the union both times she ran, while Gibson, a conservative Republican,..."
Those three statements in the article are false but they echo the lie that our angry friends would like the community to believe. They hope to hide their radical agenda behind terms that most VUSD community members find positive like 'christian" , 'conservative', or 'Republican'. By disguising who they are and hiding behind false labels they believe they can once again take over our district. They used these labels as false flags in the 1990's to fool the community and even me into voting for them. We will not make that mistake again.
These attacks on our schools have been launched by a tiny religious group that fears and rejects the discoveries of science. They believe their "little god" 6000 year old false interpretation of scriptures is the only Christian viewpoint possible and that all who do not share their views are evil. They believe that government especially the federal government sides with non Christians (defined as all who do not share their warped views), so it too and its workers are evil. Public schools are part of the government hence are evil. All evil must be destroyed including fact based public education in America.
I know my descriptions sound over the top, but all this and more can be found at the Citizens for Excellence in Education website. CEE trained and led the fight which resulted in the brief control of our district by these angry,, intolerant and stubbornly ignorant folks from 1992 to 1994.
The excesses of their tenure lead to a general uprising among all VUSD community groups, Republican, Democrat, Independents, religious, non religious, business owners and workers. The cult board members were recalled. Yet their movement did not go away. Even though they control less and less of the electorate in each election and the number of active angry ANTIs is diminishing, they still remain a potent threat to our children's education and public education in general in VUSD.
In no other North County school district is the threat so strong as in VUSD. Why us, who knows? All we know is that we must fight them and their angry backward ideology.
They have elected board members to our VUSD school board in subsequent elections. They had two on the board for eight years, Dr. Stephen Guffanti and Jim Gibson until we defeated Guffanti in November of 2008.
Those two managed to delay the start of construction on our third high school for five years at an almost doubling of the cost. A fifty million dollar high school in 2002 will be nearly 100 million dollars when it opens next year.
This nearly fifty million dollars wasted by Guffanti and Gibson has cost a lot of pay raises for VUSD employees since 2002. That waste is one of the chief reasons our average salaries in VUSD are among the bottom five lowest salaries out of nearly forty school districts in San Diego County.
Here was my response to the article that I posted on line.
con no more said on: May 1, 2010, 10:17 pm
Poor Stacy forced to write another slanted article to favor the angry folks who attack our fine school district for no good reason.
The problems in Vista Unified have nothing to do with Republican versus Democrat or conservative versus liberal. That is a phony story line that our angry friends use to try to gain sympathy for their attacks on good teachers and a fine education system.
The truth is that I and many, many other Republicans in the district including many business owners oppose the destructive agenda of these angry few. We were here the last time they were in charge. We remember what they do with power and it is not pretty.
The fight in VUSD is actually between the vast majority of voters who support the existence of public education and its FACT based curriculum and a few angry folks who detest FACT based public education.
The small extremist minority of angry ones have been responsible for a great deal of evil and harm to VUSD, our community at large and especially to our children in our excellent schools.
The angry ones fought against all four desperately needed school bonds. All four of those bonds 'won' the vast majority of VUSD voter support. Results that would have been a landslide victory in a presidential election were a loss in the school bond election requiring two thirds vote. These "losses" resulted in years and years more of terrible overcrowding in our schools.
I started working to pass a school bond in VUSD when my oldest child was in first grade. We did not get a bond (Prop O) passed until my youngest child was in this second year of college--a decade and a half.
My children and tens of thousands of other VUSD children of that era never had a chance to attend schools without having to use dozens of temporary trailers located in school parking lots rather than school classrooms.
When finally after years of horribly overcrowded schools a fourth bond received over two thirds and passed, the two board members supported by the angry ones denied the voters the high school land that would have allowed construction on our third high school to be started in 2002 for an estimated cost of about 50 million dollars. Today that long delayed high school on an inferior and more expensive piece of land is not yet finished and is projected to cost almost 100 million dollars.
At least five extra years of overcrowded high schools classrooms. VUSD had and still continues to have two of the top three largest student populations sizes in our two existing high schools out of ALL the high schools in San Diego County according to the San Diego CIF.
When are angry friends used a stealth campaign, mis-using our local churches, to get a three member board majority elected in 1992, our district became a national laughing stock due to the actions of that 1992-94 board majority. That board made headlines across the nation for denying life saving information to VUSD students in sex ed classes and pushing an anti-science agenda. Read more here:
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/vista-ca-schools
A couple of headlines from that archive:
"Vista Schools OK Sex Education Program With Religious Theme" and "Vista Board OKs Teaching of Creationism"
or the New York Times archives here:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?frow=0&n=10&srcht=s&query=creationism+Vista&srchst=nyt&submit.x=13&submit.y=7&submit=sub&hdlquery=&bylquery=&daterange=full&mon1=01&day1=01&year1=1981&mon2=01&day2=26&year2=2010
con no more said on: May 3, 2010, 8:06 am
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