Enrique Morones is the founder of Border Angels. / Photo by Kinsee Morlan

The centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s plan to make America great again – starting with construction of new border wall prototypes – began this year in San Diego, thrusting the region into the national spotlight.

And when national reporters sought a voice for immigrant advocates, time and again they turned to Enrique Morones, director of Border Angels, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights.

Reporters regularly tailed Morones to Friendship Park on days when gates on the border fence swung open, allowing families to embrace for three minutes at a time. It’s part of the “Opening the Door for Hope,” a project now in its sixth year, which Morones worked with the San Diego Sector’s Border Patrol chief to make possible.

Visitors, journalists and camera crews hiked with Morones into the desert near Jacumba, where they left jugs of water for migrants journeying north from Mexico into the United States. Along the way, Morones educated visitors – many of them new to the border region – about how measures to secure the border over the past 20 years have pushed migrants further into the desert, where some met their death.  Morones brings visitors to an Imperial Valley graveyard to remember those who died alone while making the journey, only to be buried in unmarked graves.

It’s an attempt to show the toll border-security measures have already taken on human lives – and to also to show what’s at stake, both with respect to immigration policies, and the way we simply talk to one another.

Border security and tougher immigration policies may be driving the current administration, but over the past year, Morones has been a constant voice of resistance to that rhetoric. In doing so, he’s advocated for immigrant communities both locally and nationally and put a human face on the suffering that often results from efforts to secure the border.

And in spite of – or perhaps, because of – the Trump administration’s views toward immigration and border security, Morones and Border Angels attracted more volunteers than ever.

“While some people want to build walls, I want to open doors,” Morones said.

This is part of our Voice of the Year package, profiling the people who drove the biggest conversations in San Diego in 2017.

San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

In school board meetings and public statements, San Diego Unified School District leaders speak often of their commitment to transparency.

Last year, when the district achieved a record-setting graduation rate, Superintendent Cindy Marten said one of the top reasons for the accomplishment was the transparency it showed by sharing data on student progress with outside organizations.

The district has boasted of its transparency in managing school bond money and how it reacted when lead was detected in school drinking water.

But the district’s actions haven’t matched its rhetoric.

Over the last year, through outright denials or staggeringly slow responses to public records requests – including some that have been found to have violated California law – refusals to discuss important decisions and misleading public statements, the district established itself as the public agency most hostile to transparency in San Diego.

The most glaring examples include:

• In April, with a $124 million budget shortfall looming, VOSD asked the district to produce communications between staff members to see what led to the shortfall. Nearly 300 days later, the district has produced nothing.
• VOSD asked the district for basic staffing data for the past 10 years. It took the district 207 days to produce the data. Los Angeles Unified produced the same data in 15 days.
• An analysis of records requested from San Diego Unified between December 2014 and October 2017 showed the district takes 80 days, on average, to deliver records requested by the public. Media outlets waited 110 days.
• School administrators said in a survey that they fear being reprimanded if they voice concerns.
• Two years ago, Voice of San Diego sent a records request to San Diego Unified seeking communications related to allegations of harassment, sexual misbehavior or inappropriate touching by La Jolla High teacher Martin Teachworth. District officials said no such records existed. But VOSD has since obtained four emails related to complaints against Teachworth that were not included in the district’s responses.
• The district came close to instituting a new policy in which it would purge all emails older than six months – before members of the public or the school board even had a chance to weigh in.
• After students who’d struggled in San Diego Unified high schools told VOSD that district counselors had suggested they transfer to charter schools, the district vehemently denied that such a thing ever took place. Later, a school district official admitted that this happened regularly, and a records request even produced official district forms in which school officials recommended charters to struggling students.

Such obfuscation isn’t just a problem for reporters. It also leaves parents across the district wanting for information about their schools and children.

And it costs the district money.

This year, a court ruled San Diego Unified illegally withheld emails related to an investigation of former school board trustee Marne Foster. San Diego Unified must pay more than $52,000 for fees VOSD’s attorney accrued fighting for documents, with additional costs yet to be determined.

Public Records and the Purge Proposal

The California Public Records Act specifies public agencies must respond to requests within 10 days, wherein they must acknowledge they’ve received the request and confirm that the records exist. While there’s no set time frame for when agencies have to deliver records, the California attorney general advises agencies provide them “within a reasonable period of time” and the law requires that the records be made “promptly available.”

To determine how long San Diego Unified takes to provide records, VOSD and NBC 7 conducted a joint analysis of records requested from San Diego Unified between December 2014 and October 2017.  We found it took the district 80 days, on average, to deliver records requested by the public. Media outlets waited longer – receiving them in 110 days, on average.

The district turned around records quicker for labor groups and contractors hoping to do business with the district, providing them in 37 days and 67 days, respectively. That calls into question the district’s claim that it processes records on a first come, first served basis.

“Three months is not a reasonable time period to have to wait for a public document,” said Donna Frye, past president for the government transparency organization Californians Aware. While complicated records could take public agencies more time to compile, there’s no reason the district can’t provide basic documents within a week or two, Frye said.

Delayed responses to requests for records – along with the fact the district’s chief public information officer Andrew Sharp twice joked about finding the body of a VOSD reporter washed ashore – was part of the reason San Diego’s Society of Professional Journalists in April awarded San Diego Unified its Wall Award, recognition for a public agency that displays an outstanding lack of transparency.

“The district’s actions lead us to conclude that it doesn’t value openness and transparency,” SPJ said in a statement.

At the time, Sharp blamed records delays on an understaffed legal department. He told the San Diego Union-Tribune the district was implementing changes to speed up the process.

Two months later, San Diego Unified started moving forward with a plan to purge all emails older than six months – before members of the public or the school board even had a chance to weigh in – citing high costs of email retention.

Only after members of the media and advocates for government transparency pushed back against the purge, arguing such a move could be illegal, did the school board recommend the district not delete emails until after one year.

Frye said the problem for public agencies that don’t produce information in a timely matter often boils down to an attitude problem and lack of regard for the Public Records Act.

“[Public agencies] don’t take it seriously enough, they don’t think it’s that important, they think of it as an inconvenience to them, and they oftentimes have a very negative attitude about anybody that requests information from them. So a lot of it is more of an attitude problem that sometimes is sort of institutionalized. They don’t seem to understand that the basic tenets of being able and allowed to serve the public come with that responsibility, and that is to keep the public informed about what they’re doing,” she said.

A spokeswoman for San Diego Unified said in a statement that transparency is a top priority for the district.

“The San Diego Unified School District is committed to transparency and accountability, and works diligently to answer all inquiries from the public and media,” Maureen Magee wrote in an emailed statement. “Some responses require more time than others to fulfill as the district must be sensitive to its multiple stakeholders – employees, students and the public, among them. The district’s legal office works to answer the increasing number of public records requests it fields as efficiently as it can, and has provided some 50,000 pages of documents to the VOSD in response to inquiries in roughly 18 months.”

The Graduation Rate ‘Miracle’

In 2016, the school district made an incredible announcement: Roughly 92 percent of students were on track to graduate – a record high for the second largest school district in the state.

It was even more impressive given that the district had just instituted more rigorous standards. In fact, just two months earlier, a UC San Diego researcher who’d been studying the district’s data said accomplishing a 90 percent graduation rate would take a “miracle.”

The UCSD research was made possible because the district had agreed to share student data with the research team, part of the San Diego Education Research Alliance.

When VOSD tried to dig in to how the district accomplished such an unprecedented grad rate, however, the district declined to discuss its data in interviews. VOSD submitted requests for public records and tracked down San Diego Unified students or those who had left the district-run high schools.

A picture emerged that the original numbers did not show: At least 35 percent of the students who started their freshman year in a San Diego Unified high school left district-run schools before they graduated. Many of the students least likely to graduate transferred to charter schools. If students transfer to a charter school and fail to graduate, they’re not factored into the district’s graduation rate.

Some of those students said counselors had pressured them to leave, saying a charter school would be a better fit for them.

Initially, the district emphatically denied that was happening: “That would be both morally wrong and financially foolish for any school to push out its students,” the district wrote on a web page created specifically to push back against VOSD’s grad rate reporting.

But school board member Richard Barrera later admitted just the opposite: He said Marten discovered years ago that staff members at some schools were encouraging students to transfer to charter schools.

And documents obtained through California Public Records Act requests – records the district took 11 months to provide – showed that between fall 2012 and fall 2016, school staff members recommended students find a new high school on at least 238 occasions.

Some of those students transferred to in-district alternative schools. But in some cases, records show, counselors recommended students transfer to charter schools that specialize in helping students recover enough credits to graduate. Most often, school staff members recommended students transfer because they were deficient in credits.

In September, UCSD researchers returned with a new report, portions of it devoted to exploring findings and allegations reported by VOSD.

UCSD researchers have agreed to brief the district on their research findings ahead of publication. The district can provide input, according to its memorandum of understanding, but “it does not influence conclusions drawn by the researchers.”

But an email between Sharp and Ron Rode – the district’s point person on graduation data – shows that in May, Sharp asked Rode to pressure Julian Betts, the lead researcher, to double back on comments he made to VOSD two months earlier:

“I know you’ve been pushing him hard to say, ‘Miracles happen!’ Is he there yet?” Sharp asked Rode. The subject line of the email is: “Can you work on Julian Betts today?”

Later that day, Sharp wrote again to Rode: “It would be really devastating if he accused us of cooking the books. And, frankly, it would make our future collaboration with him really hard.”

When I asked Betts about these exchanges, which he hadn’t seen before, he said Rode never followed through on Sharp’s requests to pressure him into saying “miracles happen.” He called Sharp’s emails to Rode “quite surprising.”

In an email, Betts said the the most charitable interpretation of Sharp’s requests was that he didn’t understand the independent nature of the district’s relationship with the UCSD researchers, or how productive and mutually beneficial the relationship had been.

“Further, it seems that Mr. Sharp did not fully understand the difference between the district’s official graduation rate, the estimates of student progress used to identify struggling students as the school year progresses, and our cohort study, which followed all students in the class of 2016 from grades 9 through 12,” Betts wrote.

Betts said his report improved the public’s understanding of the progress the district had made, but also the “very real challenges that clearly remain.”

Around the time UCSD researchers published their September report, the district enlisted PR consultant Tony Manolatos to promote its efforts to raise the graduation rate.

According to the terms of his contract, the district agreed to pay Manolatos $25,000 to attend at least three meetings about the district’s graduation rate and compile information into a report to be disseminated to the public.

The purpose, the district said, was to increase “transparency into district operations.”

‘This Is Not Normal’

San Diego Unified’s policy is that every piece of information that goes to media or gets disseminated to the public goes first through its press office. The district isn’t unique in this way – many public agencies set up a single point of contact to ensure information sent to the public is accurate and consistent.

But records and principal survey results show those who speak to media outlets without prior approval can face hostility.

In April 2016, I accepted a fellowship with New America, a D.C.-based think tank with an office in California. One purpose of the fellowship was to find new ways to engage parents and students who don’t interact with schools through traditional means. San Diego State University’s journalism school and the San Diego County Office of Education agreed to partner with VOSD for the project.

I asked San Diego Unified to participate, too, but the district declined. Former spokesperson Linda Zintz said at the time parents might see the collaboration as an endorsement of VOSD. But emails revealed a different story.

“Giving VOSD access to our parents and our kids would be like approving pedophiles to provide after-school care for our kids,” wrote Sharp.

The hostility isn’t reserved only for reporters. Earlier this year, a survey of principals, vice principals and central office managers across the district showed, among other problems, school staff members worried they could not voice their concerns without reprimand.

Liz Larkin, who retired as principal of East Village High at the end of last school year, said she was rebuked by district leaders for letting reporters into her school to document how easy online classes are for students to cheat.

“Principals are scared that if they speak out, they’ll get demoted. A high school principal might get bumped down to be a vice principal at an elementary school, for example. If they don’t like you, they’ll get rid of you. This is not normal,” Larkin said in October.

Earlier this month, the San Diego Press Club announced it would host an Ed Talk forum in partnership with San Diego Unified, where journalists could “ask questions and participate in on-the-record discussions” with an educator, administrator, elected official or special guest.

One day before the forum was set to take place, the district abruptly canceled the event. It has not yet been rescheduled.

Ashly McGlone and NBC 7 contributed to this report.

A meeting of the San Diego Unified school board / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

On Wednesday, the San Diego City Council’s rules committee shot down four separate ballot proposals to reform San Diego Unified school board elections. Each proposal failed 3-2 along party lines, with Democrats voting in the majority.

The reforms included proposals to add more members to the five-person school board, set a two-term limit for trustees, split San Diego Unified into two separate districts, and eliminate at-large elections so that trustees are elected only by members of their districts.

Unlike the way City Council elections work — where only the people who live in a certain district vote for that district’s representative — school board candidates first run in a districtwide election, then go on to a citywide runoff. Reformers argue that district-only elections would make it easier to see fresh faces on the school board, as city-wide elections are costly and tilt toward candidates with endorsements and financial backing from labor unions and other special interests.

The citizens who brought forward the proposals have until June to try again. If approved, a proposal would go to the full City Council, which could then place it on the November ballot.

Because of the odd relationship between San Diego and its school district — wherein the city has no oversight role, but holds school district elections under its purview — any change to the school district’s election process requires an amendment to the City Charter.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the rules committee expressed support for surveys and town hall meetings to gauge community members’ interest in school board reforms.

