3 on School Board Face Recall in Somis Vote : Politics: The members are responsible for firing Supt. Dale Forgey after poor evaluations. Angry parents say it was a question of meddling in the district’s operations.

Somis voters will decide in a special recall election Tuesday whether to oust three school board members who voted earlier this year to terminate the contract of then-Supt. Dale Forgey.

Board members Alda Perry, Miguel Mejia and Debbie Carpenter are facing recall for firing Forgey from his $70,000-a-year job in May. Forgey had served 12 years as superintendent of the 325-student Somis Union Elementary School district.

His termination, which came after three years of poor performance evaluations, enraged some parents enough that they mounted a recall drive against the three board members responsible.

Linda Gruttadaurio, chief organizer of the recall committee, said the real reason for Forgey’s dismissal was that he refused to let the board members meddle in the day-to-day operations of the one-school district, which includes kindergarten through eighth grade.

“This board really felt it should get into hands-on management,” said Gruttadaurio, who has two children in the district. “It got to the point where some of the board members were sitting in teachers’ classrooms and rating their performance.

“If I want someone to evaluate my kid’s teacher, I want somebody who knows what they are looking for,” Gruttadaurio said. “The superintendent had the education and experience to handle the situation.”

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Mejia said the recall committee, which calls itself Parents for Quality Education, is simply trying to discredit the action of the board members.

“They have been trying to make us all look like we’re a bad group,” he said. “What they’ve done is taken a bunch of rumors and spread lies about us, and everyone knows it.”

Mejia said board members did pay frequent visits to the school but did not interfere with Forgey’s job. He said the new board members were invited by teachers to spend time at the school to get a better understanding of how things operated.

“They invited us so we would be aware of what was going on,” he said. “We were trying to educate ourselves.”

Mejia said the central issue is that Forgey’s performance was unsatisfactory. But he declined to comment on the specific reasons for the dismissal.

“It’s a personnel matter,” he said. “I can’t discuss it.”

Linda Bushong, a member of the recall committee, said that Forgey had a good working relationship with parents and teachers and that the previous school board had given him an outstanding evaluation.

The Somis Teachers Assn., which represents the district’s 14 teachers, has not taken a formal position on the recall drive.

Mejia, who along with Perry and Carpenter was elected to the board in 1989, said it doesn’t matter whether he keeps his job. He said that the board took the appropriate action in removing Forgey and that the district is better for it.

Forgey has been replaced by Thelma Edmunson, former superintendent of the Mount Baldy Joint School District in San Bernardino County.

“What we needed was an effective leader, and the leader we have now is effective,” Mejia said. “So the education system in Somis will persist.”

Perry and Carpenter did not return phone calls.

The three board members will face off in Tuesday’s election against Sue Klausner, Mark Smith and Jim Bushong, all members of the recall committee.

But Linda Bushong, the candidate’s wife, said the committee will be satisfied if only one of the board members is booted out.

“We’ll feel that we’ve done our job because we have broken up the voting bloc,” she said.

Bushong said Forgey’s firing was only one of many complaints about the board. She pointed out that parents had complained to the grand jury about the frequency of the school board’s closed-door meetings.

“We want to know what’s going on,” she said. “We never find out about anything until it’s done.”

In fact, the Ventura County grand jury ruled last week that the board violated California’s open-meeting laws when it met in closed session June 17 and voted to cancel summer-school classes.

Mejia said the board was under the impression at the time that it was acting within the bounds of the law.

He also pointed out that all five board members, including Robert Fulkerson, who is not a target in the recall election, have participated in the closed-door meetings.

Fulkerson is the only board member who voted to renew Forgey’s contract. Beth Miller, who was a newly appointed board member at the time, abstained.

Forgey, who now operates a home-appliance service business in Oxnard, said he is looking forward to the election. He said he is still upset that he ended what was a 29-year career in education on a sour note.

“I’ll be enthusiastic if all three are defeated,” he said. “It’s just incredible to hear them say I wasn’t doing my job. It’s a heck of a way to go out.”