School District Scandal Still Teaching Lessons

Even by standards of this city’s elementary school board, long plagued by eruptions of infighting and acrimony, last school year’s political corruption scandal plumbed new depths of dysfunction.

Veteran school district administrator Pedro R. Placencia was convicted in January of secretly tape-recording the telephone calls of trustee Jim Suter, capping a legal drama that saddled school district officials with a grand jury investigation and a wave of unwanted publicity.

The case also entangled trustee Mary Barreto, who received the tape-recorded conversations anonymously and who revealed their existence to another board member, a move that ultimately launched the criminal probe.

Nearly a year since the issue surfaced, the fallout continues to rain down.

Both Suter and Barreto--who were elected to the board eight years ago and often wound up on opposite ends of controversial issues--have chosen not to seek reelection in November.

The scandal left scars: Suter suffered a stroke in the midst of the controversy, and Barreto--though not criminally implicated--received a vote of no confidence from teachers.

Placencia, who was fired as head of the district’s migrant education program because of his conviction, said he is fighting to regain his job and hold on to his teaching credential.

He was placed on three years’ probation and ordered to perform community service, an obligation he fulfills by tutoring youngsters in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood.

But educators and community leaders say perhaps the most significant outcome of the phone-taping scandal has been a rising sentiment that the school board needs to do better, that personality conflicts and public clashes too often have overshadowed what’s being done to educate the district’s 14,000 students.

“There are a lot of us scratching our heads about the things that have gone on,” said former trustee Dorothie Sterling, who has emerged from political retirement to run for one of three school board seats up for grabs in November.

“I felt it was imperative that we make an effort to get a board that can and will work together to try to smooth out some of the bumps in the district,” she said. “I would like to at least make an effort to change that around and get a district where everybody is working together.”

Added teachers union President Ann McCarthy, a teacher at Oxnard’s Rose Avenue School, “I went to a union meeting up north, and people considered Oxnard a joke because of what’s happened. That has got to change.”

Racial Divisions Have Plagued Board

The Oxnard Elementary School District board has a long history of tension and acrimony, especially centered on racial divisions that over the years have erupted in public fights.

In 1994, for example, the Oxnard chapter of the Assn. of Mexican-American Educators recommended that board--composed of three white and two Latino members at the time--undergo sensitivity training to heal internal divisions on the panel.

Later that year, the white majority, which included Suter and Sterling, handed Barreto a letter with a laundry list of complaints against her. Among them was that she had spoken at length in Spanish during board meetings and that she had been “overly accommodating” to those who do not speak English.

Barreto’s response was to read the letter publicly, a move that whipped up a flurry of community activity. Suddenly, dozens of parents jammed board meetings that had once drawn little interest. Spanish-language media jumped on the story, sending television crews and reporters to chronicle the unrest.

After several weeks and a promise from the board that members would meet with a counselor, the crowds and attention dwindled.

Jean Harris, a former trustee who was not on the board at that time, said she believes such differences often occur when any policymaking group changes membership or is forced to adjust to new political realities.

In the case of the Oxnard district, Barreto was only the third Latino to serve on the Board of Education, despite a student population that is nearly 80% Latino.

“But I hope the public, and parents in particular, never worried that the education of their children was being neglected,” Harris said recently. “Despite all the turmoil, the district has always had a first-class staff of administrators and teachers who maintained a fine educational program for the children.”

Since that time, the makeup of the board has changed--with Suter the only remaining white member on the five-member panel. The public outbursts have quieted, but there still have been some flare-ups.

Last year, for example, board members clashed over a push to reverse a decision naming the district’s newest campus after a former superintendent whom Latinos saw as a foe of integration. In fact, the school name emerged as one of the primary issues in the taping case.

During Placencia’s trial, prosecutors revealed that he had illegally intercepted and tape-recorded 18 of Suter’s telephone calls over five days early last summer. Most of those conversations centered on renaming the campus and a confidential review of Supt. Bernard Korenstein’s job performance. That review is ongoing.

A jury convicted Placencia of six felony counts of illegally eavesdropping and intercepting phone calls. The charges were reduced to misdemeanors when the 25-year district employee was sentenced in February.

Pain for Those Touched by Scandal

After his conviction, Placencia admitted he had made the recordings, although he said he didn’t know that was illegal, and left them on Barreto’s doorstep without her knowledge. He said he only meant to inform his longtime friend that Suter had been discussing confidential board business and that her name had come up in some of the conversations.

He also said Barreto knew nothing about the tapes before they landed on her doorstep last summer. Indeed, while prosecutors initially focused on Barreto’s role in the matter, they concluded there was no evidence to support a criminal indictment.

Nevertheless, Barreto felt the backlash. Earlier this year, the Oxnard teachers union delivered a vote of no confidence against her, citing her association with the case.

Barreto still refuses to say much about the case or related events, noting only that prosecutors found no evidence of wrongdoing and that Placencia cleared her name. She also won’t say to what extent the events of the past year influenced her decision not to seek reelection.