School board trustees Sharon Whitehurst-Payne and Richard Barrera have taken the lead on that effort. They’ve held two invite-only meetings with community members to talk about engagement.

Some district parents expressed concern over the fact Barrera is leading the effort because he’s openly opposed district-only elections. In an op-ed for the Union-Tribune last year, Barrera and his school board colleague Kevin Beiser dismissed a proposal to institute district-only elections and term limits as a Republican ploy to grab power. Barrera has been elected to school board three times, each time running unopposed.

“I’m frustrated because it’s clear to me school board members don’t want change,” San Diego Unified parent Tamara Hurley told the rules committee this week. She believes the plan the school district brought forward is a way to stall changes.

“They have every incentive to do so,” Hurley said.

Under the plan the school board approved this week, the district will create a 24-member committee — made up mostly of parents and union representatives — to advise the school board and make recommendations on election reforms. Each school board member would also select three representatives to serve on the committee.

Between now and May, the district is expected to organize town hall meetings and send out surveys to parents seeking consensus on a range of questions, like whether there should be term limits, district-only elections and an increase to the number of school board members. The committee will also consider whether 16-year-olds and undocumented residents should be allowed to vote in school board elections.

In June, the district plans to return to the City Council with potential recommendations for a ballot initiative.

At this week’s school board meeting, all five trustees voted in support of the plan to engage parents, though none expressed enthusiasm for making specific changes to the school board or the election process.

Trustee John Lee Evans called changes to the school board election process “a solution in search of a problem.”

Problems, however, have been identified by the San Diego County Grand Jury, which filed a report in May.

“The Grand Jury believes that sub-district elections alone would assure that specific concerns of each region are represented,” the report reads. “Therefore, the Grand Jury recommends that all SDUSD school board trustee candidates be elected only from within their home sub-district.”

The report also recommends instituting term limits, pointing out board members in the past have served as long as 16 years.

In response to the report, the City Council agreed with a number of the Grand Jury’s findings, including the points that term limits enable more citizens to take part in school governance and that by instituting sub-district only elections and term limits, “a large part of the elections process will be returned to the people.”

Former San Diego Unified Trustee Mitz Lee, who’s been involved with Community Voices for Education, a grassroots group, said she fully expected City Council Democrats to side with the school district this week and shoot down the proposed ballot initiatives. But she still considers this week’s results a victory.

“The goal was simply to put this on the City Council’s radar,” she said. “We’ll be back with these proposals and we want to make sure Democrats will be uncomfortable shooting the proposals down again in June.”

In other news…

• On his way out of office, Governor Jerry Brown is eyes a spending spree. (EdSource)

The spending proposals include, among others, $3 billion to finish funding the Local Control Funding Formula two years ahead of schedule, $55 million in ongoing funding for county offices of education to assist local school districts, and $100 million in one-time funding to recruit and train special education teachers in an effort to reverse a critical shortage.

While Brown’s landmark Local Control Funding Formula was welcomed enthusiastically by educators and school district officials, many say the base-funding for operating expenses has remained too low. What happens after next year, post-full funding, will be up to the next governor and Legislatures, write EdSource.

• The cost of charter schools: There’s a study for that. (Chalkbeat)

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, have been growing, both locally and nationally. Charter schools serve roughly 20 percent of the students in San Diego Unified and provide parents an alternative to their neighborhood schools.

But those who oppose them believe charter schools siphon students and resources from district schools, which struggle to reduce operating costs at the same rate they lose students. A new study found officials at one school district in North Carolina had $500 to $700 less to spend on each of its remaining students because 15 percent of local students attended charter schools in the 2013-14 school year.

The story includes an important caveat: “This kind of research is tricky, because it requires complicated judgments about which district costs are fixed and which are variable — and most aren’t clearly one or the other. For instance, although the new North Carolina study categorizes buildings and school administration as ‘fixed,’ districts could reduce both by closing schools.”

• The way a school district draws school boundaries can either improve or exacerbate segregation. (Vox)

The way San Diego Unified School District draws neighborhood school boundaries basically recreates the already existing segregation patterns in San Diego — a concern that’s especially relevant given San Diego Unified’s efforts to keep more kids in their neighborhood schools.

This story comes with an interactive data set that allows you to see how school attendance boundaries impact segregation in your school district.

• San Diego dreamer lands a “small victory” and promises to keep fighting while a UCSD student makes a wrong turn and winds up in ICE custody

Local immigration attorney and DACA recipient Dulce Garcia landed what she saw as a blow to the president on Tuesday when a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping a program that protected young unauthorized immigrants like her from deportation.

“After merging five cases, including Garcia’s, that sued the Trump administration over the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Judge William Alsup ordered the administration to renew the two-year permits that allow hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to work in the U.S. without fear of deportation while the combined case proceeds to trial,” writes the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Meanwhile, local UCSD student Orr Yakobi learned just how fragile those DACA protections are when he and his roomate made a wrong turn while shopping near the border and inadvertently entered Mexico.

Orr is an Israeli citizen with DACA status, but those protections do not allow him to leave and reenter the country. Orr is now in ICE custody and detained in Otay Mesa, where he faces deportation. Local lawmakers and others are calling for his release.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story said San Diego Unified trustee Richard Barrera has opposed term-limits. He has opposed district-only elections.

United States Border Patrol agent, Chris Harris, stands on a hilltop overlooking the U.S.-Mexico border fence, right, on November 14, 2017, in San Diego, California.
Harris is the Director of Legislative and Political Affairs for the National Border Patrol Council, Local 1613.
Photo – David Maung

The scene represented the debate over immigration and border security, boiled down to its most primitive essence.

Held near the construction site for the border wall prototypes, the rally in early December was promoted as a show of support for border security and tougher immigration policies. But 15 minutes after the rally started, a fight broke out.

“I saw somebody get punched, kicked to the floor, then somebody was choking him with a flag pole,” said Rafael Bautista, a local real estate broker who attended the rally. Bautista, like many others who oppose the president’s immigration policies, sees no separation between Trump and the people and agencies who enforce immigration law.

“Right now, the head of the state is a white supremacist and his policies support that. Duncan Hunter, the police, Border Patrol – they’re all part of the same forces aligned with Trump and the fascist right,” Bautista said.

But one member of the Border Patrol Union, Chris Harris, attended the rally that day to counter this narrative.

“Nobody has a right co-opt our story and use it for their own personal or political ends,” said Harris, director of legislative and political affairs for National Border Patrol Council, Local 1613, the union that represents local Border Patrol agents.

Not that Harris minds the increased attention on border security. Raising awareness for the issues that rank-and-file agents confront on the job is a big part of Harris’ work with the union.

At the top of Harris’ agenda this year has been stopping the millions of gallons of sewage and toxic waste that flows from Mexico to the United States.

Harris has been a go-to source for media outlets across the political spectrum, from Tucker Carlson and Breitbart News to CNN and BBC. He represents those who work for a federal agency that’s often recalcitrant and standoffish with reporters, but he believes a pitbull press is the only way to preserve democracy.

Harris encapsulates a host of contradictions. When his union endorsed Trump, Harris had misgivings about how it would politicize border security. He’s married to a woman whose parents came to the country illegally, meaning they broke the same laws he’s now responsible for enforcing.

He believes the law is meant to be followed and has spent a career enforcing it. That’s why he thinks former President Barack Obama was wrong to focus enforcement efforts on only certain undocumented immigrants. But he also calls black-and-white thinking a “lazy man’s way of viewing the world.”

“Real life is made up of shades of grey, unfortunately, and greys make you work and think critically,” he said.

Candid and accessible, Harris offers a rare voice for how Border Patrol agents see their duties and their role in an increasingly polarized landscape.

The Green Wall

A Border Patrol agent inspects the Tijuana River levee at the U.S.-Mexico border. / Photo by David Maung

Where the Tijuana River cuts north toward San Diego then flows west into the Pacific, the only barrier between Mexico and United States is a Border Patrol agent in a green uniform. There’s no fence. No actual wall. Just a painted yellow line running diagonally across the Tijuana River bed and a south-facing agent stationed here 365 days a year.

“He is the Green Wall,” Harris said, pointing toward the agent.

The nearby river channel is a mud-streaked junkyard. Scattered litter, used tires, and an abandoned loveseat dot the riverbed. Water rages through the channel during heavy rains, carrying sewage from Mexico and anything else swept up in the runoff. But today is dry – only a small stream runs through the channel.

Harris said he’s seen car parts, refrigerators, baby dolls and even dead bodies tumble through the ravine.

Creating awareness for the sewage problem has been Harris’ top priority over the past year. He courts lawmakers, speaks to media outlets and seeks partners across the political spectrum.

“It’s a big tent and everybody’s welcome if they want to help. If someone walked up to me and said, ‘I hate [Border Patrol], but I want to help fix the problem,’ I’d say, ‘God bless you, friend. Welcome to the tent,” Harris said.

More than 80 agents since June have reported rashes, chemical burns and other health problems. One agent reported methane burns on his lungs after breathing vapor from the water. It’s so toxic it reportedly dissolved the material on a pair of boots, which Harris carries in the back of his SUV for proof.

A true water fix would require a binational solution. But neither the United States nor the Mexican government has been quick to address the problem, which officials attribute in large part to an inadequate sewage system in Tijuana that hasn’t kept pace with the city’s rapid development.

Last February alone, by one estimate, 143 million gallons of sewage spilled across the border. And the sewage still flows. Imperial Beach and other cities in the county intend to sue the federal government.

“We think things have gone downhill really quickly and the consensus is there’s been no action by either government,” said Serge Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach. “The reality is that the water is indescribably awful to be immersed in and just to be around.”

Near the river bed, Harris got out of his SUV and chatted with the agent on duty. Suddenly, the agent raised his binoculars. Across the channel, two men crossed the line that separates United States from Mexico and walked down the embankment. They waded through the water, one of them losing a shoe in the process, and headed straight for Harris and the agent on duty.

“This isn’t good,” Harris said. Usually anyone who walks right up to an agent is either mentally ill or wants to fight, Harris said, often to create a diversion so other migrants can cross behind them.

The on-duty agent barked commands, ordering them stop walking and return to Mexico. “Regresen!” “Ahorita!” Go back right now, he shouted.

The men – one in his 50s, the other 19 – said they came from El Salvador. They can’t go back, they said, and pleaded to be arrested.

In recent weeks, so many asylum seekers have appeared at the U.S. ports of entry that federal officials can’t process all of them. Many wait in a long line until Customs and Border Protection officials can interview them to see if they have a legal case for asylum.

Agents decided these two men, too, were seeking asylum and turned them away. They just wanted to jump the line and thought they’d be processed faster if they were arrested, Harris and the agent said.

As the men stomped back across the river channel, the older man dropped to his knees and splashed through the water to find his lost shoe. They didn’t seem to be aware of the risks the water poses. Neither, apparently, was the group of men who sat inside a nearby storm drain, showering in a stream of running water that fell from above.

A man stands inside a storm water runoff channel that goes under the U.S.-Mexico border fence between Tijuana and San Diego on November 14, 2017, in San Diego, California.Photograph was taken on the U.S. side of the border and several miles west of the San Ysidro border crossing. / Photo by David Maung

But the risks aren’t lost on agents who chase people into the river channels.

Later that morning, a team of Border Patrol agents emerged from the muddy weeds near the channel, leading nine men they caught attempting to cross illegally.

In 2017, arrests at the border hit a 45-year low, which officials and experts attributed to enforcement policies and Trump’s hardline rhetoric. But Border Patrol agents say they’ve recently seen an uptick in the immigrants coming from Central America.

Environmental hazards aren’t the only risks agents face. Driving along the border fence, Harris pointed to a spot where in 2006 he took a rock to the face.

Rockings, as agents call it, are common along the border. Last year, San Diego’s Border Patrol sector recorded 84 assaults on officers – a large share of them from rocks, a San Diego Border Patrol spokesperson said.

Harris suffered a brain injury when the rock struck him. He lost some vision and hearing. He forgot the names of people and things. He once set off in the car and forgot where he was driving. He endured panic attacks and headaches so painful they made him vomit.

“I felt like I had a railroad spike sticking through my head,” Harris said. But the worst part of the injury, he said, was the depression.

“It was just pure blackness. It surrounded me and wouldn’t go away,” he said.

The injuries and trauma take a toll on agents, leading to alcoholism, post-traumatic stress and high rates of suicide. After his first wife died suddenly, Harris drank a liter of vodka a night and felt like an absent father, even when he was home with his family.

Harris stopped drinking in 2010 and today counsels other agents on substance abuse and mental health issues.

“My wife thinks I’m a good person. But she has no idea how hard I have to work to be a good person.” Harris said.

Agents Unshackled

From the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, he built his platform on rhetoric hostile toward Mexicans and the promise of building a big, beautiful wall.

Border Patrol agents publicly praised the message and for the first time endorsed a presidential candidate. For too long, agents said, they’d felt shackled by limitations in enforcing immigration law. Border Patrol wasn’t alone. In June, ICE’s acting director warned anyone living in the country illegally to look over their shoulder.

Until last year, immigration agents prioritized undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of crimes. But an executive order Trump issued in February lifted those priorities, making every undocumented immigrant a deportation priority.

While some members of the Border Patrol unions viewed Trump’s election as vindication of their endorsement, Harris said it made him uneasy. The decision casts the border security in partisan terms and invites political blowback. But he also understands why the National Border Patrol Council did it.

