Mailbag: Term limits can hinder a local school board

Re. “School board race revives call for term limits,” Sept. 11: Any efforts toward applying term limits to the position of school district trustee should honor how important stability is to learning.

Children flourish in a stable environment. Excessive change can interfere with learning and development. This consideration bubbles up to the top, suggesting a need for continuity as district trustees direct the education system.

Activists occasionally urge the castor oil of term limits on local governing bodies, such as cities and school boards. The main justification is to get new ideas and fresh looks at old ways. They frequently quote the adage, “A new broom sweeps clean.”

However, the rest of the adage should be included: “… But an old broom knows all the corners.” This correctly implies that experience is valuable.

Experience tends to be more important to a school board than to a city council because of who the “customers” are that they serve. A city’s customers are mainly adults with dynamic and sometimes conflicting, concerns: residents, businesses, community organizations and property owners. In comparison, school boards have only two kinds of customers to serve: students and precedents.

Few institutions respect precedents more than education. I came to realize and accept this when I served on the school board. I think it has to do with the legal doctrine in loco parentis, literally “in place of the parent,” concerning the rights and duties of school officials relative to the children in their care.

Educators legally owe students a duty to anticipate foreseeable dangers and to take reasonable steps to protect them from danger. This duty includes not repeating mistakes of the past. Thus, a key factor for a term limits discussion is that “the past” goes back to the beginnings of public education and even beyond, because children’s needs have changed very little over the eons.

Hard-won lessons from decades, even centuries, ago still inform present-day educators. The more deep knowledge and understanding of institutional history that trustees have, the more the education process will be kept on an even keel for the children.

At the other extreme of experience, if trustees were to be replaced just when they had gained the historical knowledge and experience they needed in order to be highly effective, the community would lose. It would lose someone whom they had learned to rely on. Further, the community’s voice through its elected representatives would lose influence relative to the professional staff who administer the board’s policies.

When I first was on the school board, I didn’t put much value on precedents. I had come from a career at the cutting edge of new product design, where thinking out of the box was highly valued.

But during my service as a trustee of the district, I eventually learned that changes to the education process must be made conservatively, and haste made slowly. I credit my fellow board members and the masters in school board governance course I took for educating me on how important that is.

Term limits should not be willy-nilly forced upon the school district. The side effects of such a dose of castor oil may interfere too much with a major focus — stability — of the school board.

Tom Egan
Costa Mesa

Editor’s Note: The writer is a former Newport-Mesa school board member.

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Republican voters need to soul-search

``Not that I loved Trump less but that I loved America more.” The honor, dignity and soul of what it is to be an American will be validated when the line above is quoted in exit interviews by millions of Republicans who will choose, after a prayer and deep soul searching, to vote for someone other than Donald Trump on Nov. 8.

This is not just a wish nor a frantic hope of mine, a successfully assimilated first-generation immigrant, but a core conviction of mine in the inherent goodness of a majority of Americans that I witness every day. The purveyors of hate, lies and bigotry cannot and will not succeed!

Jamshed Dastur
Balboa Island

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A heads-up to my neighbors

I thought I should warn my Orange Coast neighbors that there’s a guy in a van driving around saying he can fix the scrape on the side of your car.

I said my car was leased, and I was insured for such damage, and he drove off. But when I got out of the car, there was no scrape.

Maybe someone will read this and be aware and get his license plate number. He looked kind of like the guy who played Justin on the TV show “Brothers and Sisters.’’

Liz Newman
Corona del Mar