Apodaca: District politics heat up over summer

It’s midsummer, but while the kids are away and schools are quiet, temperatures on Bear Street continue to rise.

The last few meetings of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Board of Education have been heated affairs, with disgruntled parents, concerned educators and election-year rivals speaking up in forceful terms about the issues they want addressed.

The most recent board meeting on June 28 featured a parade of critics during the public comment period who vigorously expressed their views on a variety of subjects. And the trustees found themselves once again in the hot seat as they fielded this barrage of oratorical volleys.

Some parents of California Elementary students were on hand to express their “extreme disappointment,” as one speaker put it, over the district’s handling of the transfer of their beloved principal, Matt Broesamle, to Mariners Elementary.

The reassignment of Broesamle — Mr. B, as students and parents like to call him — was announced after Laura Sacks resigned as Mariners’ principal amid controversy over an application to the state for a Gold Ribbon Award. Some Mariners teachers and parents had previously complained to the district about the award application, which they alleged was riddled with inaccuracies about school programs and capabilities.

The district has hired an outside firm to investigate the allegations. But some of the California parents at the board meeting felt that the sudden transfer of Broesamle amounted to an attempt to fix one school’s problems at the expense of their own.

One parent begged the board to keep Broesamle at California and lend his services to Mariners one day a week. Another California parent received a standing ovation from more than a dozen others when she stated, “The message you have sent to our children at California is that they don’t matter.” She then called the timing of the announcement of Broesamle’s transfer at the end of the school year “cowardly and insulting to our intelligence.”

The California parents were far from the only disgruntled speakers. Throughout the lengthy comment period, the board also heard passionate speeches by those arguing both for and against the proposal to upgrade sports facilities at Corona del Mar High School, a substitute teacher pleading for better compensation and the president-elect of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers asking that the district share a greater portion of teachers’ increasing costs for benefits.

Among the most tense moments came when Leslie Bubb, Amy Peters and Michael Schwarzmann, who are running for the three school board positions up for election this November, each proposed that a measure calling for term limits for trustees be added to the ballot. They suggested a maximum of three terms, for a total of 12 years, because, as Bubb put it, some on the board have held the positions so long they no longer display “independent thought.”

That led to a rather uncomfortable exchange during which board member Martha Fluor contended that only two districts in the state have term limits for their school boards. Then her colleague Vicki Snell said such a measure doesn’t require the approval of voters, only to be contradicted by Supt. Fred Navarro, who said it would require voter approval.

But Fluor has a point. There has been a smattering of proposals to implement school board term limits in communities across the country in recent years, but the idea has generally failed to generate much interest, as it has with other elected positions.

Even so, the suggestion by Bubb, Peters and Schwarzmann could be viewed as a shrewd election-year tactic to draw attention to how long some board members have served and to the argument that current trustees are complacent and out of touch. Less clear is how a new study suggesting that trustee areas be revised for the first time in 50 years might affect the upcoming election.

Another potentially contentious item surfaced later on in the evening, when the board approved a one-year extension of the employment contract for Paul Reed, the district’s deputy superintendent and chief business official.

Although the extension does not involve a compensation increase for Reed, it is sure to raise some eyebrows nonetheless. Reed’s base salary of $259,143 and additional compensation of nearly $50,000 are already extremely generous relative to an average superintendent’s pay.

What’s more, earlier this year, John Caldecott, N-MUSD’s former director of human resources, released documents showing the district had also paid more than $200,000 into a separate retirement account for Reed as an incentive to delay his retirement.

Given the legal actions that Caldecott and other former employees have waged against the district, Reed’s contract extension will surely be fodder for more scrutiny and suspicions by some that the school board has become little more than an obliging tool of top district administrators.

At the very least, the grievances aired at recent board meetings suggest that there’s a growing undercurrent of discontent with district leadership and what critics see as a board that is indifferent to the real needs of students.

It’s still only July, but it’s looking like it’s going to be a long, hot summer. There’s another meeting Tuesday, and I’d wager there won’t be many places in Newport-Mesa hotter than the seven seats on the N-MUSD school board.

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PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.