“[Trump] looked us in the eye and said, ‘I’m going to consider you guys subject matter experts on what is needed to secure the border. Not some college professor, not some attorney. You guys,’” Harris said. “Nobody at that high a level had ever done that with us before. It was tremendous.”

Harris also believes Border Patrol agents had been too limited in their ability to enforce immigration law under Obama. At times, they’d been forced to release immigrants they knew were undocumented, he said.

“You can’t expect us to not enforce the laws that have been duly passed by Congress, signed into law by the president, and vetted by the Supreme Court. Asking us not to enforce those laws is a slippery slope to the rule of man,” Harris said.

Mitra Ebadolahi, an attorney for ACLU’s Border Litigation Project, believes Border Patrol needs more checks and balances on its powers – a growing concern since Trump issued executive orders calling for the government to hire an additional 5,000 Border Patrol agents.

“An agency that runs amok is itself a threat to liberty and accountability. You have a faction of people who want to increase the agency’s size and power, while deprioritizing oversight and accountability, all of which is deeply concerning,” said Ebadolahi.

In December 2014, the ACLU requested complaints about U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s abuse and mistreatment of minors. The agency initially ignored the Freedom of Information Act request – itself a violation of federal law, which Ebadolahi said is typical of the agency. The government only released responsive records after a federal judge in Arizona ordered it to.

One of the complaints came from Jahveel Ocampo, who was a teenager when she was stopped and detained while she and her boyfriend drove east from Encinitas to the mountains. Ocampo said Border Patrol agents slapped her on the buttocks, interrogated her, threatened to rape her and pressured her to sign a voluntarily order of departure, or deportation order. She eventually got a visa extension to live legally in the United States.

Ocampo’s allegations mirrored other complaints made by minors. The ACLU obtained thousands of pages of documents from the case files of 408 complaints lodged from 2009 to mid-2015, which came from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The complaints include allegations of sexual assault, harassment and abuse.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told ABC News the agency investigated Ocampo’s claims and found no evidence agents had threatened or abused her. An analysis of documents related to other complaints showed the agency rarely interviewed complainants or agents accused of abuse, and there was no evidence any agent had been fired or reprimanded as a result of the complaints.

But Ebadolahi said the consistency of complaints raised by children who have limited language skills and no contact with one another makes it impossible for a reasonable person to dismiss the allegations.

“To respond to complaints from children by substantively dismissing the allegations reflects the agency’s deep sense of entitlement and belief that they’re truly above the law,” she said.

Border Patrol, like any agency, has its bad actors, Harris said, but they’re an exception to the rule. The agency has multiple layers of oversight and is subject to intense scrutiny from internal affairs, he said. As for agents’ behavior, some are simply aggressive and unpleasant, which helps them establish order in chaotic situations they encounter. But that’s different from corruption or brutality, he argued.

He said agents take it as a “punch to the gut” when a colleague goes rogue, like when Noe Lopez, a 10-year Border Patrol veteran, was caught trying to smuggle meth and cocaine across the border.

“We would have rather seen him go out and rob a bank. That still would be wrong, and we still would have said he needs to go to jail, but we wouldn’t have hated him for it. What he did was a slap in everybody’s face. He betrayed our trust and abused his position,” Harris said.

An Unlikely Reconciliation

Border Patrol agent Chris Harris stands next to signs warning of sewage runoff that crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego. / Photo by David Maung

When Harris first saw Norma, she was on a jog through Border Field State Park, near the spot where the border fence drops into the Pacific Ocean.

It was 2011, and the agency had just built the secondary border fence, which today runs 13 miles inland from the ocean. Harris was patrolling the park that day and said more than one person complained to him about the new additions.

“People were pissed. It wasn’t like I, personally, had put the fence up,” he said.

When Harris first saw Norma approach, he thought she was coming to tell him off, too. She wasn’t. As they talked, the conversation went from the border fence to food, to relationships they were both ending. Soon, they planned a date.

It’s an unlikely love story. Harris is a registered Republican who spent his career catching criminals and those illegally trying to cross the border. Norma, who identifies as Democrat, became a naturalized citizen in 2013, 45 years after her parents came from Guadalajara to the United States without papers.

Today, the two live on a quiet street beside a golf course in northwest San Diego.

Despite her political leanings, Norma cast her first vote as a citizen for Donald Trump. Friends and family members made her feel as though she had to cast her vote for Hillary Clinton.

“I’m not a sheep,” Norma said in her living room. “I read. I pay attention.”

Norma’s political choices have made for awkward conversations with friends and family members. But their families support the marriage.

Norma sees no distinction between the man she knows privately and the one who detains those who jump the border fence. She tells the story of how, early in the relationship, Harris once tried to end a phone call because he had to make an arrest. By mistake, he hadn’t hung up the phone, and Norma could hear him talking to the people he was arresting.

“He was just so professional, very compassionate. He talked to them just like he was talking to anybody else. It’s the things you do when you think nobody is watching that really matter,” she said.

The couple is happily married and given to old-fashioned displays of affection. But their family wouldn’t have been possible if someone in his job years ago had kept her family out of the country.

Harris sees an important distinction, however: Back when Norma’s parents crossed, the border was more fluid. But 9/11 changed everything. Virtually overnight, the conversation shifted from immigration reform to border security.

“The paradigm shifted after 9/11,” Harris said. “Anyone who illegally crosses into the country under the new paradigm is aware of the gamble they’re taking. And there are consequences to everything.”

Not that Harris lacks compassion for families crossing into the United States to find work or safety. He believes the country needs comprehensive immigration reform and a system that lets in law-abiding immigrants more efficiently.

Harris doesn’t know how that can happen, but believes it begins with conversations that break through the kind of polarization that results in social media wars, screaming matches or opposing sides choking each other with American flags.

Border Patrol must make itself available to answer questions and counter misinformation, he said, but immigrant advocates and others on the left must also recognize the need to secure the country’s borders and the agency’s mandate to enforce laws passed by Congress.

“If you’re going to be part of a group that doesn’t want to talk to the other side, then shame on you. Because we can alleviate a lot of misunderstandings if we only break free from our echo chambers and become willing to talk to those who don’t see the world in the same way we do,” he said.

Superintendent Cindy Marten delivers her State of the School District address. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

California’s high school graduation rate rose steadily between 2011 and 2016, but a new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General says those numbers aren’t reliable.

The California Department of Education lacks sufficient controls to ensure graduation rates are accurate and complete, according to the report.

It also said the state does not calculate graduation rates in accordance with federal requirements.

Much of the report focuses on the way in which the state’s education department calculates “adjusted cohort graduation rates,” or ACGRs, a uniform way of measuring groups of students who enter high school at the same time and graduate within four years.

“We found that CDE’s system of internal control did not provide reasonable assurance that reported graduation rates were accurate and complete during our audit period. In addition, CDE did not calculate its ACGR in accordance with Federal requirements,” reads the report.

The findings raise questions about the accuracy of statewide graduation rates. Had CDE properly calculated graduation rates in 2013-2014, for example, the graduation rate would have dropped from 81 to 79 percent.

The audit’s findings also reflect similar issues Voice of San Diego has detailed with the San Diego Unified School District’s graduation rate for the class of 2016.

That year, the district reached a graduation rate of 91 percent – an all-time high.

But 35 percent of San Diego Unified’s class of 2016 transferred out of district-run high schools before they completed their senior years – a higher rate of departure than any other large, urban school district in the state.

A large number of those students – namely, those least likely to graduate due to low GPAs – left San Diego Unified en route to charter schools, sometimes at the urging of school staff. Students who leave district schools for charter schools are excluded from the district’s overall graduation rate.

The charter schools to which most students transferred are considered alternative schools, where students can graduate with diplomas that require them to earn fewer credits.

Along the way, San Diego Unified officials have maintained they followed “strictly administered guidelines set by the California Department of Education.” That’s true.

However, some of those guidelines may contradict federal guidelines.

The audit did not specifically mention students who were removed from a district’s graduating class because they transferred to alternative charter schools. However, the audit found that the state does not strictly monitor the graduation rates that districts report.

The Office of Inspector General recommended the state review its graduation rates from previous years and correct them – or at least note the graduation rates were not accurate.

Those recommendations are addressed to the U.S. Department of Education, which would decide whether to take any action if California ignored the auditors’ recommendations, said Catherine Grant, public affairs liaison for the U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General.

Auditors found problems at all three entities they reviewed, including Los Angeles Unified, Los Angeles County Office of Education and the state’s largest directly-funded charter school, Baldwin Park. Each is considered a distinct type of local education agency, or LEA, and is responsible for reporting its graduation numbers to the state.

The gist of the audit indicates the California Department of Education does not do enough to oversee the process school districts use to calculate and report graduation rates to the state, or to ensure the data’s accuracy. And because it doesn’t adequately monitor the accuracy of data school districts report, CDE has overlooked errors in the data.

“Specifically, CDE did not detect that Los Angeles Unified, Los Angeles County, and Baldwin Park erroneously reported students as graduates who did not complete graduation requirements, and Los Angeles Unified included students as graduates who did not complete graduation requirements before the cohort cutoff date,” the report states.

Elsewhere, auditors found CDE didn’t calculate graduation rates in accordance with federal requirements. For example, in 2013-2014 the state improperly removed from its graduation cohort 10,543 students who transferred to adult education programs or community colleges, as well as those who didn’t complete graduation requirements. If corrected, the 2014 graduation rate would drop by two percentage points.

In response, CDE agreed with some, but not all, of the audit’s findings and recommendations.

The department acknowledged that it does not monitor the processes school districts use to report graduation rates, but said this is less of an oversight or deficiency as it is a feature of local control. In other words, local school boards are responsible for making sure its students meet graduation requirements and superintendents are responsible for making sure data is accurate, CDE said.

All three entities auditors reviewed – Los Angeles Unified, Los Angeles County Office of Education and Baldwin Park – are the largest entities of their kind in the state. While auditors didn’t mention any other school districts, they may have also reported inaccurate data, including San Diego Unified.

Ron Rode, the San Diego Unified’s director of research and evaluation, said the district will monitor the situation and update its procedures should the state change its guidance to school districts. Rode emailed the following statement:

“The report appears to highlight a dispute between the state and federal agencies and does not mention San Diego Unified. Should the state alter its guidance to LEAs, we will obviously update our own procedures to ensure compliance. In the meantime, we continue to have a high degree of confidence in local graduation rates, as each graduation certificate is personally approved by two individuals, including principals who would be subject to professional misconduct charges were they to allow unqualified students to graduate.”

John Lee Evans speaking at the 2014 State of The District. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Last year was a brutal one for budget cuts at San Diego Unified.

The district had to carve $124 million from its budget. For next year, district leaders have said they need to shave $47 million more, though that amount is now expected to drop. District leaders could put on the chopping block a variety of services and programs, including cuts to preschool, counseling, music and art programs and custodial services.

The district says it needs the state’s help to stave off those cuts.

Just to maintain current services, the district says it needs an additional $59 million from the state. To reach what the district considers full and adequate funding, it would need an additional $350 million.

To demonstrate how much help it needs from the state, the district has created a graphic of a thermometer. (Still unclear is why they used a thermometer, or when thermometers started measuring money).

A graphic created by San Diego Unified to demonstrate what it needs from the state to maintain current service levels.

Instead of helping us understand the budget, however, the graphic only led to more questions.

What’s up with the scale of the thermometer, and why does it look like $1.3 billion is a tiny fraction of $350 million?

And why are we talking about New York? More specifically, what does “1/2 New York” even mean? It doesn’t even make a complete point IT JUST SAYS “½ NEW YORK.”

The man behind the graphic, it turns out, is school board trustee John Lee Evans.

Evans said he requested the chart to illustrate how much of a funding increase the district needs to maintain the same programs with no across-the-board salary increases. The amount: $59 million.

The graphic made an appearance in December when the district presented its first interim financial report. It reappeared at a school board meeting this month, when trustees draped two big posters of it over the school board dais.

“I tried to really just simplify how things are,” Evans said at the school board meeting.

But it’s not just a simplification. It’s a distortion. Here’s how the thermometer looks now, compared to how it would look if it was drawn accurately to scale.

San Diego Unified 2018 school funding graph (left) and the same graph drawn to scale (right). / Graphics by San Diego Unified School District and Ashley Lewis for Voice of San Diego

Holy guacamole! That’s quite the difference!

Seriously, though, $350 million is a lot of money and would help the district provide crucial services to kids. But drawn to scale, the graphic shows the funds the district needs from the state are relatively small compared to its overall budget.

It’s an exaggeration to make it look like the $350 million the district needs dwarfs the $1.3 billion it already has. The $59 million-need looks especially minor given the district’s full budget picture.

Evans, however, said the scale of the drawing was done out of concern for… paper.

“I drew out a rough sketch and it would take too much paper to show the $1.3 billion to scale and it would make the $59 million we need [look] minuscule, so I just put the $1.3 billion as the baseline and $59 million shown as the amount needed to increase for status quo and the total $350 million that we calculated a couple of years ago as the amount needed to fully fund our schools. So, yes, the chart is not to scale,” Evans said.

So that one’s settled. But how about the other questions?

Evans said the cryptic reference to “½ New York” refers to research that shows per pupil spending in California amounts to half of per pupil spending in New York, once adjusted for state economic differences.

Fair enough! If only that explanation had been included on the chart that’s meant to explain the district’s budget needs.

But Evans said the board is trying to make it easier for the public to understand the complicated machinations of a school district’s budget.

