The pleas of parents and staff to restore order and place highly effective teachers; not substitutes, in classrooms, continue to be ignored by Tucson Unified School District members Cam Juarez, Kristel Foster and Adelita Grijalva. At the same time, administrators in the District continue to benefit from the largess of Superintendent H.T. Sanchez.
Utterback Fine and Performing Arts Magnet School is supposed to be attractive to students across the District, but neglect has left it without a dance teacher, only one math teacher, and a damaged stage badly in need of repairs. Two months into the school year, Utterback is short at least 8 teachers. There is no crossing guard. There are too few monitors to prevent bullying and keep students from leaving school. In other words, it is anything but magnetic.
The disparity of treatment was on full display last week, when Uttberback Junior High parents and staff , came forward to plead for relief. Parents and children came forward during the Call to the Audience portion of Tuesday night’s meeting, despite their deep distrust of the District’s leadership.
In the three minutes that each member of the community is allotted during the Call to the Audience portion of the meeting, speakers exposed the leadership’s intimidation tactics and the classroom conditions with which staff and students must contend every day.
As the Whistleblowers noted in their latest missive:
Board members then took the opportunity to address the comments that were made. Mark Stegeman said that he was very happy that the parents had come forward. Cam Juarez asked for an update of the situation from Sanchez, indicating that he is oblivious to the whole issue. Adelita assumed the same posture. Now, get ready for this: Kristel Foster said that she ‘has spoken with HT Sanchez’ and that they are jointly aware of the whole situation and that they know what is taking place (at Utterback). She said she knew what was happening at the school at least twice. Which of these is worse: Not having a clue about what is happening at a magnet middle school that the Board legally committed to staff and fully fund or actually knowing all about the situation and not doing a damn thing about it? We think both are DISGRACEFUL. We know that both “ignorance and ignoring” are hurting students at Utterback (and other magnet schools).
Betts Putnam Hidalgo, a candidate for the Governing Board stated, “It is inconceivable that TUSD seems to have so much money available to administrators, and yet its magnet schools, the strongest strategy for actually integrating the district and getting out of the Deseg plan, are allowed to whither on the vine. With the amount of magnet monies we have, we should never be hearing of a shortage of teachers or supplies in those schools–and yet we hear that all the time. In the meantime, lawyers and administrators seems to do just fine. It shows a real lack of priority on the part of the District, and the overwhelming need for some supervision of spending priorities developed at the top.
While the Magnet schools wait interminably to get teachers, despite Federal Court orders and the existence of a great deal of desegregation money, as Putnam Hidalgo notes, administrators don’t experience any shortage of cash. At the same time, while non-existent rules are enforced against teachers, the District’s administrators, over the years, have benefitted greatly from a lack of adherence to the rules.
Cases on point include the awarding of bonuses to administrators, who were not entitled to such under the terms of their contracts. In 2014, Superintendent H.T. Sanchez awarded $10,000 bonuses to senior administrators Damon Jackson and Steve Holmes. According to sources:
● The bonuses were neither reported to nor approved by the Governing Board.
● Although the Board is charged by statute with setting compensation, neither the contracts nor the contracted salaries were ever approved by the Board.
● The Board approved the appointments of the administrators, but the contractual terms were not part of those approvals and never went through the Board.
● The superintendent’s contract explicitly refers to “the Governing Board’s exclusive authority to hire and fire employees and to determine employee compensation.”
● Arizona has a Gift Clause statute. Gifts of public funds are a class 4 felony under Arizona statute.
Jackson came to TUSD after having worked with Sanchez in Texas at the Ector County Independent School District. Despite his hefty salary and apparently illegal bonus, it did not take much time for Jackson to flee the oppressive atmosphere created by Sanchez at TUSD with the help of the majority on the Governing Board.
In fact, Jackson left education altogether and now works as a “Sr. IT Manager Infrastructure” with the City of Fort Worth.
For his part, after grabbing his illegal bonus, Holmes became Foster’s boss when he took the helm at the Sunnyside School District in 2015. Holmes and Foster, who has worked at Sunnyside since 2005, worked together previously when he served as Sunnyside’s Executive Director of Secondary Schools and Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, from 2009 until taking the job with Sanchez.
The details surrounding the allegedly illegal bonus are:
1) At the August 13, 2013 meeting of the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board, the appointments of Holmes and Jackson to senior administrative positions were approved. The agenda items accompanying those appointments are attached. No detailed information was provided to the Board. The proposed contracts were not available to the Board.
2) No subsequent agenda item, in which the Board approved specific contracts or set the terms of compensation for Holmes or Jackson, was ever presented to the Board.
3) On August 19 and 20, 2013 Jackson and Holmes signed contracts of employment with TUSD. The contracts include various benefits, financial and otherwise, but neither contract specifies the possibility of a bonus.
4) In June 2014, just before the end of the fiscal year, each administrator received a $10,000 payment, coded as a “bonus.” It appears that none of the other benefits that are specified in the signed contracts could produce such a $10,000 payment.
Because the contract did not provide for the award of bonuses, those monies would amount to gifts of public funds. With Board members Mark Stegeman and Michael Hicks being the only two people in positions of authority questioning Sanchez, he was allowed to set the salaries and contract terms unilaterally.
Stegeman stated, “TUSD’s casual attitude toward gifts of public funds mirrors its casual attitude toward teachers’ statutory rights to assign their own grades, teachers’ statutory rights to remove disruptive students from classrooms, the Open Meeting Law, etc. As a felony, however, gifts of public funds rise to a different level. If administrators can receive $10,000 ‘bonuses’ outside of their employment contract, then the cashbox is open to unlimited pilferage.”
“TUSD continues the practice of awarding bonuses without looking at the terms of contracts. Indeed, the board majority voted to do exactly that on June 14 when approving the cabinet’s salary, with an asterisk next to Dr. Morado’s compensation package, to indicate that he is an ESI employee. There was no contract attached to the action item for approval. He received an expense allowance and a performance bonus,” stated candidate for the Governing Board, Lori Riegel.
It is the intimidation of educators, like those frequently mentioned by the TUSD Whistleblowers, through the imposition of imaginary and arbitrary policies, and gifts to Holmes and Jackson through apparently imaginary and generous contract provisions that cause many TUSD stakeholders to question the District’s commitment to equity.
Michael Hicks stated, “ The District should never intimidate anyone who wants to address the Board in a peaceful. Students, parents, staff other stakeholders need to feel safe to come forward. We supposedly changed the venue for Board meetings to Duffy in response to an OCR complaint, and we certainly need to adhere to the spirit of that agreement which was to facilitate participation in an equitable manner. Any violation – whether the spirit or letter of the agreement is unacceptable. Any intimidation by anyone in leadership is reprehensible.”
ThreeSonorans’s channel: Utterback cries out for help at TUSD board meeting