By Leslie Wiz Santa Monica Yosuke is no bird brain Editor:
Please consider deferring the hunt for a new superintendent until after the November election. We need fresh minds to help us navigate the credibility and leadership abyss that the SMMUSD has become during your watch and under your tenure. Parents and community advocates for public education have watched in dismay as your ineffectual, reactionary, largely rudderless leadership has weakened the stature of the SMMUSD and wreaked havoc on its relationships with city government and with many of its most important stakeholders.
For years the board has used the same strategies, the same excuses, the same tired rationale to justify its hiring and interviewing policies, its contract negotiations, its budgeting practices. Holding interviews for key leadership positions under the radar and excluding public input and involvement has not enriched the pool of candidates that were available, so why not try transparency? Promising salary increases, however richly deserved, for staff, while not having the slightest idea of how to budget for them (except for plundering the reserves), is absurd and senseless, so why not try some fiscal accountability? Shattering the hopes of parents and cloaking in shame arrangements made to benefit those children with the greatest needs, depriving them of their dignity and sidelining them in darkness, is medieval, so why not try opening the doors on a little honesty?
I believe I speak for many in the parent community when I say to you long-term Board members who, through your own ambition and the lack of term limits, have been part of the board for far too long, at the end of the day, I am left with the profound hope that in November our community will be galvanized to, simply put, elect someone else. No matter how noble your aspirations, how great your sacrifice, how deep your passion for the schools, the plain and irrevocable truth is that things were better before you were elected. Let the Iegacy that defines your service to the board end with the redemptive act of refusing to seek reelection and working to support the community in other ways.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 26, 2008. Read the original PDF.