Charter school petition cost the District about $59k in legal fees

At the June 20th Board of Trustees meeting the administration reported an updated figure for legal expenses to the District that totals a whopping $71,219.24. $59,349.22 of that total was attributed just to legal expenses related to the charter school petition. A small unspecified part of that is attributed to my still incomplete California Public Records Act (PRA) request. I have not yet received any emails from Trustee Richard Sloan who, as I reported in an earlier posting, has refused to turn over his email communications about the charter petition. PRA's are part of our state Right to Know laws. Compliance with the law can get expensive when Trustees refuse to cooperate and when there is a large volume of communications, notes, memos, and reports that must be reviewed by legal counsel before they are released.

At the meeting Trustee Santa Cruz Bohman warned anyone who is considering making a PRA to think about the costs. Perhaps that was for my benefit since I was present in the room. Nevertheless, this was a curious statement from an elected official who turned in only a single email. It's hard to believe that was the extent of her email communications about the charter petition especially when she was CC'ed on numerous other emails that her fellow Trustees turned over from their own District and personal email accounts. One can only hope that Ms. Bohman is complying with the PRA. After all, I confronted this same issue last summer when she neglected to turn over emails I already had in my possession.  

The take home lesson here is that the LWIP charter petitioners must acknowledge the huge financial and non-monetary expense they have caused to the District from their flawed and ultimately defeated charter school plan. Their folly has essentially cost the District the equivalent of a full-time teacher's salary.

Unfortunately, no one is acknowledging responsibility. Nothing has changed in LWIP since the same clique is still running the Administrative Council and even just hired our two new teachers. Not only did they neglect to announce that the hiring committee was forming to solicit volunteers but to add insult to injury even announced one of the hires to the entire Valley on the SGV email list a few days ago before they bothered to inform us LWIP parents. The AC is running our program as if it were their own private school. Democracy is still hollow shell in LWIP and things must change soon.