“We are trying to make the budget information as clear as possible. That way people can identify which spending they agree with and which they disagree with, before, during and after the budget process,” he said.

Students take part in a science class at Vista High School. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

For subsisting on taxpayer dollars, public schools are surprisingly difficult to get into. That’s true for the average citizen, parent and education reporter.

Kristina Rizga, formerly of Mother Jones magazine, once remarked that it’s easier for reporters to embed with an Army unit than to go behind the scenes in a public school. While I’ve never embedded with a military unit, after four-and-half years covering education in San Diego I can certainly attest that getting access to schools and information is no easy feat.

There are a lot reasons for this — some of them defensible. For example, school districts are bound by law to protect the confidential information of both students and staff members. Giving reporters or other members of the public unfettered access could jeopardize their right to privacy — a concern that’s become especially acute for schools that serve large numbers of undocumented families.

Teachers, perhaps wary of how they might be portrayed by the press, tend to close their doors to education reporters. Principals — like those surveyed by San Diego Unified this year — might fear they’ll be demoted or disciplined if they air the district’s dirty laundry in public.

Defensible or not, these things make it harder for the public to understand what actually happens in classrooms, where the money is spent, or why students are falling through the cracks. And if education reporters aren’t let into schools, the public can’t appreciate the accomplishments or understand the challenges that schools face.

It’s not just journalists who struggle for access.

For years, principals at local schools have issued stay-away orders to parents they deem disruptive. Those who get them are banned from campus for 14 days, and principals have discretion over what constitutes disruptive behavior. Some parents say principals can abuse this practice and ban parents from campus for simply asking too many questions.

This is problematic given the fact that public schools are, well, public. Parents and reporters have a right to that information — even if a school district doesn’t act like that’s the case.

Last month, we took a look at how San Diego Unified established itself as the public agency most hostile to transparency.

We listed plenty of examples. The district takes, on average, 80 days to complete requested records (media outlets waited 110 days, on average). It illegally withheld emails we sought and was forced to pay more than $52,000 for fees that our attorney accrued while fighting for the documents. And parents across the district have expressed frustration with their inability to get answers to basic budget questions.

But while San Diego Unified has been singled out for its hostility — last year it won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Wall Award, which recognizes a public agency that displays an outstanding lack of transparency — this type of behavior is not uncommon for school districts.

“Education reporters all over face similar issues,” said Alexander Russo, a media watchdog who writes about hits and misses in education reporting at The Grade.

Russo said lack of access has long been a favorite complaint of education reporters, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

“I tend to feel that too much emphasis is placed on easy access to schools, because access is almost always conditional,” Russo said. Besides, he added, “I’m not convinced that sitting in the back of the classroom is as valuable as a lot of education reporters think it might be.”

Access journalism is an easy trap for reporters to fall into. It refers to a practice — often implicit — of gaining entry in exchange for favorable coverage. In the process, reporters sacrifice their independence and shy away from spotlighting problems. It’s a concern for all reporters, but especially acute when access to people and information is tightly controlled.

But, as Russo points out, reporters don’t have to actually get into schools to do their jobs.

“If you can’t get into the school, that doesn’t mean your job is done and you can’t do anything. It just means you need to think creatively about finding information: Stand on the sidewalk, go to the parking lot, talk to people coming out of the building. As a reporter, it’s your job to find a way,” Russo said.

Russo’s right. There’s always another way to learn about a school — whether it means making contact with people who work there, meeting parents who send their kids there, or filing a Public Records Act Request for specific information and waiting weeks (or months) for the district to respond.

But let’s say none of those options appeal to you. Maybe you’re a parent and you just want an unfiltered view of the school to which you’ve entrusted your child.

For me, there’s really only one path to full access, and it’s an approach that works for parents as well as reporters: Building a relationship with the principal.

Each school is a little world unto itself, and the principal is its ruler. They’re still accountable to the superintendent, but for the most part principals have a great deal of autonomy over who comes in its doors.

This cuts both ways, of course. Get on the wrong side of a principal and you might earn yourself a stay-away order. But I’ve found that earning a principal’s trust is the surest path to getting an up-close view of a school or hearing its real story — the good, bad and the ugly.

In Other News

San Diego Unified is moving forward on a plan to weigh changes to school board elections

This week San Diego Unified school board members approved a list of 24 people — made up of students, parents and union representatives — to advise the school board and make recommendations on election reforms.

Between now and May, the committee will consider a number of changes to the school board election process, including whether to add more members to the five-person school board, set a two-term limit, replace at-large elections with district-only elections, or allow 16-year-olds and undocumented residents to vote in school board elections.

Catch up on the conversation by checking out this previous Learning Curve newsletter. Andrew Simmerman, a communications professional and educational consultant, also wrote an op-ed Thursday arguing in favor of some of those reforms.

Short on cash, the district cut technology support staff and sold off buses

Thanks to a pair of school bond measures in San Diego Unified, schools across the district have received technology upgrades, including smart boards in classrooms and new devices for students. But there’s a problem: IT staffing cuts mean the district has fewer people who can service those devices when problems arise.

“None of these broken computers fix themselves,” said Nat Krieger, one of five technicians supporting IT needs at nearly 200 schools. “There’s no magic here. It takes human beings to fix them.”

Meanwhile, the school board sold off 11 of its school buses for $825,000.

The sales come as no surprise. The district has slashed busing by roughly half since 2010 and the buses are underused. But the move also underscores the fact the school board has deprioritized busing in the past 10 years, which has implications for attendance and the demographic makeup of schools.

Ed Reads of the Week

Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help (New York Times)

Online courses, which allow students to complete coursework in a computer lab or at home, have been a boon to school districts across the country. Some online classes are “blended,” meaning students spend some of their class time with teachers. In others, students complete all work on their own.

But a mounting body of evidence suggests that online courses hurt students who are least proficient and most in need of skilled classroom teachers. That concern is even more acute with online credit recovery courses, which allow students to skip over sections and complete courses in a fraction of the time it takes to complete a semester-long course with a teacher.

And there’s another concern the NYT story doesn’t consider: Online courses can be shockingly easy to cheat. Last year, students at East Village High school even showed me how they do it.

Dozens of California districts with worst test scores excluded from extra state help (CALmatters)

The state’s new dashboard system rates districts in several categories that impact student learning. It offers extra help to school districts struggling academically, but only if low scores are coupled with high suspension or low graduation rates.

Experts say part of the problem is that suspension and graduation rates are susceptible to manipulation by districts that want to avoid scrutiny. And with limited resources, some of the students most in need of extra support won’t get them under the new system.

No oversight for homeschooling in California (KPCC)

Earlier this month, a horrifying story came out of Riverside County, where parents are accused of abusing their 13 children by starving and chaining them to a bed. In the wake of the story, some questioned how such depravity could go undetected.

It turns out the children were homeschooled, which is treated like any other private school. In California, homeschooling is loosely regulated — if at all.

Alarmed and Ashamed: 3 School Shootings in 25 Hours — and All We Can Say Is the Active Shooter Training Helped (The 74)

“Three schools, two days, 19 casualties, two dead. And yet cable news doesn’t even break into its regularly scheduled beltway blather. We’re barely moved to tweet.”

Sheriff Bill Gore / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies this summer pulled over an undocumented married couple and contacted Border Patrol, who took them into custody.

Now, the family has filed a claim with San Diego County, arguing the June traffic stop violated their constitutional and civil rights. They’re seeking $2 million in damages for separating family members and causing undue hardship. The claim is a precursor to a lawsuit. The county has 45 days to evaluate it and respond.

Sheriff’s Department policy prohibits deputies from stopping, detaining or questioning people to enforce immigration law. The department acknowledges deputies stopped the vehicle and contacted Border Patrol, but maintains they did not violate department policy because Border Patrol independently made the decision to dispatch agents to the scene.

If accurate, it would mean federal agents could monitor information requests from local officers, and spring into action whenever there could be an immigration violation.

And if local law enforcement agencies can freely share information with ICE and Border Patrol, and those federal agencies can dispatch agents without a request from local law enforcement agencies, it reveals a loophole in the in the state’s attempt to keep local law enforcement from enforcing immigration law.

The claim filed by the family comes two months after Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the California Values Act, or so-called “Sanctuary State” law, which limits the extent to which local law enforcement can cooperate with federal agencies for immigration enforcement purposes. Advocates for the bill called it the strongest legislation in the country when it comes to immigrant protections.

But the case of Carlos Nieblas-Ortiz and his wife Martha Valenzuela-Luna, the undocumented couple, demonstrates the limits of the state’s prohibition. Undocumented immigrants in the state remain vulnerable to getting swept up in enforcement efforts, even if they’re not suspected of crimes.

The state law also allows local law enforcement to work with feds on task forces, so long as the express purpose of the task force is not to enforce immigration law.

Nieblas-Ortiz and Valenzuela-Luna were driving with their teenage daughter near Mission Bay, when two San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies pulled them over. The deputies were on patrol as part of Operation Stonegarden – a federally-funded task force aimed at stopping the flow of drugs over the border and coastline.

Deputies stopped the car for what they said was a cracked windshield. They searched the car, but found no drugs. Instead of issuing the family a citation and allowing them to leave, however, deputies called Border Patrol and held them until agents arrived on scene.

Agents detained Ortiz and Luna and transferred them to ICE custody. They were sent to separate detention facilities where they remained for more than a month. They’ve since been released.

In the claim Ortiz filed last month, he alleges the Sheriff’s Department violated family members’ constitutional and civil rights by stopping them on the pretext of a cracked windshield then calling Border Patrol to check their immigration status. Deputies unlawfully detained the family by holding them for 45 minutes until Border Patrol arrived, he argues.

The County has 45 days to respond to the law suit by deciding whether to settle, formally deny it, or decline to formally deny it and allow the family to take further legal action.

A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Department said it cannot comment on pending claims.

When we first reported Ortiz and Luna’s story in August, the Sheriff’s department acknowledged its deputies had contacted Border Patrol, but said they did so to ask about how frequently Ortiz and Luna crossed the border, an indicator of possible drug trafficking, a department spokesman said at the time.

The spokesperson said the Border Patrol agents, on their own accord, then came to the scene to investigate Ortiz’ and Luna’s connection to a criminal investigation.

That’s been the last mention of any criminal investigation. A judge didn’t mention it at Ortiz’ bond hearing, and neither the Sheriff’s Department nor Border Patrol has provided evidence Ortiz or Luna were involved in one.

Gore has since acknowledged the couple was not, in fact, smuggling narcotics.

“It turns out they weren’t smuggling drugs. That was an exceptional case,” he said.

But earlier this month, Gore tried to clarify how, exactly, the Border Patrol agents ended up at the scene in the first place. He said his deputies contacted Border Patrol to obtain information from a database only they had access to, at which point Border Patrol agents “self-deployed.”

In an attempt to verify the department’s version of events, VOSD in July filed a Public Records Act request for the audio recording of the radio traffic on the day of the incident.

The department denied the request on grounds that it relates to a law enforcement investigation, even though the department made no arrests and issued no citations.

If local law enforcement agencies can freely share information with ICE and Border Patrol, and those federal agencies can dispatch agents without a request from local law enforcement agencies, it highlights a loophole in the California Values Act that leaves undocumented immigrants vulnerable to deportation.

It also illustrates a broader issue facing state and local attempts to shield residents from federal immigration authorities.

Jennie Pasquarella, senior staff attorney and director of immigrants’ rights at ACLU of California, said this type of situation has been happening for years.

“You have these task forces formed for criminal investigation purposes, but then you have federal agents standing off to the side asking about immigration status,” she said. “There’s an entrenched culture of creating both formal task forces and informal partnerships. It will take some time to change with the implementation of (the California Values Act).”

Pasquarella said local law enforcement and federal agencies have long shared information in ways that put undocumented immigrants at risk.

She calls lack of clarity on how local law enforcement and federal agencies can share information one of the weak points in the California Values Act.

“It’s a huge and growing concern,” Pasquarella said.

By October, local law enforcement will have to report to the state attorney general all the task forces they participate in with federal law enforcement. They must also report the ways in which they share databases with federal law enforcement. The attorney general’s office will release draft guidelines on database sharing regulations the same month.

Until the guidelines come out, Gore said federal agents will continue to use local law enforcement databases to find and identify people who have interacted with local police.

King-Chavez High School / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

With four months left in the school year, five teachers at King-Chavez Community High School have resigned and two have been terminated. King-Chavez has a total teaching staff of 31 teachers, meaning the school now must replace more than 20 percent of its teaching staff midyear.

Teacher turnover is an ongoing concern at the charter school, which caters almost exclusively to low-income and Latino students.

It’s such an issue that King-Chavez CEO Tim Wolf took the loss of nearly a quarter of his staff in one year as good news. After all, 14 teachers left midyear last school year.

Five former teachers who resigned or were terminated from King-Chavez in the past two years described a hostile work environment and micromanagement from school administrators. The teachers, who asked we withhold their names so as to not jeopardize future job prospects, said administrators verbally abused teachers, in private and in front of students.

Wojciech Giezek taught PE at King-Chavez until last school year, when he said he was let go for a series of petty infractions, including a time when an administrator walked past his class and saw a student eating Cheetos.

“I think they try to instill fear in teachers where if they do something wrong, even something small, they’ll be fired. The kids don’t expect teachers to stay around for very long. When there’d be a (substitute teacher), they’d say the teacher had probably been fired,” said Giezek.

Wolf dismisses that his steady stream of departures has anything to do with the school’s leadership. He thinks it’s just a reflection of how hard it is to find solid high school teachers.

