11-5-05 By Charles Brink For the first time in over 10 years we have an opportunity to elect a school board that is both competent and caring about our kids. We can reverse the downward death spiral of this district and restore it to Distinguished School status.
Concerned citizens forced Marty Barofsky to resign because he insulted the 7-11 Committee at a school board meeting. Wagner and Harbison encouraged the appointment of Max Duran to fill a vacated seat on the assumption Max would side with her and the board and oppose the ideas that I and others have been advocating to the community. Wagner read some old stories on my website about me and Duran dating back to the Duzick era. Max had been brought in by Duzick to shut down the Wallace Canyon high school site and promote the Red Rover high school site. Little did Wagner know that Max had seen through Duzick and Wagner's game playing.
Max helped to convert Fred, sometimes with the assistance of Melissa, to shut down some of Wagner's lunacy. All of it with the strong support of the audience, some of whom became the candidates.
This led us to the unusual situation of having 10 candidates running for just three seats.
There are six good Candidate's running for office. Any three of these would be acceptable and I would advise the Acton and Agua Dulce voters to vote for whoever they think is best.
Some people will find this bizarre, as this is my newspaper and I'm paying for the entire cost and I'm one of the six candidates.
My personal choice for the three to elect are Ron Bird, Charles Brink, and Max Duran. But if you choose, in no particular order, Mike Hughes, Fred Helsep or Larry Layton, it will still be a good school board.
Kathy Howald's private slate headed by Mark Distaso also includes Deborah S. Jauregui-Rocha, and Leona Ruth Sexton.
Mark Distaso is a one note bureaucrat who believes we should hire an out of town consultant at a cost ranging from 40K to 100K to plan our schools. He believes this master plan will solve all of our problems, along with his revolutionary restructuring of our budget, and will give us all the money to pay for everything. He has claimed as his, almost every idea that I have been promoting in writing for years, along with Ron Bird's and Max Duran's ideas as well. Distaso ignores the fact that the school has had five master plans in the last 10 years and doesn't understand most of us in the community know what's wrong with the school, without wasting $100,000 we don't have.
Mark now claims that asking for second level developer fees is his idea, even though I've been arguing for that in writing for the last five years. He also claims we should buy the old rental modulars which Ron Bird has been promoting for the last 18 months. He now wants us to come back to Distinguished School status, even though in his own campaign statement he did not support it.
To show how empty his plans are, he is claiming that his best idea is that he saved the school $70,000 by finding a way that deferred maintenance could be paid from the Restricted Developer Fund instead of the General Fund (which is true). While that increased the General Fund by that $70,000, it reduced the Developer Fund by the same $70,000, which had been used to help pay for the rentals. This expense then had to be paid from the General Fund. Basically, he just moved the expenses from one fund to the other, with no savings at all.
The net effect was the ending balance in both the Developer Fund and General Fund now was exactly the same after his "revolutionary" accounting idea was accepted by the district. I'm sure he didn't try to play the old shell game on the school board and I really think he just doesn't understand his idea did nothing.
Ron Birds's comment:" I don’t think Mark has ever seen a problem that couldn’t be solved via either the budget or a needs assessment, but he does claim to be able to use some Mark magic to raise our budget from 12 to 17 million. I think the larger issue is addressing the academic quality of Vasquez High."
Leona Ruth Sexton is an excellent fund-raiser for the sports program. She has missed a number of candidate forums and school board meetings and is not qualified to serve on the Board. But, she is highly qualified to serve on a fund-raising committee for the school.
Deborah S. Jauregui-Rocha is a union activist who spouts buzzwords and apparently only attended one school board meeting before she joined Kathy's slate. She has publicly stated that many of our kids are not intellectually capable of attending four-year colleges and that we need more vocational education. At one candidate forum she was asked if she'd visited all of the school within our district. She stated "I've been to two of the four". Somebody should tell her we have five schools.
The last candidate not to vote for is Geraldine Rose Davis (Duzick). Her husband Jim Duzick is the primary cause of the debt and school disaster. He was responsible in issuing millions of dollars COP's which indebted the district for 30 years and for building the all rental Vasquez Campus.
She has publicly supported the position that we should merge our schools with Palmdale. A no vote for her is a no-brainer.
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Acton Agua Dulce School District
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