3 From School Board Targeted in Recall Bid

Two weeks after the Los Nietos School District board voted tentatively to demote two popular principals and an administrator, the administrator has announced his resignation, and the board members who supported the action have been targeted by a recall effort.

The administrator, Bill Brown, director of instructional services, announced during Tuesday’s meeting that he had been offered a job in the Temple City Unified District with better pay. Brown has been with the Los Nietos district for 24 years.

Also during the three-hour meeting, a committee of parents and residents presented board president Adeline Rocha and members Angelica Johnson and Paul Delgado with a recall petition. Board members Sylvia Orona and Gloria Duran were not mentioned in the petition because they voted against demoting Brown and the principals.

The petition accuses the three board members of making false accusations when they targeted Nelson School Principal Pete Nichols, Aeolian School Principal Mercedes Parks and Brown for possible demotion.

When the board took the action on Feb. 27, members said they were acting in response to an investigation by the Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department of Education, which is looking into whether the district failed to provide proper bilingual education. The board members said they felt compelled to take the preliminary action in case the investigation proved that the district violated the law.

But some parents say the board was acting prematurely and is trying to get rid of the three for unrelated reasons.

“This is all personal,” said committee member Martha Bautista.

The petition also accuses Rocha, Johnson and Delgado of wasting money by creating new management positions, and giving the board a bad name by breeding ill will and division among the members.

In a meeting that sometimes dissolved into shouting matches, parents accused the three of using Nichols, Parks and Brown--who support Supt. Terry Giboney--as pawns in a power struggle between board members and Giboney.

Giboney has defended the principals and the administrator and said there is no connection between the civil rights investigation and the board’s decision to inform them that they may be demoted.

Nichols, Parks and others have also questioned why the principals of the two other schools in the district were not also given notice that they may be demoted pending the outcome of the investigation. Nichols, who blames the controversy on “age-old petty grievances,” said civil rights investigators have never visited his school.

However, Rocha said all the schools were targeted. Civil rights investigators did not visit Nelson School to interview staff, she said, because state Department of Education officials were at the school the same day on a periodic assessment inspection. The principal of Los Nietos Middle School was not given notice because she has only been on the job one year, and the principal of Rancho Santa Gertrudes was exempted because he is planning to retire, Rocha said.

She said that under the state Educational Code, the board has a March 1 deadline for informing principals that they may be demoted when school starts in the fall. She said the deadline forced the board to take the tentative action in case the investigation shows that the district did not provide adequate bilingual education for Latinos.

Rocha and Johnson, the veterans of the board, said parents and residents have been deliberately agitated and misled to believe the two principals are going to be fired.

“Nothing has been set in concrete,” Rocha said. “We took this action in case the Office of Civil Rights finds something. I have a positive feeling everything is OK.”

Committee member Bautista said that once Rocha, Johnson and Delgado file with the county clerk an acknowledgment that they received the recall notice, the committee must gather the valid signatures of about 1,400 residents to force a special election.

Rocha said the problem has been exacerbated because the Office of Civil Rights does not give the district details about investigations, so the district cannot keep parents informed.

“They feel they have to protect the principals,” Rocha said. “If I were in their situation, and didn’t have all the information, I don’t know that I wouldn’t do what they are doing myself.”