“It’s not easy to teach inner-city kids. They need a lot of time and attention and a lot of teachers either don’t understand that or aren’t willing to put in the work,” Wolf said. “We don’t serve traditional kids, and traditional teachers don’t always match well.”

Of the high school’s 524 students, 99 percent are Latino, making it one of the most ethnically homogenous schools in San Diego. Nearly all – 99 percent – qualify for free or reduced price lunch, a rough gauge of a school’s poverty level.

The high school is part of King-Chavez Neighborhood of Schools, a network of six charter schools and two preschools that serve 1,975 students, not counting the preschools. Most come from Barrio Logan, Logan Heights and Southeastern San Diego neighborhoods.

In January, the San Diego Unified school board renewed the high school’s charter, allowing it to operate for an additional five years.

By one standard, the school is doing well despite steadily churning through teachers. In 2016, the most recent data available, more than 90 percent of its senior class graduated. The school also boasts a robust internship program.

But there’s reason to be skeptical that students are learning as much as the school’s graduation rate suggests. State test scores are persistently low. In 2017, just 5.51 percent of students met or exceeded state standards in math – lower than traditional high schools in San Diego Unified. Just over 28 percent of students met or exceeded standards in English, barely edging out scores at Lincoln High, the district’s lowest-performing school.

Wolf said turnover has generally been more of a concern at its high school, compared to its schools that serve elementary and middle school students. But other schools have had their own staffing concerns. In 2008, seven employees at the King/Chavez Arts Academy were suddenly fired, representing a wholesale turnover.

Nationally, charter schools have a slightly higher teacher turnover rate compared to traditional schools – though research doesn’t explain the reason behind the trends. And while it’s widely accepted that high teacher turnover is disruptive to schools and harmful to morale, research is mixed on its academic impact. One study suggests replacing ineffective teachers with effective educators could have a positive impact on academics.

Regardless, turnover is common enough at King-Chavez Community High School that administrators plan for it by keeping a pool of trained substitute teachers who can slide into place when teachers resign or are fired.

“Teaching at King-Chavez takes a different kind of commitment, and not everybody has it. I don’t judge them. But don’t blame us if you don’t have the commitment,” said Wolf.

A school bus drives through Barrio Logan. / Photo by Sam Hodgson

San Diego Unified will no longer send debt collectors after parents who are late to pay their children’s school bus fees.

Parents who don’t qualify for free busing will still have to pay $500 a year to get their kids to school on the bus, but a decision the San Diego Unified school board made this week means district staff will collect fees instead of an outside debt collection agency, with which the district has contracted since 2011.

The decision comes two weeks after Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher introduced the Primary Education Fair Debt Collection Act, which would prohibit public schools from using debt collectors to collect overdue bus fees — or school-related fees of any kind.

In a January press release, Gonzalez Fletcher cited a recent Voice of San Diego story revealing that in the 2014-2015 school year alone, the district referred 380 parents to a collections agency for debts that ranged from $10 to $500.

Collections agents can send parents letters, call them on the phone, or threaten legal action if bus fees go unpaid. Having accounts sent to collections can negatively impact parents’ credit scores and make it harder to secure loans or housing.

California is one of 12 states that allows — but doesn’t require — school districts to charge parents school bus fees. San Diego Unified is unique, however, in contracting with a collections agency to recoup fees.

Trustee John Lee Evans said at this week’s board meeting that the decision to hire a debt collection agency goes back to the budget crisis of 2011, when the district scrambled to figure out how to provide transportation with its limited budget.

“We reluctantly (made the decision) because of the budget crisis that we faced at that time,” Evans said.

But he also blamed the state for forcing the district’s hand by not providing adequate funding.

“I would put a challenge to the state legislature to not put us in this position in the first place, where we have to find nickels and dimes under every corner to fund our schools, to transport our students and provide the materials we need,” Evans said.

Three current trustees — Evans, Richard Barrera and Kevin Beiser — were on the school board when the district first made the decision to contract with the debt collection agency. The board renewed the contract with Transworld Systems Inc., a Delaware-based collections agency, three separate times, including as recently as October.

This week’s decision represents a change in tone by school board members.

When we first reported the story in November, Beiser defended the district’s actions by pointing out that students with disabilities and those who qualify for free lunch ride the bus for free. He characterized the story as an attack and wrote on Facebook it was part of VOSD’s “war on public education.”

Even as Beiser expressed support this week for the decision to stop using debt collectors to recoup fees, he noted that 75 percent of current riders use the bus for free, meaning only a small share — 25 percent of riders — are subject to fees and debt collection agents.

Students who have disabilities and those who qualify for free lunch don’t have to pay bus fees — but that doesn’t mean any student who qualifies for free lunch automatically gets a free ride to school. It means they qualify for free transportation where busing is available. And for an increasing number of students, no buses are available at all.

In the past seven years, the district has slashed its busing program by nearly half. In 2010-2011, the district ran 2,300 bus routes and transported 17,500 students daily. This year, it’s down to 1,439 routes moving 9,330 students a day.

While citizen watchdog Sally Smith lauded the school board’s decision this week, she also pointed out that $500 can be a hefty sum for families even if they don’t qualify for free lunch.

“While you applaud yourselves for providing free transportation for those that qualify for free and reduced lunch, we all know that that threshold is very low, and in San Diego there are still very poor families that do not meet that threshold,” Smith said.

So far, most of the conversation has focused on the costs of busing and the ethics of using debt collectors to recoup them. But there’s also a more pragmatic side to the conversation that isn’t being discussed: Providing transportation could actually boost enrollment.

In 2011-2012, the year after the district first instituted bus fees, 4,000 students lost access to buses. Of those 4,000 kids, 9 percent left the district altogether, according to the district’s numbers.

Jan Perry, director of America’s Finest Charter School, believed transportation was so critical to her school’s enrollment that a couple years ago, after the charter school changed locations, the school purchased a bus to get students to school. Eventually, they hired a full-time bus driver.

The investment paid off, Perry said. The bus allowed them to hang onto many of the students who would have likely transferred schools once the charter school moved to a new location. Today, the bus transports 60 to 70 kids a day. Because funding is tied to enrollment, each student a school hangs onto helps their bottom line.

Few charter schools operate buses, but many — like The O’Farrell Charter School and High Tech High — offer free bus passes to students who qualify.

“Our enrollment is really important to us, and also we didn’t want to lose the kids who we’d invested in,” Perry said. “You have to do what you have to do to keep your school surviving when you’re a charter school, especially in the early years.”

And as San Diego Unified continues to lose students year after year, district leaders may want to rethink the ongoing cuts to its transportation department.

A San Diego Parent’s Guide to Good Schools

This week, Voice of San Diego launched our first issue of A Parent’s Guide to Public Schools — a free, magazine-style guide to help families make informed decisions about their children’s education.

The Guides delivers an overview of every public school’s performance in easy-to-read charts, and tackles questions like: What a charter school is, how school choice works and which schools offer dual immersion or International Baccalaureate programs.

Pick one up at your local library or download a copy. It’s available in English and Spanish.

La Jolla High in the Hot Seat

Dozens of angry students and parents showed up to this week’s school board meeting to sound off about a controversial cartoon published in the student newspaper at La Jolla High. The illustration features caricatures of students drawn in racial stereotypes. Some students went so far as to call for the principal, Chuck Podhorsky, to be fired.

Facing pressure from the community, school board members called for an investigation into the incident and how the cartoon was published in the first place. La Jolla High’s student newspaper has a faculty advisor, but as of Thursday a district spokesperson couldn’t say whether an adult had approved the cartoon prior to publication.

While the point of the cartoon isn’t at all clear, it may have been a satirical nod to a recent H&M ad that featured a young African-American child in a sweatshirt that read, “coolest monkey in the jungle.” That ad drew fire across the internet and cost H&M business partners.

No doubt offensive to many, the cartoon raises more complicated questions about the limits of free speech — something La Jolla High has a long history of confronting.

In 2011, after the school’s principal attempted to remove “senior benches” that contained controversial political messages, the ACLU said the school was trampling on student’s freedom of expression. A year later, the ACLU and San Diego Unified agreed to a settlement that included an updated policy strengthening the free speech rights of all district students.

Elsewhere in La Jolla…

The principal of Bird Rock Elementary has taken a leave of absence after parents leveled a number of allegations at her. They alleged that she directed a teacher not to report inappropriate student-on-student touching observed by a parent volunteer, and that she promised gift cards to teachers if they wrote their names on forms evaluating her performance.

A letter sent by Area Superintendent Mitzi Merino said the principal will “be taking some time off to spend with her family,” effective immediately.

Preschoolers. / Image via Shutterstock

Two years after San Diego Unified School District kicked off its highly touted Preschool for All program, district leaders plan to close four more of the child development centers that offer preschool programs for children whose parents are working or going to school and meet income eligibility guidelines.

The child development centers slotted to close include: Kennedy in Lincoln Park, Brooklyn in Golden Hill, Bayview in Pacific Beach and Montezuma in the College Area.

The cuts follow a string of closures over the past 10 years. In 2008, the district operated 25 child development centers. By 2016, that number was down to nine. The closures planned for next year mean only five centers will remain — for now.

In a recent memo, the district cited low-enrollment and a need to reorganize its early education programs as reasons for the closures.

But child development centers are also more costly to operate. Lucia Garay, director of early education at the San Diego County Office of Education, told me last year that the state does not reimburse school districts for the entire cost of operating child development centers.

“Historically,” I wrote at the time, “child development centers have been the Cadillacs of district-run preschools. Instead of the three-hour or six-hour programs offered at most schools, child development centers have taken a more holistic approach to early childhood education and stayed open year-round, from 6:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. — ideal for parents who are working, looking for a job or going to school. Parents must demonstrate need to be eligible for a spot in a child development centers.”

Unfortunately for parents who send their kids to the centers — as well as the teachers who work there — child development centers have been dwindling even after the district launched its Preschool for All program, which officials initially described as an expansion of its preschool programs.

Unlike the preschool for all program that New York City schools offer, San Diego Unified’s version doesn’t actually mean all students are offered preschool spots. The program is extended to parents whose income exceeds the cap for subsidized preschool – meaning those who can afford it.

According to tuition costs listed on the district’s website, after a $150 annual registration fee, parents pay $530 a month for a three-hour preschool slot, $875 for a six-hour slot and $1,000 for a seat in a child development center.

It’s hard to measure the success of the district’s preschool for all program so far — or even compare current preschool enrollment to previous years. For this story, the district did not have data available for how many parents have opted to pay for preschool spots or how many have gone empty. In 2014, more than 700 spots went unfilled. In 2015, it was more than 1,000. (I’ll provide an update if and when the district sends the data).

Some preschool seats have gone unfilled in past years because they’re reserved for students whose parents meet income requirements. But if the district can’t find enough qualified parents to fill those seats — due to onerous paperwork requirements or a lack of preschool options that fit a parent’s schedule — those seats sit empty.

Let’s hear from a preschool parent…

I did a quick Q&A with Chris Mendoza, a single dad whose daughter attends the child development center at Walker Elementary. Walker offers a 12-month program. Other preschool programs only go ten months, or the length of the school year.

Walker isn’t scheduled for closure next year, but I wanted to get a sense of him how a closure could impact his family.

What does a spot at Walker’s child development center mean to your family?

It means almost everything. It allows me to work during the day. It provides an affordable program I can send my daughter to that actually gives her academics as well as time to socialize with other kids her age. It provides things that I can’t really do if I’m watching her. I know I could watch her and she’d be safe, but she wouldn’t have the academic or social experiences she gets at Walker.

How are the teachers?

They’re great. My daughter will come home and try to mimic everything that went on at day at school. She’ll ask me to check the weather, or talk about patterns. And I know it’s not her friend’s she’s copying, it’s her teachers.

Do you work or go to school?

I do both right now. For the past two years, I’ve been able to work and go to school thanks to the program at Walker. I work as a special education substitute. And I go to school at Point Loma to get my teaching credentials. So the (childhood development center) is crucial now more than ever because I’m going to start student teaching and won’t be able to be with my daughter.

How much do you pay?

It’s based on financial need. My daughter’s mom and I aren’t together, but she took care of the application. My daughter goes to school 5 days a week, 6.5 hours a day. It comes out to about $100 a month. There’s no way I could beat that at a daycare or any other preschool. I’ve seen prices and they don’t even come close.

How would it impact your family if it closed?

If it closed altogether, I’d be at a loss. I’ve grown so comfortable with the CDC. If they closed it, I’d have to figure out where she’d go during the day. Right now I can drop her off and comfortably say I know she’s in good hands. I’d have to start the process all over again of finding a place I can trust.

Would you go to a CDC in another part of town if they closed the one your daughter attends?

I’d entertain that idea, but Walker is so central and convenient for me or someone in the family to pick her up or drop her off. Or get to school if there’s an emergency. I’d be open to looking, but if this particular CDC closed, I’d be devastated.

In other news…

No Movement on Improvements to Public Records Request Process

Superintendent Cindy Marten and her administration haven’t been altogether speedy when it comes to providing records and information requested by members of the public. When we analyzed the data several months ago we found it took the district 80 days on average to provide records requested by the public. Media outlets waited 110 days on average.

Last year, after parents across the district complained about long waits for answers to basic questions, some members of the school board expressed sympathy and vowed to look into the issue. In July, trustee John Lee Evans asked Marten for a report within six months explaining how the district handles requests and outlining ways the process could be improved. That deadline came and went, with no report.

