According to our former blogger, Thomas Gordon, the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Trustees voted at their meeting this week to cancel the fence that they were planning to build around the new Godinez High School, at Centennial Park.
The fence irked a lot of people because it would have resulted in a huge loss of park space. The SAUSD administrators argued that they needed the fence to ensure the safety of students, but the district’s Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Santa Ana did not include a fence of this nature.
Moreover, according to crime statistics that Gordon obtained from SAUSD, the district already suffers from hundreds of assaults and other criminal actions that involve students pounding on fellow classmates. Outsiders are not involved.
This whole circus could have been avoided if SAUSD School Board President Rob Richardson had bothered to talk to local community leaders and City officials before coming up with his crazed fence plan.
If you ask me, this whole exercise was a red herring designed to distract us from the district’s ongoing class size reduction scandal. The O.C. Register published an article today that reviewed the findings of the recent audit of SAUSD schools with regard to the CSR fraud.
Predictably, the audit “did not detail if any specific administrators or district departments were most responsible for the slew of problems with the program.” That is because district Superintendent Jane Russo set it up to be a useless audit.
The audit did however include recommendations:
Provide adequate staffing to keep classes within funding eligible limits.
– Monitor class sizes frequently.
– Identify a class-size reduction program manager. One person should be responsible for coordinating the efforts districtwide.
Trustee John Palacio chimed in with his usual words of wisdom, “We only acted when teachers went public. To me that’s a shame.”
VICTORY IS SWEET!! Great job to Thomas and all the other community folks who stood up to this boondoggle.
A previous agenda had the Godinez fence itemized as a closed session item under “significant exposure to litigation”.
There is no item on the Godinez fence listed on the most recent school board agenda.
http://www.sausd.k12.ca.us/documents/agenda/7-24-07%20A.doc
A construction bid has already been awarded for this project. The district will need to rescind that bid award if they have, in fact, decided not to proceed.
Despite the assertions to the contrary, all available evidence appears to indicate that the district is still moving forward to build this fence.
#2
Thanks for the insightful post, however I believe it’s significant to post, in full, the text from the agenda:
SIGNIFICANT EXPOSURE TO LITIGATION:
Stand Still Agreement with City of Santa Ana concerning Godinez Fence at Centennial
Perhaps someone needs to ask members of the Joint Use Committee what the “Stand Still Agreement” is and when did the school district and the city enter this agreement. It appears this document may contain all the answers to our questions.
I concur with #2. It appears the district is moving forward with building the fence.
Millions of dollars lost to CSR and the district is building an expensive fence, anyway? Seems fiscally irresponsible.
Maybe the District can lend its expertise on this kind of project to help build the border fence (heh, heh).
#4
Millions of dollars were lost due to the CSR fiasco and that blame rests directly with the Supt. and her cabinet. The fence matter is entirely different.
The Godinez fence matter is a student safety and liability driven issue and that’s why the chief of school police applied for a grant to cover the cost of erecting the fence. The grant was awarded for this project and those are the funds earmarked to build the fence. District admins did the right thing securing grant funds to pay for this project.
I wonder if the Stand Still Agreement has anything to do with the grant awarded the district to build the fence. Something to chew on.