Private Citizen Gets a Real Education on Public Schools

I don’t know how many other Kathy Morans there are out there. She may speak for a large, restless, silent constituency, or she may represent a barely audible peep in the night.

But in these days of outcry over cutting money for public schools, it’s kind of surprising not to hear a mother of four school-age children joining in the chorus.

All four of Moran’s children have gone through public elementary schools in the Orange Unified School District. Her two oldest are now in private high schools, but her two youngest are still in public schools, so her stake in public education remains strong. She has worked fairly steadily on school-related matters in recent years and next year will serve on a PTA board in a district middle school.

Once upon a time, Moran was quite prepared to let professional educators have their way. But a funny thing happened to her on the way to slavishly accepting how the public schools were operating--the more she got involved the more she didn’t like what she saw. She didn’t like how decisions were made, and she didn’t like how money was spent.

And now, even though it’s almost heresy to say it, she’s not convinced that cutting some money from public education would necessarily gut it.

But before you call her a cretin, allow her to elaborate.

“I think people come from the mind-set I did six years ago, and that was that anyone who works in education is wonderful and would only do what is best for the kids,” Moran said. “And that isn’t true; it just isn’t true.

“I think it’s like with charities, with religion, with school systems--everyone has a mystique about the people who would be in it. They think they’re always honest, good people who would always put children first. I’ve been involved too long that I know it’s not true.”

Moran, who lives in Villa Park, first got involved in the Orange Unified District when it was going to close four elementary schools in 1985. Moran and others protested the closings, citing what they considered poor “homework” that had been done by school officials. The board later reversed its decision.

And although she says the district has made tremendous strides recently, she said she learned enough about the inner workings in the past few years to question how public schools spend taxpayers’ money.

The school-closure controversy was followed by disclosures of a district bid-rigging scandal that has led to convictions of a former school district administrator and two private contractors. The contractors were recently given suspended jail terms and probation, while the former administrator awaits sentencing. Moran is so angered by the lack of jail time that she has asked the judge for permission to speak at a hearing next month at which the two convicted men are expected to ask that their felony convictions be reduced to misdemeanors. The scandal also brought down four school trustees, whom the county grand jury accused of “willful misconduct” for doing a poor job of overseeing school district business.

On top of that was the district’s computer-system purchase, a process that the accounting firm of Ernst & Young concluded was “inadequately planned, too hastily evaluated and apparently predisposed to a particular hardware and software approach.”

The mounting bill of particulars over the years opened Moran’s eyes.

“I was very naive and didn’t understand the mechanism of how things work,” Moran said. “It seems like the bottom line is that they’re always cutting things for children. When you realize part of the reason the cuts are there is inefficiency in the system, that’s when you get irritated and want the system to be more efficient so those cuts are not necessary.”

That’s the journey that has taken Moran from an uninvolved parent to an activist. It has also convinced her that the suggestion of cutting money from school districts isn’t necessarily an outrage.

“I’m not against cuts if they’re for sound business practices. I don’t think cuts would have to come to the kids if school administrators had the ability to run their districts more as businesses.”

Her other hope is that the budding crisis in education in California may get more parents involved. “I learned through this whole process that communication is probably the most important thing. I think disclosures that the system isn’t working in certain areas makes the public then demand that it does work. What’s happening now is the culmination of what’s been going on for a long time. People will tolerate cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts, until it hits home. Then when it hits home, they don’t want any more. Then people start to look into why there were these cuts and whether they were justified.”

If that happens, God forbid, there will be enlightened public involvement in local school districts. “I’m a philosopher from way back,” Moran said. “I really began to realize that if you live in a democracy, you can’t be a passive participant. For democracy to work, and for a school system to work, you’ve got to put something back into it.”