ON THE TOWN:Board ignores schools’ failings

The most recent school board meeting I had attended was last year, when the assembled bureaucrats sat through a presentation by a charter school organization. It seemed they had already decided not to work with the group.

I know this because despite a wealth of information that was presented, not a single question was asked by the board or former Supt. Robert Barbot. I had questions written on my notepad. How could it be that these supposedly more-informed people had none?

For some reason, I expected things at that meeting to be different, but they were not — more of the same-old, same-old.

So why I went to the meeting last Tuesday night is still a mystery. Perhaps it was because it involved a serious discussion about TeWinkle Middle School, a school both my kids attended. We later removed them from TeWinkle because we could not stand the pain of their education there.

And I’ll say it again: Our decision to remove them was no reflection on the teachers there, who just wanted to teach. But those teachers saw the same things we did. More on that later.

The evening was split into three sections in which the future of three schools — TeWinkle among them — would be discussed. The discussion centered around the suggestions made by a panel of people who visited each campus as a result of the school’s failure to meet the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was established five years ago.

I arrived during the last few minutes of the discussion of Pomona Elementary School, one of the three schools in the district that failed to make the federal government’s cut.

The roses-and-rainbows talk started just after I sat down.

“I think that Pomona is a good school,” Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard said. “We just want to help it get better.”

Well, Supt. Hubbard, I’m sorry, but Pomona is not a good school. It is a failing school, and that is why it is on the federal government’s watch list.

Could it become a good school? Perhaps, but that will require school board members to do something radically different from what they have been doing in order to achieve a different result and — sorry again — but the veteran members of this board are not very good at doing the heavy lifting that is now needed by these three schools.

But I’d really love to be proven wrong on that one.

When it came time to discuss TeWinkle, board President Judith Franco botched the pronunciation of Mirna Burciaga, a former Costa Mesa City Council candidate and community activist whose name and its pronunciation should have been well known to Franco.

I thought at the time that perhaps she did it on purpose — just a petty dig at someone who has been a thorn in the side of the board for years, but I was wrong. For just a few minutes later, Franco stumbled over the last name Newcomer.

The public portion of the evening was uneventful until one speaker took exception to the No Child Left Behind Act. At that point, I saw Hubbard nodding vigorously in agreement. Then the floodgates opened.

“I hate the No Child Left Behind Act” along with the rest of my colleagues, said board member Tom Collier, who seems to have already drunk the school board Kool-Aid.

“As far as I’m concerned, [No Child Left Behind] is a backdoor way into a voucher program,” said board member Dana Black, one of the senior members on the panel and someone who has had more than enough time to fix these floundering schools.

That these board members were blaming a 5-year-old law is no surprise. That they let three Westside Costa Mesa schools flounder for years is no surprise, either.

The only surprise is that it took them this long to find the excuse for why these three schools have failed.

Their failure has very little to do, if anything at all, with No Child Left Behind. If the federal standards were the problem, we’d have failures across the board. But, in fact, the other 20 some schools in the district are meeting the federal standards. And walking distance from all three schools are other district schools that made the cut.

One of the reasons for the schools’ failure was something cited no less than three times in the report by the visiting panel. The staff complained of discipline issues; specifically that kids were not being disciplined enough or properly.

I wish Black were right. I wish that No Child Left Behind were a back door to a voucher program. Perhaps a voucher program would help these three schools get the help they will not get from the school board members I heard Tuesday night.