By Boyd Williams Santa Monica
My children have moved on to college and beyond and I am grateful for the excellent education they received in the Santa Monica-Malibu schools. However, as a Santa Monica taxpayer, I am still here, and excellence appears to be falling by the wayside. I have just completed a reading of the tentative agreement with the teachers union and the FCMAT Management letter, as well as a viewing of some recent school board meetings.
My initial conclusion is that the Bush administration, with all its lies and secrecy, has come home to the Santa Monica-Malibu school board and its superintendent.
At the most recent board meeting, I heard praise for the superintendent for having brought in FCMAT as an unbiased independent group to review the district’s budgets. I heard that FCMAT is able to show that, indeed, the district can afford to give teachers a 5-percent raise.
What school board members and the superintendent say has less meaning than what is written in the documents they reference.
The FMAT letter appears to get the district on safe ground in terms of meeting the agreement with the teacher’s union. However, upon close reading the ground is anything but safe (http://www.smmusd.org/).
“Representatives of FCMAT will be meeting with the California Department of Education and Department of Finance to determine the district’s liability, if any, regarding retroactive payments and will provide a written response to the district.
“FCMAT recommends that the district review the expenditure requirements of developer fees with their local legal counsel to determine if all or part of the current debt service payments for certificates of participation can be funded from the capital facilities fund.”
“The multiyear projection includes the continued annual transfer of $500,000 from the district’s building fund to the routine restricted maintenance account in the 2006-07 fiscal year. Depending on facility needs, the district may wish to seek a legal opinion from bond counsel regarding the ability to increase the amount of this annual transfer, thereby making more of the districts unrestricted revenues available for other purposes.”
It seems pretty clear, from close reading, that there is a rather complicated shifting of monies that appear to be intended for school facilities will now be heading for salaries, with the process not clearly known to be legally allowable. When I supported the November bond election with my ‘yes’ vote, I thought I was voting to improve school facilities. It looks like maybe I was misled.
I hear repeatedly in statements by the school board, union president and news articles referencing the Tentative Agreement as a 5-percent raise. However, when I read the agreement, it is clearly more than 5 percent for teachers in the district over 20 years. I am unable to know how much, and from public statements from the school district I never will (smmcta.org).
The final straw in this year of backward steps by our school board and superintendent is the agreement with Winston Braham, where he has been paid a large sum of taxpayer money to go away and keep silent. If Mr. Braham was incompetent and fiscally irresponsible, why would he be paid anything, and, more importantly, why the silence? I find it hard to believe Mr. Braham would need to be paid to keep silent regarding his own incompetence.
What is most disturbing is that this whole process of establishing funding for an agreement has unfolded after the superintendent and school board committed to the agreement. Any neophyte negotiator knows the limits and capacities prior to negotiating. I am guessing this is one area where the school board needed to buy Mr. Braham’s silence.
As for declining enrollment and increasing permits, you might think the district was talking about weapons of mass destruction, so I won’t even go there, although it is a great hot button to get the local emotions roiled up.
While writing letters may not do much, I am pretty clear on how I might be voting next time the ballot has Santa Monica-Malibu on it. As a longtime supporter of public education, that is not what I want to do and I hope it is not too late for some honesty.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 12, 2007. Read the original PDF.