She did say, however, that she was able to accomplish all the major goals she set for herself when she was elected eight years ago, including making changes to the district’s math and reading curricula and working for the passage of a bond measure to shore up aging schools and build new ones.

“I’m a better person for all that has happened,” Barreto said. “I just think it’s time for new blood. We need new energy, we need new focus.”

For his part, Suter is more specific about how the criminal case affected him. In the middle of Placencia’s trial, the former schoolteacher was hospitalized with heart problems and suffered a stroke.

Suter believes his health problems are directly related to the stress he was under because of the scandal.

“There is a lot of human wreckage, a whole lot,” said the 72-year-old educator, who taught in Oxnard schools for 35 years.

Twice a week, at an outpatient clinic of St. John’s Regional Medical Center, Suter works with speech pathologist Becky Olson on swallowing solid food and regaining full use of his speech.

On a recent morning, he slowly consumed a mix of peaches and cottage cheese under Olson’s supervision. When he started therapy six months ago, Suter couldn’t swallow and was fed through a tube in his stomach. But he has made such progress that he hopes the tube will soon be removed.

After his morning meal, Suter launched into a series of exercises to strengthen his speech and retrieve words hidden from his memory by the stroke. At one point, Olson had him give five examples of words that begin with certain letters of the alphabet.

“How about five words that begin with the letter T?” she asked.

“Teacher,” Suter immediately responded, before pausing to try to think of four others. But it was too late, his brain already locked on a familiar idea: “A teacher, a teacher, a teacher, a teacher.”

In the end, Suter said, it will be the daily contact with teachers and students he will miss the most. As a board member, he spent a lot of time on school campuses, doing everything from planting gardens to cooking hot dogs for kids.

And even as he has been recovering from his health problems, he hasn’t been able to stay away, taking part recently in middle school graduations and district award assemblies.

“Oh boy, I wish I could run again--it really is in my blood,” he said. “But I wish them the best of luck, I really do. I hope they can focus on the things they need to do and purge these things of the past. It’s time to let it go.”

Opportunity to Reshape Image

Around the Oxnard elementary district, those sentiments are being repeated like a mantra.

With three seats open in the November election, and the district facing revolutionary reform of its bilingual education program, teachers and community leaders say the board has a golden opportunity to reshape its image and bury the past.

“I really have hopes that board members will be able to put these polarizing issues behind them, that they will be able to work together with the common interest of providing better education for our children,” said Irma Lopez, who co-chaired a Latino coalition that helped elect Barreto eight years ago.

“That is not to ignore the years that Jim Suter and Mary Barreto gave to the district,” Lopez said. “But they’ve given enough, they’ve done good, and now it’s time for other people to come in and do their part.”

Board member Francisco Dominguez, who also serves as executive director of an Oxnard-based Latino advocacy group, said he believes the board already has made strides toward focusing on the work that lies ahead.

“It has been difficult to try to get through all of the divisive issues, but I think we’ve been doing the things we’ve needed to do over the past several months to take care of business,” he said. “I think it’s important for board members to have mutual respect, even if there are differences of opinion. I think that can be done, it just takes a lot of work.”

Board member Arthur Joe Lopez, the only incumbent seeking reelection, agrees with that assessment.

“Despite the wire-tapping incident, I really do believe the district since that time has moved in a very positive and constructive direction,” said Lopez, noting that the board continues to refine its curriculum and was able to hammer out a new contract for its teachers.

“I realize when I say that, people won’t point to the successes. They’d rather look at the underside of these political shenanigans or bizarre occurrences,” Lopez said. “But when you think of all that has happened, we’ve been able to make significant progress, and we fully intend to go at it even harder.”

Dorothie Sterling, who taught in Oxnard schools for 32 years and twice served on the board, said keeping that momentum going will take five board members willing to set aside personality issues and commit themselves to Oxnard’s children.

“I think that if we’re going to move forward, there has got to be some significant change on the board,” she said. “I don’t know whether I’m the one to do that or not. But I do know the community has to be on its toes and look very carefully at who it is they want to lead the district.”

For a brief time, Pedro Placencia thought he might want to be one of those people to help lead the district.

Unhappy that he has not been able to regain his job, the 56-year-old veteran educator briefly considered running for one of the three open seats. He decided against it, but continues to fight for employment.

“I have 25 years invested in there,” Placencia said. “All of the sudden, for the one act I did, my 25 years of dedicated service is not worth anything.”

Late last month, the state Professional Competency Board upheld Placencia’s dismissal. And this week, he said, another state panel is scheduled to consider whether to revoke his teaching credential.

Placencia is fighting both efforts. It’s not that he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. Rather, he said, he has apologized for his actions and is paying for his mistakes.

But he said if board members are truly talking about fresh starts and burying mistakes of the past, then he believes he also deserves a second chance.

“Down deep in my heart, I never meant, directly or indirectly, to harm Jim Suter or anyone else,” he said. “I made a mistake, and I already paid a price. But this is one act versus 25 years of dedicated service. I’m not perfect, but neither is the board.”