At this week’s board meeting, trustees Kevin Beiser and Mike McQuary made virtually the same request when they asked Marten again for a report on how the district handles requests for public information. No school board members mentioned the fact they had already asked for this information back in June or questioned why Marten hasn’t yet provided it.

The Neighborhood Schools Dilemma

This week, we published commentary from a parent and land-use consultant who argued that the school choice debate has missed one key element: the environment. School choice policies may have come from a good place, he argues, but parents and school buses that cart students across town add to the carbon footprint and hurt the environment. Instead, parents should stick to their neighborhood schools and keep children in schools close to home, he wrote.

His argument for neighborhood schools aligns pretty closely with the district’s. A major piece of the district’s overarching goals is keeping neighborhood students to their assigned schools. But the commentary also breezes over the racial implications of keeping kids in their assigned, neighborhood schools. That is, in a city where neighborhoods are already segregated by race and class, a successful neighborhood schooling push could actually make schools more segregated.

But more to the point, more kids in their neighborhood schools might mean the district makes even deeper cuts to its transportation program, a trend that’s been happening for the past eight years. And because fewer buses might actually mean more parents would drive their children to school individually, it’s unclear what impact this would have on the environment even if every student attended their assigned schools.

Privilege Based on Real Estate

This month, news broke that D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson had abused his position of power when he bypassed the city’s competitive lottery system to get his daughter into a highly coveted school. In the process, Wilson broke the very school lottery rules he established.

The controversy comes at a time when D.C. Public Schools is already reeling from scandals. Just last year, investigators found the former chancellor allowed other well-connected parents and government officials to bypass lottery rules. Then, in January, an investigation into D.C. Public Schools revealed a system of passing low-performing students along in an apparent attempt to boost graduation numbers.

Wilson resigned this month, shortly after his attempts to get his daughter into a coveted school came to light.

My friend Conor Williams, a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program, writes that D.C. parents were incredulous when they heard the news – and for good reason. Wilson abused the privilege of his position and broke a rule he had created to benefit his own family. He has no legitimate defense.

But, in another sense, isn’t privilege — or more specifically, real estate — the very currency that determines the quality of a student’s education in most cities across the country?

“In D.C. (and beyond), we allow — we expect — privileged families to game the school enrollment system … we simply prefer they do it by purchasing houses,” Williams writes.

And while we may see that version of privilege as the American way, it certainly doesn’t provide all students in school district with equal access to a quality education. In other words, Williams writes, the current system seems anything but fair.

“Our socioeconomic classes are calcifying through the untrammeled inheritance of social, educational, and material privileges. Nevertheless, ridiculous as it is, wealth-based access to quality public education is a central part of the U.S. meritocracy game. It’s too ubiquitous to question. It’s the air we breathe,” writes Williams.

Eileen Sofa at home with her son. Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of a sexual assault.

On the morning of Aug. 3, 2016, with summer school classes in session, a teacher’s aide at Lincoln High school walked into the bathroom and saw what looked like one boy sexually assaulting another.

The teacher’s aide — the single eyewitness to the incident — later told police he saw both boys with their pants down, the suspect “right on (the victim), touching him skin to skin.”

The victim was a 17-year student with cerebral palsy and a condition that requires a tube in his head so excess fluid can escape. He can’t speak more than a few simple words at time and needs help with most daily tasks. (VOSD is withholding the names of the students involved because they were both minors at the time of the incident.)

According to a police report obtained by Voice of San Diego, a day passed before an officer from San Diego Unified’s school police department conducted interviews and completed his report on the incident.

In an interview with the school police officer, the 15-year-old suspect, with his mother by his side, told the officer he knew the difference between right and wrong. Helping someone is right, he said. What he’d done to the other student in the bathroom was wrong.

“I went to the bathroom with (the other student) and I put my thing in him. I put my thing in his butt. I don’t know why I did it. I have never done anything like this before. I think it lasted for like two minutes,” the suspect said.

He made a similar admission to a Lincoln staff member, though he told her it was an accident.

On Aug. 5, two days after the incident, a detective from San Diego Police Department’s sex crimes unit reviewed the case. Despite the suspect’s admission, as well as statements from two witnesses, the detective recommended the case be cancelled for lack of evidence.

“Neither the victim or the suspect was able to articulate a crime in their preliminary statements. Both the victim and the suspect have a severe developmental disability… This case is being Cancelled as unfounded because no crime has been articulated at this point,” wrote Michael Weaver, detective from the San Diego Police Department.

Eileen Sofa, the mother of the victim, said neither police nor staff at Lincoln High told her that the suspect admitted to sexually assaulting her son. Instead, she said they told her that staff had walked in just before an assault occurred. She claims she didn’t hear otherwise until a year later.

By the time the details included in the police report surfaced, a teacher who had tried to bring the information to light had died from an apparent suicide.

That teacher believed the school was misdiagnosing students and placing them in special-needs settings that weren’t right for them. That included the suspect, who despite a long history of violent and sexual offenses was placed in a class with the school’s most vulnerable students.

Police declined to charge the boy with a crime and he was back at Lincoln weeks later.

School leaders did not expel him from Lincoln High. A discrepancy had emerged between the way school staff initially documented the incident and how they described it a month later, with school back in session. The encounter had been degraded from a sexual assault to something less serious.

Jamie Guevarra, the boys’ special education teacher, wrote one day after the incident she was “informed by [a] staff member that [the] suspect was ‘attempting’ to have sex with [the] victim in the boy’s bathroom.”

Sexual misconduct — defined by the district as “attempting to commit or committing a sexual assault or battery” — is one of five offenses for which school principals must recommend students be expelled.

Nearly a month later, however, the school’s vice principal documented the incident differently. She labeled the offense an “obscene act.” The school does not expel students for that.

In the end, a student at Lincoln High who told police he’d assaulted a boy with special needs was suspended for five days. The suspect soon left Lincoln and transferred to a high school in another school district in San Diego.

For the rest of that school year, the teacher who tried to blow the whistle on the suspected rape would turn to colleagues, law enforcement officers and the superintendent in an attempt to raise alarms about problems he saw at Lincoln.

He didn’t live to see the story made public.

What Set Him Off

Of all schools in San Diego Unified, none in the past decade have seen more high-profile explosions of violence than Lincoln High. Academically, no schools have struggled as visibly, causing district leaders to restructure it over and again in search of a solution.

If the district’s top leaders recognize the problems, in public they’ve offered only optimism.

At an October 2016 school board meeting, just weeks after the suspected sexual assault occurred, Superintendent Cindy Marten predicted a turnaround for Lincoln High, saying it was the one school where the public could expect great things to happen that year.

The school year did not match Marten’s prediction. An academic program that two years earlier district leaders hailed as a way to reinvigorate the school left the majority of students in the program with failing grades. In May, after almost a year with no permanent principal in place, students walked out of class to protest the school’s lack of representative leadership.

Throughout the turmoil, one teacher, Nathan Page, grew increasingly convinced school leaders were failing its special education students — misdiagnosing their disabilities and placing them in academic settings inappropriate to their needs.

By the accounts of his friends, colleagues and family, Page was deeply passionate about students, perhaps to a fault. His mother, Julie Page, said as a child her son had a prodigious memory for snakes and lizards. As an adult, he applied his intellect to Christian theology. When Mormons knocked on his door to proselytize, he’d invite them in and debate for hours, his mom said.

Sofa, the victim’s mother, recalls how one day her son left his backpack at school. Instead of setting it aside for him to pick up the next day, Page drove to Sofa’s house and delivered the backpack that day.

“That was just the kind of guy he was,” said Sofa.

In 2016, his third year at Lincoln, Page began to clash with school leaders and became increasingly vocal about how Lincoln was managed.

Liz Gakis, his colleague and union rep, said Page believed one student in particular had been placed in an environment that was too restrictive and that he was capable of a more advanced setting. When school leaders disregarded his advice, he was obstinate.

“That was the thing that set him off,” said Gakis.

One teacher at Lincoln, Cody Szohr, knows the student Page believed had been misdiagnosed. After Page left, Szohr started working closely with the student as he began taking general education classes alongside classmates without disabilities.

Szohr backs up Page’s assessment that the student was capable of succeeding in a mainstream setting.

“(The student) is one of the least of my worries in my classes. He’s much smarter than people have let on. He definitely is in the upper half of all the students I worked with, in terms of being able to understand the material,” Szohr said.

At the time he worked there, however, Page believed administrators ignored his advice.

Friends noticed he had trouble coping emotionally with stressors at Lincoln. Janitors would walk past his classroom in the afternoon and see him crying, colleagues and friends said.

In January 2017, Page went out on stress leave. When he returned to school, his problems continued.

By mid-March, Page had come to fear the student suspected of committing an assault at Lincoln had transferred to another school district and assaulted additional students there. (A spokesman for that school district confirmed the student had transferred in September, shortly after the incident at Lincoln, but said the district has no record he was involved in any assaults after he arrived).

Meanwhile, Page’s behavior at school grew increasingly erratic. At one point, he followed vice principal Myeshia Whigham — the staff member with whom he clashed most often — into the campus courtyard and yelled that she was discriminating against students and that he would be suing her.

For this and other conduct, Whigham wrote Page a letter of reprimand. It didn’t silence him.

In early April, Page sent an email to Superintendent Marten — copying Whigham and a former Lincoln staff member — in which he said Lincoln’s leaders failed to protect students after they learned about the suspected sexual assault.

The following day, he sent a mass email to nearly two dozen staff members that said: “Anybody who respects crooks that are involved in any way in covering up rapes is despicable (!).”

That same month, Page took leave from Lincoln for the second time in a year. He would never return.

In July, several months later, Page went to the San Diego police to tell the detective what he knew of the suspected sexual assault at Lincoln. He told detective Weaver he worried the student involved in the case at Lincoln had gone on to commit additional sexual assaults in a different school district.

“My only concern is that the perpetrator gets help, and that there are no more future victims. I just want to make sure you have all the information that I can help you with,” he told Weaver.

But the police report also indicates Weaver had doubts even before interviewing Page.

“Prior to the interview, I observed that Page had a strong body odor, and a rapid, sometimes frenetic speech that I know are often associated with both persons under the influence of narcotics, as well as those suffering from mental disorders such as schizophrenia,” Weaver wrote.

In the end, Weaver reached the same conclusion he had before speaking with Page.

“Based on the above statement by Page, there was no new evidence in this matter to re-open the case, and it will remain closed,” Weaver wrote.

Nathan Page’s photo from the 2016-2017 school year, his last at Lincoln High.

How Lincoln Handled the Incident

If the student did sexually assault his classmate in the bathroom at Lincoln High, it wouldn’t have been the first violent or sexual crime he committed against another student.

Discipline records show he had been reprimanded for sexual or violent offenses at least 11 different times since he was 11 years old.

In 2013, when he was a student at Gompers Preparatory Academy, he was suspended for sexual harassment after making inappropriate comments and gestures to a female intern. He was suspended again a month later for writing notes to girls that contained sexual comments.

The following year, after he transferred to Millennial Tech Middle School, he put his hand on a girl’s hip and asked for a kiss. Again he was suspended for sexual harassment. A month later, he was suspended for sexually harassing a girl he tried to hug and kiss. In 2015, he grabbed a student and pushed him into the wall and got suspended for attempting to injure the student.

Had this behavior ended in middle school, it would have been easier for Lincoln’s staff to miss. But he also exhibited violent behavior at Lincoln.

In 2016, months before he was accused of sexual assault, he was caught with a box cutter at school — an expellable offense. But school staff determined that bringing the box cutter was a manifestation of the lack of impulse control brought on by his intellectual disability and did not attempt to expel him. A month later, he was suspended for slapping a girl.

MaryLynn Gonzalez, a special education teacher’s aide at Lincoln, said that neither she nor her colleagues were made aware of the suspect’s history — even though teachers and aides supervised students in potentially compromising situations, like locker rooms and community outings.

Gonzalez said administrators advised aides to look at the educational goals written in students’ special education plans, but nothing more. Educational goals would not contain a student’s history of offenses.

“We had no idea. Believe me, had I known I would have been watching him like a hawk,” Gonzalez said.

Still, the student remained in a setting for students with moderate to severe disabilities, one of the most structured and restrictive academic environments. As compared to students with mild disabilities, whose programs are typically geared more toward academic progress, the program for those with moderate-to-severe disabilities is focused more on basic life skills that can prepare students to live independently.

It also serves some of the most vulnerable students, such as those who can’t communicate or care for themselves.

Special education attorney Matthew Storey said moderate-to-severe settings are not appropriate for students with histories of sexually assaultive behavior, especially when they’re surrounded by more vulnerable peers.

At a minimum, Storey said, a student with these traits should be placed in a day treatment program like Riley/New Dawn, which offers intensive therapy and supervision — possibly even a residential setting.

“At the very least, he should have had a (one-on-one) aide with him at all times,” he said.

Storey said cases where nonverbal students are sexually assaulted by other students with disabilities are not altogether uncommon. He estimates he sees one or two similar cases a year. Typically, however, there is little evidence on which to build a case.

“These accusations come around all the time, but if you have a nonverbal student, how do you prove them?” he said.

What makes the case at Lincoln unique, he said, is the eyewitness and a confession by the suspect.

Mysterious to Storey is the discrepancy between how school staff initially described the incident and how the vice principal labeled it a month later.

