And yes, I too do not trust this school board. Now what?

Per:CCSA:“Once submitted, the district has 30 days to hold a hearing on the charter petition and another 30 days to make a final decision. Extensions may be granted by mutual consent up to a total of 90 days.”

A final decision is not a conditional decision, it is a simple yes or no. A conditional decision is a no.

So what to do? Formally appeal to the County Board(many facts show this school board has bent the rules-think City of Bell) and act to make your voice heard. Think politics and votes; recall has a nice ring. Do I have a second?

Also looking through that report… I found it curious that the bottom had exclamation points. Why did they use exclamation points? It’s just a report, from the GOV no less, strange. (I know that’s probably an odd thing to notice)

Don’t let the MDUSD jerk you around past this next board meeting. If you dont get a clear approval or denial you need to go on the offensive and put as much legal and political heat on the MDUSD or you might be defeated.

Here is the districtwide report: http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/Expulsion/ExpReports/DistrictExp.aspx?cYear=2010-11&cChoice=DstExp1&cCounty=07&cNumber=0761754&cName=Mt%2E+Diablo+Unified

We were nervous about the delay for two reasons. First, the calendar delay pushed the appeals calendar such that it made it extremely difficult for us to run the appeals gauntlet in time to open the school the following school year. Second, the BoE’s attorney/consultant had a track record of representing school boards in their efforts to squash charter efforts. However, we made the mistake of trusting the board at their word because we were nervous about antagonizing them and wanting a working relationship with them in the future, plus we decided to assume they were acting in good faith.

Despite the eventual recommendation by our superintendent and staff to approve the charter, our BoE denied the charter on illegal grounds in January, but as there are no sanctions against boards that violate the law, they had no reason to adhere to it.

Our one regret was that we did not conclude immediately that the board was denying our charter and file suit to pressure them to approve or deny the charter immediately, especially considering how hard we’d worked to keep district staff involved in our development process. While the suit may have proved untenable, we should have tried the issue in the court of public opinion, recognizing that the board focuses its resources on its political constituency only, and that shedding light on their school financing practices would have yielded a more certain outcome.

The result is that our districts only majority/minority school is now closed, and the performance of our less affluent and ESL students who were distributed to schools lacking the effective program hosted in their now-shuttered school has suffered significantly. Real flesh and blood children are hurt when well-constituted charter efforts fail, and I hope you can provide the kind of school experience the students of Clayton Valley High School deserve.

As they say in the business “Either lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

This board and their hired guns have proven over and over (with more examples every week) that they cannot lead in any sense of the word.

They have now proven that they are unwilling to follow or get out of the way by jerking around a grass-roots charter group with massive public support.

It is clearly now time to remove these people from public service so that others can do the job that they have so thoroughly failed to do!