Garden Grove Trustees Answer Foes : Say Recall Group Is Trying to Take Over the Schools

Garden Grove Unified School District trustees on Tuesday called leaders of a group seeking their recall a “small political faction (that) is determined to wrestle control of the public schools away from the citizens of this community.”

The statement was part of the trustees’ formal response, filed with the county registrar of voters, to the intent-to-recall notices served last week on all the board members.

The trustees are board president Lynn Hamtil and trustees Dick Hain, Kenneth H. Slimmer, Joyce T. Johnson and Maureen G. DiMarco.

The recall move was prompted after the school board in January announced that it would consider changing attendance boundaries at several schools. Changes were needed, trustees said, because predominantly Latino students in overcrowded schools needed to be moved to less-crowded schools in the district.

The district staff had recommended that a closed school, Carrillo Elementary, be reopened and its former attendance area be restored. That caused an uproar among many parents at Marshall School, which students from the Carrillo area now attend.

Parents charged that transferring predominantly English-speaking students from Marshall to Carrillo and replacing them with limited-English Latino children from overcrowded west Santa Ana schools would harm academic programs at Marshall.

After a massive protest by parents at a February school board meeting, trustees voted to delay boundary changes pending a study by a committee of school and community representatives.

But many of the Marshall parents said they still distrusted the school board, and opponents of the plan served the intent-to-recall notices on all five trustees on March 2. The notice, among other things, charged trustees with “implementing an unnecessary forced-busing program.”

Trustees have said repeatedly that “forced busing” is inaccurate and inflammatory. They noted that the Latino students already ride buses to three overcrowded schools closest to their neighborhoods. Any move to put them in less-crowded schools simply would mean taking the students a few miles farther, board members argued.

“This (recall) group’s charges are simply untrue,” school board member DiMarco said Tuesday.

In their formal responses to the recall notice, each board member charged that recall advocates “are seeking revenge at our children’s expense because they were (supporters of candidates) defeated in the last school board election.”

Recall advocates denied that charge.

“What’s happened is that at the first board meeting held on this issue, many people showed up angry--not just at what the board was planning to do, but the sneaking way they wanted to do it,” recall leader B. Eric Cahn of Westminster said.

Cahn also rejected the board’s argument that recall leaders represented a small vocal minority.

“More than 300 people showing up at the first board meeting is not a small group. But I believe the board members are only guessing because they still want to believe that (the recall) is political rather than that they owe us information which we’ve been trying to get now for a long time,” he said.

Recall advocates have said they plan to circulate petitions aimed at forcing an election. The county registrar of voters office says that petitioners must collect 14,000 valid signatures per trustee to qualify for the ballot.