The day after the incident, special education teacher Jamie Guevarra filled out a suspected child abuse report in which she wrote that she was informed by another staff member the suspect had been “attempting to have sex” with the victim in the boys bathroom. Attempting to commit or committing a sexual assault or battery is one of five reasons for which principals must recommend expulsion.

But the following month, with school back in session, vice principal Whigham described the incident as an “obscene act,” a less serious offense for which students aren’t automatically recommended for expulsion.

Asked to explain the discrepancy, a district spokesperson said the district does not comment on pending litigation. Sofa and her son filed a claim with the school district in November, which the district rejected. They plan to soon file a lawsuit for negligence.

Regardless of why Whigham described the incident the way she did, her approach offered one distinct advantage: It saved Lincoln staff a major bureaucratic headache that may have kept the student at the school longer.

Had Whigham called the incident a sexual assault, she would have been required to recommend the student for expulsion. That would have temporarily locked the student into place — preventing him from enrolling in another district school and possibly another school district — until a determination was made on whether to expel him. (Students in this situation could also attend an alternative school that accepts students awaiting expulsion decisions, but that placement is typically temporary).

The expulsion process isn’t a quick one. Before schools can expel students with disabilities, members of a student’s special education team must determine the behavior was not caused by the disability.

Even then, expulsion isn’t certain. The decision would have to be approved by a three-member panel as well as the school board. And if students appeal the decision, the process can be further drawn out, lasting weeks or months. If either the three-member panel or the school board reject the recommendation to expel, the student could wind up back at the school where he started.

Calling the incident an “obscene act,” however, allowed the suspect to transfer schools while also sidestepping a potentially protracted expulsion process.

But it also made it less likely whatever school district he transferred to would be aware of the full context of the incident or the details included in the police report. In that case, educators wouldn’t know what type of setting was appropriate to both support him and protect other students.

“It would mean the student the district has on paper doesn’t match who the student is in reality,” Storey said.

‘A Lot of People Dropped the Ball’

The police report for the suspected sexual assault includes a statement from Lincoln’s then-acting principal who said the suspect admitted to her he had “accidentally put his thing into (the victim).”

It includes a statement from Calvin Smith, the teacher’s aide who told the officer he walked into the bathroom to see the suspect right behind the victim, pants down, “touching him skin to skin.”

It includes a confession the suspect made to the San Diego school police officer.

What the report doesn’t include is a description of the specific facts officers relayed to the victim’s mother, Eileen Sofa, or an indication that they informed her of statements the witnesses and suspect made in interviews.

There’s a simple reason for this, according to Sofa: Nobody ever told her exactly what witnesses said.

The narrative the school police officer wrote a day after the incident reads: “The (suspected victim’s) mother and father arrived to the school a short time later. I advised them of the incident and let them know we were uncertain exactly what happened and to what extent if anything did happen.”

After hearing this, Sofa did not ask that her son be tested for sexual assault, an invasive procedure in which victims are prodded, swabbed, and photographed. Sofa did not pressure police for a forensic interview, during which her son would have been interviewed by professionals trained to solicit objective information from children without coaching or leading them.

The report says that Sofa told police she didn’t see any injuries to her son and that, for the most part, he was acting normal. This rationale was cited by San Diego police detective Weaver weeks after the incident as reason why the case should be cancelled, meaning he determined there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed.

And that’s where the case stood, for more than a year. The suspect transferred to another school district and the victim remained at Lincoln High.

The following October, after reporters began asking questions about the case, San Diego police officers reached out to Sofa and asked to meet again with her. The officers told Sofa they had contacted her because questions had come up they needed answered. They began the interview by asking Sofa what she knew about the case.

“One of the staff told me (my son) went to the bathroom… And every time (my son) goes to the bathroom, for some reason (the suspect) wants to go to the bathroom. And when he (the staff member) walked in (the suspect) was standing behind (my son) with his pants down. He (the staff member) didn’t see anything, but he took it to the teacher,” Sofa told police, according to the report.

Sofa’s account does not match what the witnesses or suspect had previously told police, but the officers did not correct her understanding. They offered to have a forensic interview performed on her son, but also gave her a letter to sign if she did not want to move forward with the case or be contacted again by police.

“I will just leave it at that,” Sofa told police. “The kid is gone, he is at another school now.”

Sofa signed the letter and gave it to the officer.

“I am recommending this investigation be inactivated as the victim (guardian/conservator) is uncooperative and does not want to continue the investigation at this time,” the officer’s report reads.

Gonzalez, the teacher’s aide who worked with both students, said she and other Lincoln staff members did not realize Sofa had not been given all the facts until after NBC 7 reported on the incident in November. At the time, Sofa said she felt betrayed by the school for lying to her.

“We had no idea she didn’t know,” Gonzalez said. “We thought it was out in the open what (the suspect) had done to her son.”

Marlea Dell’Anno, a former prosecutor in the City Attorney’s office who is now representing Sofa and her son, said both school staff and investigators made mistakes from the very beginning.

“A lot of people dropped the ball on this case, starting with the fact they did not make a full and accurate disclosure to the mother. So everything after that was essentially built on a lie. What they withheld from her was not inconsequential information. They withheld material information which caused her to make decisions which she wouldn’t have made had she known the truth,” Dell’Anno said.

Had Sofa been given the details of what the suspect stated in interviews or what the witness had seen, Dell’Anno said, she could have made a more informed decision on whether to ask for an examination.

On behalf of Sofa and her son, Dell’Anno filed a claim with the school district in November alleging police and school staff withheld material facts from Sofa and failed to protect her son. San Diego Unified rejected the claim in December. In the coming weeks, Dell’Anno plans to file a lawsuit against the district for negligence.

According to the claim filed in November, Sofa went in person to the San Diego Police Department to request copies of the police reports, but was denied. Police also refused to provide audio recordings of statements she made to officers.

“Any parent out there, if they were in the same position, it would make them crazy. How do you keep secrets about that kind of thing from a child’s own mother?” Dell’Anno said.

She said it was especially concerning that SDPD and the district disregarded Page’s overtures.

“To care so much that you’re basically pleading with people, ‘please listen to me,’ and he gets called crazy and a drug addict, none of which is true,” she said. “I think it was an irresponsible way to handle that information. If somebody took the time to look into it, they would have gotten the information that they needed.”

San Diego Police Department spokesman Scott Wahl said the department could not comment because the case is pending litigation. Shortly before this story published, an officer from SDPD’s internal affairs division, which is looking into the case, said the matter has been forwarded to the district attorney for review.

‘There’s No Closure’

The 2016-2017 school year was a tumultuous one for both Nathan Page and his mom Julie Page. Her son had always been the rock, Julie said, the one who friends and family members turned to when they needed advice. But Lincoln High seemed to change him.

She knew her son was upset since early in the school year, when he came to believe educators were misdiagnosing students with disabilities. But it wasn’t until he took stress leave mid-year that Julie noticed he wasn’t himself.

Her son had never been diagnosed with a mental illness, Julie said, but friends and members of his church worried about his stability.

Julie noticed her son seemed paranoid. Some days he was down — others he was full of frantic energy. He sent long, impassioned messages to friends and family in the early morning hours. Those who knew him well began to question his grasp on reality. Some began to back away.

Nathan believed speaking out against problems he saw at Lincoln made him a target for administrators who wanted him out of the school, Julie said.

Some of his colleagues now say that part, at least, wasn’t paranoia.

Liz Gakis, who retired last year, describes Lincoln as a place where administrators intimidated and micromanaged certain teachers.

“He was pushed to the edge. (Administrators) hovered over him, went into his classroom and called him into the office. They wrote him up. They pulled assistance away from him. It’s the same thing they do to newer teachers who are less confident and more vulnerable,” Gakis said.

“They singled him out, absolutely,” said Gonzalez, who worked with Page as a teacher’s aide. Gonzalez said students adored Page and would yell his name when he entered the room.

“They were on him for every little thing. I believe it was because he was a voice for the kids. He raised issues they ignored for years. I was in tears one day I felt so bad for him, and I’m not a crier,” she said.

In April 2017, Nathan left Lincoln and remained on leave for the rest of the year. With a loss in income, he sold his house. He moved in with his mom at her home in Temecula.

Around August, however, the picture began to brighten.

Nathan decided to look for a new job and received a favorable recommendation from a former supervisor. That September, he was hired as a special education teacher at a school in Lake Elsinore. Julie would overhear her son talking to friends on the phone, laughing like he used to.

“He was back. Nathan was back,” said Julie.

But just as Nathan was about to start work, his mom noticed he seemed particularly concerned about heading back to the classroom.

“I don’t know why. Maybe it was lack of confidence after everything that happened. He seemed nervous, but he was still laughing with friends. He seemed OK,” she said.

After the second day at school, Nathan got in his car and headed up to a mountain road, near the candy store he loved to visit as a kid, and drove his car off the road.

His Toyota Corolla rolled 100 feet downhill, according to a news report from that day. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was ejected from the car. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where he died at 9:45 p.m.

Nathan’s death wasn’t initially determined to be a suicide, but investigators found no skid marks. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which Julie said he always wore. And he had no reason to be up on the mountain road.

“If it was anywhere else, I could believe it was an accident,” Julie said.

Since his death, Julie has tried to hang on to the good memories she has of her son. She exercises and spends time with her two other children. If there’s anything positive that came of his death, she said, it’s that family members have returned to church, looking to reconnect with their faith. But that doesn’t mean she’s made peace with what happened.

“There’s no closure. Not when it’s your son,” Julie said.

She tells his story because she knows it was important to her son.

“That was his one goal – justice for the student who was hurt. He told me that many times. If the truth would have come out when he was still alive, he would still be here with us,” she said.

After he died, the school in Lake Elsinore where Nathan had started teaching reached out to his mom to offer condolences. The only thing Julie said she received from Lincoln or San Diego Unified was a letter saying her son had been overpaid in his final check and she needed to repay the balance.

She tore it up.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. / Image via Shutterstock

In 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump set the table for a partisan battle over school choice.

Having focused his campaign on immigration and border security, education issues barely received a passing mention. When he did mention education, his plans seemed to hinge on one topic: greater support and resources for charter schools and vouchers.

Not long after taking office, Trump appeared to double down on his ideas when he appointed Betsy DeVos — a wealthy Republican philanthropist and school choice champion — as his new education security. From the very beginning, DeVos drew fire from Democrats, teachers unions and even so-called “education reformers” who otherwise supported school choice and some of the same policies DeVos espoused.

Over the past year, DeVos has become no less controversial a figure. That controversy came to a boil this week after 60 Minutes aired an interview with DeVos in which the education security fielded questions on school choice, discipline and guns in the classroom.

DeVos expressed support for arming teachers, but said she couldn’t imagine her own first grade teacher carrying a gun. She stumbled through answers about the quality of education in Michigan, her home state. She said she hasn’t intentionally visited struggling schools. In short, she came off as wildly unprepared for her job — and she was widely criticized for it.

But through the criticism, one feature stood out — something that’s been lurking ever since Trump first mentioned vouchers and charter schools on the campaign trail: DeVos, via Trump’s administration, has become synonymous with school choice. And school choice has come to mean vouchers, charter schools and the privatization of public schools.

There’s a problem with the narrative, though. School choice is much broader than vouchers, which don’t exist in California, and charter schools, which were first introduced to California in 1992 as an alternative to vouchers.

In San Diego Unified, school choice has existed for decades as a way to give parents the option of sending their kids to schools outside of the neighborhoods where they reside. In 2016, about 42 percent of parents in the district took advantage of the program, roughly the same percentage as families who did so in 2011, when the district first ramped up its efforts to encourage parents to remain in their assigned schools.

To encourage racial integration, San Diego Unified in the ‘70s established magnet schools, which are usually structured around a specialty theme, like music or a foreign language, and draw students from all neighborhoods. This is also school choice. And some evidence suggests taking away these options could actually make district schools more segregated.

But these options aren’t really what critics are talking about when they voice opposition to school choice. In San Diego, charter schools usually land in the crosshairs.

The basic argument against charter schools — which are publicly funded but to a certain extent, independently run — goes something like this: Because money is tied to students, school districts lose money when students transfer to charter schools. District schools then have less money and fewer resources to educate students.

Add to it a perception that charter school operators are privatizing education for profit, and charter schools can deny entrance to students they don’t want, and you’ve got a recipe for a fight. (Every charter school leader will deny both accusations; all charter schools in San Diego County are non-profit and discriminatory admission processes are illegal.)

But here again, these aren’t new arguments. They’ve just taken on new texture and emotional resonance with DeVos.

I wanted to hear from a few local charter school leaders if and how they’ve noticed the conversation shift in the past year, and how they think the new administration could impact their schools.

Weighing in are Jon Dean, superintendent for The O’Farrell Charter School; Demi Brown, executive director of Empower Charter School; and Christine Kuglen, director of Innovations Academy. Here’s some of what they had to say:

How have you seen the conversation around charters schools or school choice shift in the past year or so?

Demi Brown: I’m not hearing so much about vouchers, but I notice we do get lumped into this conversation about privatization. And the misinformation that I’ve seen seems to be coming from people who others consider to be credible — people within the Democratic Party, or the teachers union.

Every charter school in San Diego is a nonprofit. If I was an advocate for public schools, and I heard there were these schools that could use public money and operate without accountability, that would infuriate me, too. But it’s a huge misperception. It’s this false rhetoric that’s being repeated.

I definitely think that it’s become a more partisan issue under the current administration. People forget the two previous administrations — Republican and Democratic — supported charter schools.

