The Santee Revolt: Escalation – UPDATED

As I wrote yesterday, last week, parents and students demonstrated at Santee Education Complex after principal Vincent Carbino made weird and unannounced mid-semester changes in the subject matter of more than 30 classes, wreaking havoc with students’ schedules, and in some case, disrupting graduation and college plans. This week it appears that matters on campus are continuing to escalate.

For instance, at a campus meeting on Monday afternoon Santee students read a letter requesting for the resignation of principal Vince Carbino.

Yet, while the Santee’s students and their parents continue to be upset, the school’s teachers are, if anything, are far, far angrier. And the faculty anger appears to be directed equally at Carbino and at LAUSD administrators whom they feel have turned a deaf ear to their escalating alarm regarding the school’s leadership.

On Monday, after the students made their presentation, a group of faculty members stayed to talk about some of their grievances against a principal whom they say gets his way through a combination of threats, bullying, withering public criticism of anyone who disagrees, and various forms of “harassment. “For instance, if he doesn’t like you, he’ll order regular police searches of your classroom,” says Jose Lara, a social studies instructor.

“So what’s happened is all the good teachers are leaving,” says Brent Boultinghouse, a bearded, genial-faced culinary arts teacher, who is also the school’s union rep. “Santee is hemorrhaging teachers. All because of Carbino.”

Jose Lara, explains that the district went so far as to send two full time “coaches” to the school to work with the principal. “But he won’t listen to them,” he says. “He won’t listen to anybody.”

The school’s English Department Chair, Gina Perry, agrees and then confides in a low voice that she’s reinstating some of the AP classes whether the principal likes it or not. “Sometimes you just do what you got to do,” she says. “It’s what the kids need.”

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Both Santee teachers and UTLA leadership contend that the reason that principal Carbino canceled or changed the various classes, including the 12 AP classes, was in reaction to a landmark court settlement called Williams v. the State of California. The 2000 case was a class action suit that contended that kids in the state’s poorest were being denied the right to an equal education because they didn’t have the same access to books, adequately trained teachers, and safe and clean school facilities, as those students in affluent areas.

In settling the lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to pour $1 billion into schools with test scores in the bottom 30 percent — most of them schools whose students overwhelmingly live in poverty.

The settlement also created a system of annual checks, sending education officials into classrooms each fall to see if every student has a book and is learning in a safe school building. Those checks — and the money to buy textbooks and make repairs — have led to tangible improvements in low-performing schools, says the study commissioned by lawyers who filed the Williams suit.

Right before the change, say teachers, Santee was due for its annual Williams inspection.

“There’s no reason he shouldn’t have been able to get the textbooks,” says Dori Miles, the UTLA rep for LAUSD Local District, who met with Santee faculty members again on Monday. “But even if there was a problem, if he had just talked to the teachers and the parents about the issue, some kind of creative accommodation could have been made. That’s what good administrators do.”

Instead Carbino made the course changes unilaterally, says Miles, then left teachers and students to scramble to deal with the results. This meant that in many cases students found themselves suddenly stuck in courses that they’d already taken and passed, meaning that they would be a course short at graduation.

It also meant that teachers who say they’d spent weeks “preparing course outlines, lesson plans, and instructional goals” (as one teacher said in an unhappy letter), were expected to teach a course for which they had made no preparation.

In the case of the AP instructors who, for each course, had been required to get a detailed syllabus approved by the state’s college board in order to qualify for AP status, the change was particularly infuriating.

Yet even months before the course changes, in response to a year’s worth of escalating complaints, the union asked Santee faculty members to fill out a survey indicating if they approved or disapproved of the way Carbino was doing his job as principal. The results indicated that 9.5 % approved, 17.5 % were unsure, 73 % disapproved.

On August 9, the union sent an 8-page letter with nearly 50 pages of back-up material, to LAUSD’s local district superintendent, Carmen Schroeder, about “a matter of great urgency.” The letter talked about “verbally abusing students and staff” and “creating an education environment “characterized by hostility, fear and intimidation.” Mr. Carbino’s poor administrative judgment was “shattering” teacher morale, and “denying students access to a free and adequate” public education, ” said the letter.

It concluded: “…We urge you to immediately appoint a new complex wide principal.” The letter is signed by UTLA President A.J. Duffy.

Thus far, there has been no official response.

“Except Carmen Schroeder came to the school and asked me if I could get the students and the parents to stop their demonstrations,” says Boultinghouse. “I told her ‘no.’ I couldn’t.”
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The teachers say that if the union can’t push the district into taking firm action to remove the principal, the faculty is likely to take matters into their own hands.

“We’re looking at the idea of turning this school into a charter,” says Boultinghouse.

Lara nods. “Frankly, we’ve had conversations with Steve Barr and Green Dot.”