Good News--there are fewer and fewer of our local angry friends posting on line. After articles mentioning Vista Unified School district, we used to have more than a dozen of them posting paranoia, slander, and out right lies regarding our fine public schools and fine VUSD school teachers. Now we have only two or three and their attacks on FACT based public schools are getting stale. The same silliness is posted over and over virtually verbatim. Their simple arguments are easily refuted. Their rants are not catching on and their number continue to diminsh.
The newest line of attack concocted by Jim Gibson and his allies against the four school board members, who are actually trying to improve education in VUSD, has to do with the possibility that the school board might come to a settlement with the Vista Teachers Association in the VUSD lawsuit against the VTA for less than the original amount asked for.
It appears that someone on the VUSD school board is informing his supporters of what is being said at closed door meetings of the VUSD school board when the board members discuss their strategy in the lawsuit. (Gee, I wonder which school board member would break confidence and back stab the other school board members while not caring that the privileged information he was illegally sharing with his supporters would make the lawsuit more time consuming and costly for the district?). The VUSD school board strategy that is being leaked seems to be to try to come to a quick resolution of the lawsuit for an amount of less than 540K.
Now, personally, I do not think the VTA should settle at all. The VUSD school board had lawyers who advised them and read and approved each new collective bargaining agreement before the school board agreed to sign on. These agreements are mutual--both sides agree to them in writing. The VUSD school board's lawyers thought the bargaining agreements were legally 'kosher" for a decade and a half. To now decide that the bargaining agreements were in error and that the VTA negotiators--ordinary classroom teachers with no law experience and who often had no access to a lawyer-- somehow pulled the wool over the eyes of the hired gun VUSD lawyers for 15 years is ludicrous. VTA should just say no to any agreement that is not forced on them by litigation with damages assigned by the court. I think the VTA has a good chance of owing nothing or even being OWED money by the VUSD if they just refuse to settle and let the court case run its course.
However, if the school board wants to offer a settlement. Let them. The teachers can consider it. With at least one trustee leaking self serving information to his supporters, a settlement seems harder and harder to achieve.
More bad news--teachers rights including salary schedule, set duty hours, seniority, and permanent status are under attack and being labelled as racist locally, state wide and nationally in the newest front in the war on public education.
Our local angry friends who post at the North County Times recently been saying that VUSD teachers are not working hard enough to help Hispanic children and hinting at racism. Poster El Chapo wrote on April 19, 2011 after an article about four teachers at VUSD being named teacher of the year:
How could you choose this teacher if they don't know how to speak spanish(sic) to teach our kids remember 80% of the vista teachers don't speak spanish(sic) thats (sic) why our schools are falling.
Makeeda formerly Roxy wrote, "built several white schools for other school districts at the VUSD taxpayers cost"
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/vista/article_0bba9676-7bad-502a-998a-0f582f4f923e.html
On February 6 El Chapo wrote about the relocating of Olive to the Washington campus,
", hey why don't they bus students from shadowridge (sic) area so they don't have to close olive (sic) and have the smart parents help the school"
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/vista/article_a7f3e661-35db-5bfc-a0ff-3cbaea624297.html?mode=comments
The theme that teachers rights like duty hours, salary schedules, seniority, and permanent status are racist in nature is the latest billionaire bully funded attack on American education and the teachers who provide it. They have paid for hired gun word thugs to created anti public education 'think tanks' and to build many websites to promote this view. The latest I have run across is called Democrats for Education Reform. See its slick website here: http://www.dfer.org/ This organization has branches in states all across the country Ohio, New Jersey, New York and of course California.
It is secretly funded by billionaire bullies who are able to hide the fact that they fund it and also to get IRS tax deductions while doing so.
The main theme of these hired gun word thugs is that teachers having rights amounts to racism and that destroying teachers' rights is the next great civil rights movement.
Racism resentment is the same theme of the small cadre of misinformed activists that are posting their comments after North County Times articles mentioning VUSD and who have taken over our the Districts English Language Advisory Committee, DELAC, activists like Alejandro Sancehez, Eduardo Preciado, Silvia Peters. Sadly they took the leadership of DELAC from the capable hands of Gabriela Hooshman a year ago last January.
They have used the racism charge in organizing against the relocation of Olive Elementary School. Apparently former extremist Trustee Stephen Guffanti and his wife Maureen helped to organize the parent protests and the misplaced resentment at Olive.
http://www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/letters/article_e9235ab6-7a56-552f-9302-580cab826a61.html
Luckily ANTI immigration fervor also motivates the Guffantis resulting in Maureen writing a letter to the editor expressing her praise for the arrest and deportation of a mother, a grandmother and a child in less than a school day while two other children were still in school. The other two children arrived to an empty house with three of their family members gone.
http://www.nctimes.com/news/opinion/letters/article_daca7dc3-af26-58f3-a3f0-a898ad6ac457.html
When I pointed out this last letter to the editor to Makeeda/Roxy, she reacted in rage as usual but since that time I have not noticed any of our local misinformed angry Hispanic parents supporting the Guffanti only Gibson.
Our Hispanic angry friends are correct in one thing, their children are being discriminated against and held back from achieving all that they could. Sadly the billionaire bullies have focused them on the wrong target--the hard working teachers in the public schools and not on the right target--the underfunding of public education, public health programs, food programs for the poor, medical and dental help for the poor. Imagine how much better low income students of ALL RACES could do if they did not have the stress of not knowing where they were going to live, if they were going to have food at night, if their sore teeth and sick stomachs were going to get appropriate medical treatment and if their parents could stop working three jobs a piece and be home to parent them. A society where all children have the right to food, shelter, and medical and dental access would go a long way towards improving test scores.
Study after study have shown that test scores follow the money. Test scores have nothing to do with drill and kill programs and they have nothing to do with teacher having job protections. The highest scoring students in the country are in states with teacher protections and rights (Massachusetts) and the very lowest scores are in states in the south with no teacher protections at all.
We should always remember that these hard fought for rights were granted to teaches to stop the outrageous abuses of the early to mid twentieth century when male teachers were paid more than female teachers, teachers were fired for reasons of political consideration, teaching spots were given to political supporters, and teachers were dismissed for arbitrary and even for no reason at all (just as probationary teachers still are). Calling them racist is an outrage and slander against the teaching profession and is historically inaccurate.
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