This week the unsafe conditions of Tucson Unified School District’s classroom made the nightly news again and two Board members Dr. Mark Stegeman and Michael Hicks are reiterating their demand for change.
Hicks called for an investigation several times, but those requests were ignored. The two sitting Board members say TUSD schools should be “safe havens for every student and staff member” instead of the increasingly dangerous environment found at too many school sites.
According to Hicks and Stegeman, the 2015-16 school year witnessed one school disruption after another, all pointing to a severe contradiction between TUSD’s board-adopted policies and administrative directives. These problems had become noticeable during the 2014-15 school year.
Through media exposure two school administrators (Palo Verde Magnet School Principal and former Booth-Fickett Magnet School Principal) have publicly stated that central administration had taken discipline decisions out of their hands, resulting in decreased or no consequences for discipline violations. Principals have said that “their hands were tied.” The Booth-Fickett Principal was promptly told to leave his post, after divulging the facts to the public. It was also learned that some principals received significant pressure to “get their discipline numbers down” as well as direction not to file assault charges with the Tucson Police Department, even in cases involving obvious student physical attacks on students and school personnel. This appears to be a violation of ARS 13-1204.
Principals were told that this new direction was based on the federal desegregation court order, which is grossly misleading. TUSD’s current discipline policies (which Hicks and Stegeman have opposed) are in many ways more lenient than the court order requires, and nothing in the court order condones flagrant refusal to implement even those more lenient policies. Indeed, TUSD’s current practice undercuts the purpose of the court order and threatens the safety of all students, including the Mexican American and African American students whom the order was designed to protect.
Alarmingly, central administration later stated that it was imperative to keep students in school (rather than suspend them) with the objective of retaining student enrollment reimbursement from the state, ‘in order to keep the District solvent’. The administration is now walking back from this statement, which exposes a focus on financial problems rather than on student and personnel safety.
After the KGUN report, Members of the public called on the Board to fire Sanchez. One gentleman wrote in an email:
I am writing in regards to the report that just featured on KGUN 9 tonight about the violence and utter lack discipline within the TUSD school district, especially at Palo Verde HS. I am appalled that the current superintendent was allowed to come into this district and make such changes that have made the schools not only unruly, but dangerous. When a trained police officer is afraid for his/her safety, things have gone too far. Immediate change is needed, not waiting for the end of the year (at best), or the end of the school year (at worst).
You are doing these student a disservice by allowing them to think this kind of behavior is appropriate. What is going to happen to them when they are adults in the workforce? No one will hire them. If they act like they are being allowed to in school, they will end up in jail.
I am appalled that you are letting staff be assaulted and not backing them up. I am appalled that you are not reporting criminal assaults as assaults. We are in need of great teachers. I don’t see how ANY teacher or support staff would stay in a job where they were constantly threatened and physically injured.
I am asking you to immediately replace the superintendent with someone better qualified. I am asking that you IMMEDIATELY make changes in the policies to require students to be in class, be expelled, or suspended if required.
Hicks emailed the gentleman in return. He wrote:
Thank you so very much for your email.
I’m appalled with what the TUSD administration and the board majority are doing in the name of restorative practices to our students, school staff and our community. We have a Superintendent who has proudly informed the board and the public that he was invited to the White House to discuss his new method of dealing with serious behavior issues in the our district’s schools.
The superintendent has said to our community that his message to parents is “we’re very focused on student safety and nothing comes before student safety”, well Mr. Superintendent your approach to student discipline appears to be broken and I, as one school board member, truly hope that the others school districts, who you communicated with at the White House, are not implementing your new approach that allows bullies to have free rein in our schools.
On Friday, Hicks and Stegeman issued a joint statement:
“We are more concerned than ever about the safety of our students and personnel and understand even more clearly why students and teachers, as well as site administrators, are fleeing TUSD. It is frightening to learn that even armed police fear for their safety at one of our schools. The entire situation is indefensible. Governing Board members should not learn of such profound problems through media exposure or other external sources, but withholding important information from the Board (or at least the Board minority) has become common practice. We are calling for an immediate external investigation by the Department of Justice, which is a party to the desegregation case, into this matter. We are also requesting, through this statement, that the TUSD Superintendent place our request on the next Board agenda.”
Parent and popular school board candidate, Betts Putnam Hidalgo, echoed the sentiment in her statement:
So once again, horrific stories about discipline or the lack of it, coming out of TUSD. What is the end game? While the Cavazos piece takes on restorative practices, it also makes it abundantly clear that they have not even been tested in our schools. Instead, the District has attempted to deceive the public and the court authorities handling the desegregation case into believing that we don’t really have disciplinary problems.
This has been quite a year for deception. First we had the scandal of the magnet monies–where Magnet School principals stood up in a board meeting and swore up and down that they were being treated well by the district even as the District had, unbeknownst to them, apparently, removed money from almost all of their budgets.
Then we had, as a follow up to that, a so-called “community meeting” at El Casino Ballroom where everyone from political insiders on down to PTA presidents swore their loyalty to the districts’ leadership and demanded that they be allowed to use magnet school monies for “separate but equal” schools. This meeting was actively organized and pushed by top-level District personnel and flyers: It was anything but a grassroots, bottom-up meeting as presented.
Then, just as we received an interim report by a private consultant who is tasked to improve the disciplinary policy and student and parental guidelines, all hell broke loose on the disciplinary front. Just as the Superintendent stated that he completely supported a new disciplinary policy, he got caught for consistently undermining the old one by ordering principals to “fudge” the numbers.
The restorative practices that are being held up here as the problem are being successfully implemented throughout the country as different states–in a bipartisan fashion– attempt to find alternatives to incarceration. They have been “tried” at TUSD without training, follow-up or personnel that are expert in their implementation or uses. The years that I worked as a Community Rep, the training was a 15 minute computer powerpoint. Just to be clear, these practices have absolutely nothing to do with letting kids off the hook for bad behavior or allowing roving gangs to violently take over our schools . But when you conflate these things in a further attempt to deceive, restorative practices are tried and pilloried before we even have a chance to see how they could work in our schools.
Oh, yes, and let’s not forget the last act of deception: the use of only a small portion of the Prop 123 monies for the promised teacher raises. The numbers tell a fascinating story, but you really don’t need them. To all of the District apologists, the point is this: the District said one thing, through the words of HT Sanchez and Kristel Foster, and they did something else. They didn’t do what they promised–and all of the money moving and redefinitions in the world do not change that fact. And lest there be any confusion, teachers know it, bus drivers know it and the public knows it. And they all feel deceived.
What’s the common thread? Toxic deception or toxic mismanagement. In either case, how is it that current leadership can continue to run this district into the ground? Where is the oversight and the leadership? Parents, taxpayers, voters, this is not the State at fault. This is not the policy at fault. This is a horrifying lack of oversight and poor leadership that is actively damaging the staff, teachers and students of TUSD and eroding the gains that they have worked so hard to make.
TUSD is paying tens of thousands of dollars to a consultant to revise its disciplinary policies, but these changes have apparently now been postponed a year. This postponement is unfortunate, because addressing weaknesses in TUSD’s disciplinary policies, as well as failures to comply with those policies, are one of the district’s most urgent problems.
If the public votes to dislodge the current board majority in November, then we will insatiate measures to restore order to classrooms and our schools.
The start of the school year is just weeks away. As nervous parents and kids return to the classroom, Sanchez is now on notice that anything less than safe havens will be unacceptable.