At the Tucson Unified Governing Board meeting this week, Board President Adelita Grijalva, with the tacit support of fellow Board members Cam Juarez and Kristel Foster, enforced an old board policy that is discriminatory against the District’s homeless population, according to fellow Board members Michael Hicks and Dr. Mark Stegeman.
Grijalva, daughter of Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Raul Grijalva, refused to hear from education activist David Morales after he refused to provide his home address. The power-drunk Adelita then ordered security personnel to remove Morales from the boardroom.
Morales, who is the publisher of the Three Sonoran’s blog, has been a nemesis of Stegeman and Hicks’ in the past during the fight over the District’s Mexican American Studies curriculum. During that fight, Grijalva encouraged the now famous takeover of the boardroom by Morales and other who supported the Critical Race-based curriculum.
Now that Grijalva no longer needs the Chicano activists to maintain power, she is exerting her power over them.
On Thursday, Morales shared a post from Patrick Valencia McKenna on his Facebook page. It read:
“I think it’s really sad when I get messages from people who say they support what I am saying on Facebook but they can’t like my posts because they fear retribution from the Grijalvistas. Even people who work for nonprofit agencies are afraid to agree with me because they fear loosing their jobs. The Grijalva political machine is a rotting cesspool of corruption and suppression against the self determination of the Tucson Chicano community.”
On Thursday, Gloria Copeland, who has served as one of the African American plaintiff representatives in the District’s decades old desegregation case, addressed the silencing of Morales on the James T. Harris radio show. “Remember, what we are seeing here is what happened in Nazi Germany.”
Copeland referred to the Mexican American Studies fight, “Adelita didn’t stop them from disturbing a public meeting, but now will not allow dissent.”
Rich Kronberg, a long-time teachers’ union leader and educator stated, “Foster, Juarez and Grijalva all claim to support the TUSD students facing the biggest hurdles in their attempt to get a good education. Their insistence that those who testify at Governing Board meetings provide an address acceptable to the Board president flies in the face of that claim. Surely they would not discriminate against only some people and insist on an address but not insist on an address for everyone…including those for whom the address would be a homeless shelter or a park.”
“This was an overt attempt to silence Mr. Morales,” continued Kronberg. “For the record, Mr. Morales and I were on opposite sides during the whole Mexican-American Studies Program controversy. Despite that, Mr. Morales is entitled to testify at a TUSD hearing, and it is just plain wrong to deny him the right to testify. Beyond that, he is very knowledgeable about how TUSD operates. This business of an address is a transparently flimsy excuse to prevent an opposing voice…one who opposes the re-election of the two other members of Ms. Grijalva’s governing cabal on the TUSD Governing Board. Grijalva’s action, all by itself, it constitutes sufficient reason to vote against Grijalva’s two supporters in order to restore some level of sanity and honesty to the TUSD Governing Board.”
Lillian Fox, an education activist and highly qualified retired TUSD teacher stated, “Ms. Grijalva looked foolish turning off the microphones to prevent David Morales from being heard and then having security remove him from the Board meeting Tuesday. On Tuesday, when the Board was meeting, TUSD still had 165 teacher job listings. Last school year TPD wrote letters to two TUSD schools about their failure to report assaults to law enforcement. On the school Facebook page, the principal of Pueblo Magnet High School posted that he had changed students grades. In Arizona, changing a teacher’s grades is illegal. It would have been appropriate, if Board President Grijalva had lost her temper and taken drastic action about any of those things, not about Mr. Morales.”
Hicks said, “On Tuesday President Grijalva would not allow a member of the public to address the Board until he provided an address that satisfied her. Dr. Stegeman and I watched in shock as President Grijalva ordered security personnel to remove the man, who was not disruptive, from the boardroom. When she ordered our microphones to be shut-off, she shut off input from the thousands of residents we represent.”
When Dr. Stegeman attempted to question President Grijalva’s actions, she forbade him to speak and ordered the microphones turned off. The brazen move disenfranchised voters across the District and signaled that persons who have no home address also have no voice before the TUSD Board, according to Hicks and Stegeman.
The District’s counsel has advised that the requirement to provide a home address before addressing the Board is only a Board policy and not a requirement of any Arizona statute. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Act requires districts to ensure homeless students have access to education and other services they need to meet the same high academic achievement standards as all students. All local school districts must designate a Homeless Liaison.
On July 16 Hicks and Stegeman requested that an agenda item to change the address policy be brought to the Board. Policy BEDBA requires that the superintendent honor such a request, unless there is a good reason for delay. Stegeman said, “The Board has met twice since July 16, and this simple agenda request has been ignored without explanation. It should appear on the Board’s agenda as soon as possible.”
Both the Tucson City Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors have declined to require members of the public to provide their addresses during the Call to the Audience portion of their public meetings.
In response to McKenna’s Facebook post, one friend wrote of the elder Grijalva: “And to think that as far as the rest of the country knows, Raul Grijalva is a progressive Chicano hero.” Another wrote: “And many people have no idea what life is like in his district.” Grijalva’s Congressional District and TUSD both sit in the eighth poorest metropolitan area in the country.
The area has never fully recovered from a boycott of the area called for by the elder Grijalva in response to immigration legislation. As a result, of the few jobs that are available, most are controlled by the Grijalva cabal as noted by McKenna in his Facebook post.