Stop Trial-And-Error Hiring

The Simi Valley Unified School District’s trial-and-error approach to recruiting superintendents has little to do with education and still less to do with good government.

After seven superintendents in seven years, the school board should stop and take a long look in the mirror before heading around this particular mulberry bush yet again.

The quick rise and fall of Dan Flynn--who resigned barely three months after landing the job on a shaky 3-2 vote--is but the latest symptom of a persistent problem.

The Simi Valley school board, like many others across Ventura County and the nation, is deeply divided by contrasting political and ideological views. Some of the issues that divide the trustees are serious matters of curriculum tone and content: Progressive teaching methods or back-to-basics traditionalism? Strong emphasis on values or a more value-neutral approach? How much attention to pay to religion, to multiculturalism, to sex education, to career preparation?

These issues are rightly debated at election time and in board meetings; the public should vigorously join in. But day to day, somebody has to run the schools.

Simi Valley Unified is Ventura County’s largest school district, with 19,000 students in 27 schools and an annual budget of $150 million. Managing such a big enterprise with such an important mission--educating the children of an intensely family-focused city--demands the total attention of its top manager. It also demands that the school board stick to policy decisions and leave the day-to-day decision making and operations to a hired professional.

The people of Simi Valley should be concerned that the board has offered no official explanation for Flynn’s hasty departure, and curious why the board gave Flynn an extra $16,000 in severance pay beyond what was required in his contract. Simi Valley taxpayers should be as skeptical as we are of Flynn’s explanation, that the trustees gave him the extra pay because “they are good people.”

The Simi Valley trustees must try harder to keep their ideological differences from sabotaging the efforts of their next superintendent to operate those schools efficiently and effectively. That will take restraint and faith.

A good first step would be to refrain from hiring the next superintendent until they find one all five trustees can agree to support--and to leave alone.

The trustees should appoint an interim superintendent to take care of business while the board does its homework and finds a strong, experienced (and, we should add, courageous) candidate that all five board members endorse.

Simi Valley’s students, parents and taxpayers deserve some stability at the top. Running the schools is too important a task to leave flapping in the wind of political whim.