Navarro Is Kind Of Creeping Out

My grandmother always told me to not speak ill of school superintendents who retire…..nah, she didn’t; but if she were here right now she would say something like that.

So fulfilling Grammy’s “take the high road approach” I will endeavor not to speak ill of Fred Navarro however glad I am that he’s going. I am not going to mention the devastating mistakes that were made by the superintendent and the board because there is literally not enough room. Suffice to say that the damage they have caused is extensive.

It is vital for the community to understand what the district is doing and why because of your own wallets. You pay a big price for the education of our kids and you should be allowed to understand and even participate. This district has a history of not making this understanding easy for you; in fact they have systematically made it difficult.

Because this school district is funded primarily by your taxes, regardless of what you’ve been told, NMUSD has showered the universe with your money. Your taxes have bought untold programs which have been forced upon teachers, were not useful, and were silently abandoned two or three years later. This practice not only did damage to teacher morale, but in some cases did untold damage to the students. A perfect example of this was Swun Math which cost more than four million of your dollars, and had so many mistakes that teachers spent most of their time correcting these mistakes for over four years!

In addition to expensive programs, the district has used attorneys with abandon, and made multiple confounding and expensive construction decisions. The Estancia pool debacle is but one example of many. And they have spent literally millions of your dollars on inflated, bloated salaries and unheard of benefits for the superintendent and the administration.

In addition, Baker/Bear, which is what we lovingly call NMUSD Offices, has not exactly been a bastion of morality in that the truth has often been lacking, and while loudly proclaiming its transparency, have been anything but transparent for years.

If the energy they have spent on keeping things “under wrap” had been spent on the education of 2,000 plus students ….well, wow!

Too dramatic right? No. When you consider the number of students, teachers and parents affected by the actions of this superintendent and the Board it cannot be over dramatized.

We are now looking at the future of education and how it is represented in this district. We cannot afford to trudge along doing “business as usual” which is what the “old” board wants. Your money has to be spent on the important people in Newport Mesa education…the students and teachers.

We need a true national search for a new superintendent.

We need to elect three brand new board members.

We need a change in the culture of NMUSD.

(Sorry Grammy, I tried)