Tucson High School’s Badger Room was the site for the TUSD Governing Board retreat yesterday. The name of the room was appropriate. Board member Burns relentlessly badgered her fellow Board members.
After one diatribe by Burns, Superintendent Pedicone pleaded saying “I can’t work this way…..Can we get past these relational issues? We got to get past this stuff, I am paralyzed right now.”
Superintendent Pedicone selected Rene Diaz, of the Arizona Hispanic School Administrators, to facilitate the meeting. He presented the “The Art of Leading Tucson Unified School District.” The discussion items were to include, board protocol, leadership, communication, and effective teams.
Diaz was only able to get the group to reach consensus on one point: they all agreed that it is a dysfunctional board.
Miguel Cuevas was angry that he was “blindsided” by other member’s public complaints about the coup which removed Dr. Mark Stegeman from the Board’s presidency. Cuevas claimed that it upset him to learn from his mother that a fellow Board member went public with their displeasure with his participation in the coup. The comment was directed at Board member Hicks.
Hicks replied that his opinion piece in the Tucson Citizen was not primarily about TUSD Board or Cuevas. “You guys think it is all about you. It is the entire system. We have a system that allows people to come before us and bitch at us when things are going wrong. I have enough thick skin that I need to know when I am doing something wrong.” He explained that his opinion piece was aimed at governing bodies in Tucson that are trying to impose civility rules in order to silence the public.
Burns said the opinion piece “makes me want to retaliate” and then continued a rambling rant by saying that the district may never recover from Dr. Stegeman’s attempt to bring sanity to the district by changing the Mexican American Studies classes into elective rather than core classes.
Hicks responded to the attacks, “I am not afraid. Like it or not I am here for four years.”
Each Board member was asked to think of something they could do to make their situation better. Board member Adelita Grijalva promised to be prompt in the future. She said that from now on she would try to keep her comments from the public, though she would not retract her most controversial statement that Dr. Mark Stegeman was not qualified to make decisions because he was a “white male.”
Hicks was asked and promised to alert fellow Board members next time he released a statement. Stegeman was asked and promised to not over analyze issues during Board meetings.
Burns told her fellow Board members that the things she thinks she does to bother them, she also does to her husband, so they shouldn’t take it personally. She said that the only thing she was willing to do was, “try my darndest to not react so quickly, and it is not easy for me. That is what I am willing to do if that would smooth things over.”
The “retreat” started with a short movie and ended with a reading by four board members of a poem about birds.