County School Board Splits Over Plan to Heal Rift

Members of the deeply divided Ventura County Board of Education spent nearly an hour debating what steps they might take to get along better--then quickly split into two camps when it came time to take action.

In front of a boisterous crowd of 70, including one man who suggested that some board members seek psychiatric help, Wendy Larner, Angela N. Miller and Marty Bates on Monday night voted down a proposal that would have brought all five trustees and Superintendent of Schools Charles Weis together for a workshop intended to help them hammer out their differences.

Board President Larner, an Ojai resident, said that the plan, which includes paying a consultant $800 to evaluate the board, would be “wasteful and ineffective” because board members have such divergent political philosophies.

Bates, a Thousand Oaks businessman, said he wanted no part of an evaluation that would be open to the public.

Miller, who routinely votes with Larner and Bates as part of the board’s conservative majority, once again joined them in voting down the proposal. And the two other board members who voted in favor of the workshop, Al Rosen and John McGarry, faced yet another defeat.

Ojai resident Rudy Petersdorf was among those in the crowd who sparred with board members over the vote. As the board moved from its workshop discussion to another issue about whether to hire a lawyer to help rewrite past board policies, Petersdorf called their conduct outrageous.

“You don’t need an attorney--you need a psychiatrist!” he said, to whoops of laughter and cheers in the audience.

Unruly crowds, long speeches, hours of contentious argument over routine administrative items: These have become the hallmarks of county school board meetings in recent months.

Comments by the public and board members over agenda items that would not have merited discussion a year ago are now so lengthy that the board has not completed its bimonthly agenda on at least three occasions since April.

The leftovers get bumped to the next scheduled meeting, forcing people who came to speak on a particular item to return for yet another three- or four-hour session.

The frequent banging of Larner’s gavel and the beeping of a clock that precisely limits speakers to three minutes also are part of the new board meeting routine.

“We never, ever used a gavel at board meetings until 1995,” Weis, who sits next to Larner at board meetings, said Tuesday. “Now there’s a lot of gaveling. In fact, my ears are sore today, there was so much gaveling last night. When that timer goes off or when somebody speaks out of turn, out comes the gavel.”

Board meetings started becoming more heated shortly after Larner, Miller and Bates voted in late March to suspend the use of Planned Parenthood and AIDS Care speakers at county-sponsored sex-education workshops for teachers.

A group that targeted Miller and Larner for recall as a result of their vote began attending board meetings and challenging the conservative board majority on nearly every issue.

Supporters of Larner, Miller and Bates retaliated by coming to the meetings and expressing their support of the conservative board members during time reserved for public comment. Each side now blames the other for allowing their allies to dominate public discussion.

“There are six or eight people who come and harangue the board at every meeting,” said Karen McClain, a Thousand Oaks residents and member of Citizens for Accountability in Education, a group that formed recently to oppose recall efforts.

“We could get 15 people to do the same thing, but there is nothing constructive to it. We just aren’t going along with their game.”

But Dick Messina, also a Thousand Oaks resident, doesn’t see it that way. He expressed shock when the board on Monday rejected McGarry’s suggestion that it undergo an evaluation session.

“It’s asinine,” Messina said. “They need someone from the outside to evaluate them. Someone who has no ax to grind.”

Larner said Tuesday that if the board was left alone to conduct its business, it would be able to operate without difficulty.

“People are apoplectic because there is a different viewpoint than has been on the board in the past,” Larner said.

Bates, meanwhile, said he could not support a consultant’s evaluation because, under his understanding of the state’s open meeting laws, it would have to be held in public.

“I think [a consultant’s evaluation] is badly needed,” Bates said. “We need to sit down and discover each other’s sides and discover why people stand the way they do. [But] I do not believe it can be done in front of a group.”

Bates predicts the current controversy will blow over in about a year, when the board has concluded dealing with sex-education issues. But Weis is not so sure.

“Somebody described our meetings as the ‘Gong Show,’ ” he said. “And I don’t think they were too far off.”