Resident Says Dublin Needs 'Strong Leadership' From School Board: Letter To Editor

Dear Editor:

Dublin residents have a good reason to be upset and frustrated. On Tuesday, May 23rd, the Dublin Unified School District held a special meeting to vote on one of the properties they had shortlisted for the much needed second high school in their rapidly expanding city. The voting was scheduled to happen after community's input on the site chosen— Carl Zeiss, a 13-acre office complex nestled between prisons and a newly built courthouse expected to bring in a high volume of traffic.

The poor choice of location coupled with the tiny size of the site made hundreds of concerned residents flock to the meeting and more than seventy people gave potent 90 second speeches strongly opposing the selection. However, prior to this they sat through a presentation by Mr. Scott Sheldon from Terry Realty advisors summarizing the process of site selection.

This presentation, which raised a lot of eyebrows was flawed because of deliberate omissions of facts, incorrect assumptions that made a board member raise red flags and thus proved to be another example of lack of transparency by the board while deciding on the future school's capacity and reasons why they chose to include or exclude certain sites.

The site analysis report, which people were promised would shed light on the school board's decision to vote on Zeiss and supposedly clarify things, proved to be anything but that and added disconcertion to the mix of emotions felt by parents that night. But the big blow to the community actually came when the board president Ms. Rouse and trustee Mr. Cunningham, both voted yes to Carl Zeiss demonstrating that they did not value community input and clearly did not care about any of the valid concerns brought to the table.

However, the majority 'No' vote (3:2), which was a culmination of letters, emails, speeches, facts and data, personal experience narration and finally some emotion made the audience erupt in a victorious cheer.While some in the community celebrated this victory of a majority 'No' vote to the Carl Zeiss site, many considered it as a huge bullet that was dodged after a tremendous amount of work put in by people.

While all were relieved about the decision, they were left pondering how they got to this point, in the first place! Frustration about the quality of leadership and lack of vision has led to a lot of discussion on social media outlets, much of which has been passionate and has left people with more questions than answers.

What is critically needed in Dublin is strong leadership with not just pragmatic decision making but that which focuses on problem solving in a creative way and most importantly delivers its promises to the community.

What is now obvious is that something as fundamental as a child's right to quality education cannot be assumed to be in place. The adage that comes to mind is "When you take things for granted, the things you are granted get taken"!

- Ramya Ramakrishnan, Dublin resident