Feud Bodes Ill for Fallbrook School Board : Education: Newly elected trustees claim they were snubbed, but current members say it was business as usual.

The campaign is over, but the fighting seems to have just begun at the Fallbrook Union High School District board.

After being the two top vote-getters in this year’s elections, trustees-elect Carl Morrison and Paul Finot said they were snubbed last Friday by the current board members, who voted to extend the contract of the superintendent, whose performance was a significant part of campaign discussion.

Further, the current five-member board has balked at sending the yet-to-be sworn-in members to an orientation conference to which most districts send their new members.

The actions signify what could be a rocky two years ahead for the board, which faces high school crowding, the question of unification with the elementary district and the same budgetary concerns that virtually every other school district in the state has.

“If this is the way we are starting out . . . this is going to be like hell,” Finot said. “They’re saying in advance: ‘We don’t care what you say, we’re voting against you.’ ”

The fracas began at the regularly scheduled board meeting Nov. 9, when the sitting board voted to send Trustee Jim Hutcherson to a conference intended as an orientation for new board members. Morrison, sitting in the audience, asked if he and Finot would be sent as well.

It was then that outgoing board member Tal Cowan said the conference was for board members, and that it would be inappropriate for Morrison and Finot to go.

But county Office of Education Supt. Harry Weinberg said his office encourages districts to send their new trustees to the conference, and most districts in the county do.

The board has since offered to send Finot and Morrison to the conference.

Last Friday, the board, in closed session, voted unanimously to extend the contracts of Supt. Robert Thomas and Assistant Supt. Donald Callard one year and to approve a teachers contract. Each contract included a 1% pay increase.

The approval of the contracts by a “lame duck board,” Finot said, shocked the newly elected board members.

“I was pretty horrified,” Finot said. “I had run on the idea of doing a fiscal analysis of the district and inviting the community in.”

The board’s actions on Friday extended Thomas’ contract until June, 1995.

“The most common question I was asked during my campaign was, ‘when you get in there, will you fire Thomas?’ ” Morrison said. “You just don’t know how many scores of people have said that they would never support a bond issue in this town until the superintendent goes. They just don’t trust him.”

Morrison and Finot said they were not sure how they would have voted on any of the contracts, but both feel they had been slighted.

The board has been working on the contracts since March, and the teachers union is set to vote on the offer Tuesday.

“Just because the two of them were elected doesn’t mean that the district business should come to a screeching halt,” said board member Patrick Miller. “We’re not just going to shut down operations until they come on board.”

But Morrison contends that “something as significant as extending the contract of the administration where that was a main subject of the campaign” was inappropriate.

Sitting board members emphasized that Morrison and Finot are not yet trustees.

“They’re not officially anything yet,” said Phyllis Kay Martin, an outgoing trustee. “We just took care of our business. It was not meant to be a slight, it was not meant to be anything other than our taking care of business.”

The extension could have been approved much earlier, Martin said, and the vote was routine.

Thomas’ contract extension also was designed to give him “a fair chance for the new board members to get to know him,” Martin said.

Most agree that the new board has gotten off to a rocky start.

“It’s going to be really tough for the remaining board members,” Martin said.