Principal Reassigned to New Conejo District Post

After less than two years leading Los Cerritos Middle School, Principal Pat Pelletier will be reassigned to a newly created post in the district office, trustees have decided.

“We offered her an assignment and she has accepted it,” Supt. Jerry Gross said Friday. “It will be exciting work for her and it will be productive for the district’s long-range plans.”

Pelletier’s new position at the district office is comparable to a principal’s job and will entail coordinating the district’s new technology push, writing grants and reviewing prospective English and math textbooks, said Jody Dunlap, assistant superintendent for personnel services. Pelletier’s $77,000 annual salary will not change.

“I think it’s going to be very rewarding and challenging,” Pelletier said of her new assignment. “I talked to the kids after school and told them I’m just going to be down the street.”

Retired middle school Principal Richard Johnson will lead Los Cerritos for the six months after Pelletier departs Jan. 6, trustees decided behind closed doors at their Thursday night meeting.

A former principal of Redwood Intermediate School in Thousand Oaks, Johnson spent more than three decades as a teacher and administrator in the Conejo Valley Unified School District. He will serve as acting principal, making $324 a day, while the school district launches a search next spring for a permanent principal, Dunlap added.

An educator for 25 years, Pelletier served as an administrator in the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District before coming to Thousand Oaks in the fall of 1995.

Because the reassignment is a personnel issue, trustees and administrators declined to discuss the reasons behind the move.

Sources close to the Los Cerritos staff said Pelletier, 50, had problems almost from Day 1. Held in high esteem by some teachers, others thought Pelletier ran her school according to favoritism rather than common sense.

At one point during her tumultuous tenure, Pelletier was the subject of dueling teacher petition drives, with a majority of the Los Cerritos staff signing a 20-plus point complaint against the administrator.

Without discussing specifics, trustee Dolores Didio said most dismissals of this type involve an administrator’s “fit” with his or her unique school district.

“My own personal feeling about principals in general is that in today’s world, they have a very difficult job,” she said. “They have the community to deal with, the district, parent groups, teachers and students. They have to pull all that together.”

In most cases, when principals are having trouble, they either return to teaching or take an administrative post with the 18,574-student school district, said Hal Vick, executive director of the Unified Assn. of Conejo Teachers.

“Like teachers, principals have certain due-process rights,” Vick said. “But a principal can be removed for a variety of reasons . . . including poor performance and not meeting district expectations--pretty much the same thing a teacher can be removed for.”

Vick said such reassignments are relatively uncommon in the school district, happening maybe twice in a decade.

“It’s happened a couple of times before that, [when] for whatever reason, the district considers that the person could better serve the district in another capacity.”