Why are some schools requiring certain school personnel to be at baccalaureates this graduation season? Don’t we have separation of church and state? How can an employee be required by their government employer to attend an event at a church on a Sunday?

Why are the schools even involved in this type of event — it should be completely private and run by interested students and their parents, not by the school.

I no longer work in MDUSD. If I did, I would be exercising my First Amendment rights to petition MDUSD to stop this abuse of its employees and to stop this disregard for employees’ (and students’)freedom of religion.

School districts in which employees, including teachers, are not taking furlough days are becoming the exception. The tornado that is the years-long state financial crisis has now touched down in our classrooms, particularly in school districts that do not have a parcel tax to offset some of the revenue shortfall.

It is time to stop ranting on blogs about where the next cuts should come from and start highlighting the areas where students, teachers, administrators, and classified employees are working hard–and succeeding–even as their jobs become more difficult. We need a revenue source independent of state and federal formulas: a parcel tax. And we’ll get that only by convincing district voters that MDUSD is worth their support.

You may not like the Superintendent or some senior administrators or Board members, but as the recent lightweight Grand Jury investigation shows, their apparent ethical lapses brought little more than a finger-shaking from that panel.

They are the district’s leaders for at least two more years. But they don’t need to be the face of MDUSD. There are many others worth that honor, such as the Mt. Diablo High students and teachers who went to school on last Friday’s furlough day; the music teachers and coaches and librarians whose programs are underfunded; the Holbrook and Glenbrook students, staff, and parents who made us see the remarkable work being done in those schools; the . . . (fill in the blank with your own story; there are many).

Rather than be a loose collection of critics, the MDUSD community needs to work together to repair the damages done over the past several years. Don’t let anger about the district leadership be a distraction.

Ms. Hansen is correct. Even what they made look all big and official for school closure studies was pretty much all just a compilation of information that was available on the web and by a half dozen phone calls. They could have also put all that information onto about 10 pages had they not padded it with duplicate info to make it appear to be worth what we paid for it.

I have been confused as to why some of their numbers did not match what the District has published—somebody is wrong, but who?