Jon Dean: The polarization has gotten a little bit worse, but it’s done specifically by anti-charter school people who are trying to lump charter schools in with school vouchers. They’re totally different. You have to remember that charter schools were the solution, the alternative to vouchers. But it behooves the opposition to describe them as the same thing.

Christine Kuglen: My perception of the outside world — especially the rhetoric from Democrats — is that people want to blame charter schools for all kinds of problems. Don’t get me wrong, there are some bad apples — there’s corruption, people stealing money. That’s not anything different than what happens in district schools, but when charter schools do it, the reaction is that we need close all charter schools.

It’s not that I have a problem with the Democratic Party. It’s the hyper-defensiveness that comes from being aligned with the school district and labor union. And the mentality of the school district is that they can treat kids as a given. I think if we all had more of the mindset that we all had to earn our students, we’d be in a better place.

What do you think has been missed or misrepresented in the conversation?

Brown: I can’t stress enough that charter schools are public schools, open to all. School choice offers options to students who don’t live next to quality school. And I’m concerned that some people are taking the story from Michigan and other states and applying it across the board. But California has its own story when it comes to charter schools.

When Betsy DeVos came to the center of the conversation, I thought, ‘That’s not how we work in California.’ Our accountability system for charter schools is rigorous. Ultimately, the kids are the ones who suffer when we make this a partisan issue. I think that both parties can agree that we want high quality options for all children.

Dean: School choice doesn’t just mean charter schools. It means magnet schools and schools in different neighborhoods. Charter schools don’t need to be an enemy of traditional schools; they need to be a partner. They need to learn from each other.

I always say a school district is like a big oil tanker. A charter school is more like a speed boat. It can change direction a lot quicker if something isn’t working. I think with charter schools, kids really are put first. Traditional schools do that to some extent, but a lot of the efforts are swallowed up by bureaucracy.

Kuglen: The biggest myth is the idea that people are cherry picking students and denying entrance to students with special needs. About 20 percent of students at our school have disabilities. Every charter school I know has about the same percentage of students with special needs as the district average, and some of them attract a lot more. But I think the public falls for this because they don’t understand how it works.

Do you think DeVos will be good or bad for charter school movement in California?

Dean: I don’t know if it will be either good or bad. It’s sort of a non-issue to me. Really the life and death of charter schools depends on the state legislature and governor’s office. I don’t believe the Trump administration is really going to have the capacity to deal with charter schools and district schools.

Brown: I think it still stands to be seen. In regards to DeVos, I think when anyone speaks on a topic that they’re not educated on, it doesn’t reflect well on that topic. I haven’t yet seen anything specific from her so far to make me feel more empowered as a charter school leader.

#NationalWalkoutDay

The lede of a New York Times story this week captured it eloquently: “A month ago, hundreds of teenagers ran for their lives from the hallways and classrooms of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff had been shot to death. On Wednesday, driven by the conviction that they should never have to run from guns again, they walked.”

So did their peers. Thousands of students from New York to San Diego walked out of school in a coordinated call for more gun control. Students in some school districts defied direction from school officials to join the walk out. Others did so with support from administration.

San Diego Unified, for its part, sought a kind of middle ground. Superintendent Cindy Marten advised principals to let student voices be heard — but also encourage them to do it on school grounds. Some took the advice, some didn’t.

To see the action, I cruised over to San Diego High, where students from SD High, East Village High School and City College students had gathered. Here’s some of what they had to say…

“Never again,” said Jasmine Alas, senior at East Village High. / Photo by Mario Koran

“We’re the ones getting shot. If anybody understands what’s happening, it’s us,” said Andrew Lopez, freshman at San Diego High. / Photo by Mario Koran

“School shouldn’t be a place where we worry that we’re going to get shot up. And we do worry. All the time,” – students from East Vallage High

In Other News…

It’s official: Current San Diego Unified school board members Kevin Beiser and Mike McQuary will again run unopposed in this year’s election.

McQuary strolled onto the school board unopposed in 2014 after former trustee Scott Barnett announced unexpectedly he wouldn’t seek another term. Beiser, a teacher in Sweetwater Union High School District, has served on the board since 2010.

Regardless of how the public feels about their performance over the past four years, the fact their elections will be uncontested is a problem for parents who want to hear debate and the nitty gritty of plans to lead the school district. Even Matt Hall, editorial director for the San Diego Union-Tribune, expressed disappointment this week on the lack of competition (and conversation) over school board seats.

When I tackled this topic a couple years back, I talked to some who believed the current way in which school board trustees are elected — wherein candidates square off in a district-only primary and again in a city-wide election — disadvantages candidates without endorsements and financial backing from labor unions. School board members also receive paltry compensation for serving on the school board, which further limits the pool of candidates.

There’s a movement afoot to change the current school board election system — a decision that involves the City Council — but so far city Democrats have been unwilling to get involved. In January, they punted the issue back to the school board, which hand-selected a committee to review possible changes. The school board expected to come back to the City Council with a plan by June with recommendations from the committee.

Teachers Union Spoiling for a Fight

With a contract renewal nine months overdue, San Diego Unified teachers this week participated in a work-to-rule action to pressure the district during union contract negotiations, KPBS reported.

That meant teachers would do the work required of them, but go no further. They would not hold after-school tutoring, clubs or non-mandatory meetings. San Diego Education Association president Lindsay Burningham told KPBS it was a way to show the district what schools look like when educators don’t volunteer their time.

The action is part of a larger push for raises, smaller class sizes and smaller caseloads for special education staff, and is part of a campaign the teachers union has been organizing for months.

According to documents disseminated by the teachers union, the efforts are also driven in part by opposition to charter schools and a case before the Supreme Court, Janus v. AFSCME, which could end “agency fees” and strip unions of much of their financing and power, as described by the 74, an education news site.

Unrest among teachers unions led to a recently settled statewide strike in West Virginia, where teachers demanded a five percent pay raise. Unions in Oklahoma and Arizona are reportedly considering following West Virginia’s lead and launching strikes of their own.

Nicole Stewart, a former Lincoln High vice principal, said she believes students receive inconsistent consequences for violent behavior. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

The afternoon of Jan. 23, near the end of the school day at Lincoln High, a student took a knife and slashed his classmate’s neck. Police officers quickly arrived. Television news crews descended on the scene and filmed the blood drops left behind.

The principal sent notice to parents that day through email and voicemail. What Lincoln’s principal didn’t tell parents, however, was that two weeks earlier, the same student who stabbed his classmate was caught with a knife on campus.

After the first instance, members of the student’s special education team determined that bringing the knife was a manifestation of the lack of impulse control caused by his disability. The student was soon back on campus.

According to documents obtained by Voice of San Diego, members of his special education team determined he was not responsible for bringing a knife to school in the first instance, but was responsible for slashing his classmate’s neck in the second:

“The conduct in question was within (the student’s) control … (He) planned to use a knife if provoked even after being caught in possession of a knife. (He) and the other student deliberately engaged in a physical altercation after mutually deciding whether to fight in the restroom or in front of the classroom. (He) intentionally attempted to avoid being caught by placing the knife in a trash can after the confrontation.”

MaryLynn Gonzalez, a teacher’s aide at Lincoln, witnessed the injured student stumble from classroom to classroom in a daze, looking for the teenager who’d assaulted him.

“He was bleeding from the side of his neck. It was really, really bad. He was going into various classrooms, dripping blood in each of the rooms. There was blood everywhere,” she said.

School hadn’t yet let out for the day, Gonzalez said. She ran to the school’s main office to get help, but found a locked door and nobody in sight. A staff member finally appeared and the student received medical attention. He was taken to the hospital, where he recovered.

Citing student privacy rights, Lincoln High Principal Jose Soto declined to say whether the knife the student used to slash his classmate’s neck was the same knife he’d been caught with two weeks earlier.

Had the same incident happened five years earlier, a student who brought a knife to school could have faced expulsion. But owing to a districtwide shift away from discipline policies perceived to be punitive, San Diego Unified four years ago moved to a more therapeutic approach to discipline known as restorative justice. In the process, it eliminated several offenses for which principals must recommend students for expulsion.

Starting in 2014, students only face automatic expulsion if they brandish a knife – that is, use it in a threatening manner. Simply bringing a dangerous weapon to school is no longer enough to expel a student.

Under the new discipline model, school staff try to address the underlying issues that lead to misbehavior instead of defaulting to suspensions. But four years after the district changed discipline policies, San Diego Unified is only in its first year of training staff districtwide on how to effectively implement restorative practices. Administrators at Lincoln have been left to figure out ways to lower suspension rates while keeping campuses safe and orderly.

Now, educators, parents and students are coming forward to say they fear for students’ safety at Lincoln High and worry even more about what might happen if nothing changes.

From Suspensions to Blue Slips

Lincoln High reopened in 2007 after a $129 million rebuild – the most expensive project in district history. For the price tag, for the opportunities if offered the underserved students of southeastern San Diego, expectations soared from the beginning.

Lincoln High / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Since then, however, Lincoln High has seen its student body dwindle. It has faced ongoing staff turnover and grappled with poor academic performance. Last year, just over 10 percent of students met or exceeded state standards in math and 26 percent did so in English. That was the lowest rate of proficiency in English of all district high schools and second lowest in math.

Various attempts by district leaders to address the problems by restructuring or rebranding the school have fallen short time and again.

Soto says violence isn’t a problem for the vast majority of students on campus, and suggested a deeper problem is press coverage that unfairly portrays the school as more violent than it actually is.

But last year, more Lincoln students were suspended for violent incidents than any other high school in the district – and that’s not even counting the number of students who administrators have sent home informally, mid-day.

Nicole Stewart, who served as a vice principal at Lincoln from 2014 to 2016, said when the district softened its discipline policies, administrators started dealing with misbehavior by kicking kids out of school for the day. Instead of suspending kids who got into fights – which would show up in Lincoln’s suspension rates – they started sending kids home informally, a practice known as “blue-slipping.”

Stewart believes the practice led to inconsistent consequences and made it harder for teachers to control student behavior.

“The kids run that school from the opening bell to the closing bell,” Stewart said.

Lonnie Boswell, who has worked as a long-term substitute teacher at Lincoln, said fights aren’t uncommon at other middle and high schools where he’s worked over the past four years, but he hasn’t seen any as violent as Lincoln.

He said Lincoln administrators failed to take appropriate action even after a student assaulted him during class, injuring his back.

“It’s only gotten worse over the years. Someone is really going to get hurt. I think something is going to explode at Lincoln. It’s right on the verge,” said Boswell.

Not a New Problem

In the 11 years since the school reopened, Lincoln has wrestled with both the perception and reality of violence.

In 2016, chaos erupted when a “play fight” between students at lunch turned serious. A school police officer followed a student into the parking garage and shot him with a Taser.  At some point during the struggle, a student struck the officer in the head, injuring him. Other officers who arrived used pepper spray to disperse the crowd of students who had gathered.

Superintendent Cindy Marten used the incident to display the district’s newly softened approach to discipline, and no students were expelled for the incident. Over the objections of the school police officers union, who said the decision set a dangerous precedent, district officials allowed the student to return to Lincoln the following school year.

To the frustration of community members and students, the ordeal attracted major attention from local media outlets. In the days following the brawl, Lincoln students organized demonstrations of unity and made clear to reporters the violent incident did not define the students of Lincoln High.

“I believe it’s worth noting that, according to current research data, safety is not an issue at Lincoln for 97% of our students (See the California Healthy Kids Survey results on the CDE website),” Soto wrote in an email. “As principal, I will not be happy until 100 % of our students feel safe at all times on campus. In the meantime, I will continue to highlight the incredible academic and other achievements of our students, including the more than $9.4 million in college scholarships received by our students last year. I hope you will also begin to report on these accomplishments, because our community, our parents and especially our students have the right to expect fair coverage from all of our city’s reporters. … We all know it takes time for public perception to catch up with reality. I believe the media can help with that process.”

The survey results Soto referenced in his email came from about 100 students – 27 percent of last year’s freshman class. That represents just under 7 percent of the school’s 1,447 students.

But the violence was very real in several incidents in recent years.

In 2014, a student took a butcher knife to his classmate in the bathroom, slicing his hand.

In 2016, a student with a long history of violent and sexual offenses was caught with a box-cutter at school – an expellable offense – and was later suspended for slapping a girl. Administrators did not attempt to expel him, and several months later, he admitted to sexually assaulting a special needs classmate in the boys’ bathroom.

This year, the student who was previously caught with a knife returned to campus and two weeks later slashed his classmate’s neck.

The parents of two Lincoln High students, whose names we’re withholding because they’re minors and facing threats, told VOSD their sons have been attacked, harassed and spit on by other students since September.

They say they’ve repeatedly brought the concerns to school administrators, who have failed to stop the violence. In mid-January, the father took his sons out of school out of concern for their safety. They’re now at home completing coursework independently.

“I have to think about my safety and my brother’s safety before I can think about my education,” one of the boys said.

Soto said student and staff privacy rights prevent him from answering questions about the family’s complaints.

With 1,625 students, Lincoln is the ninth largest high school in San Diego Unified. But last year, Lincoln recorded 84 suspensions for violent incidents – more than any other district-run high school and more than four times the district average for high schools.

And that’s not counting the unknown number of times administrators sent students home from school informally, without documenting the suspensions.

In other words, suspension rates are not a true measure of all violent incidents on school campuses – they’re only a measure of the way administrators respond to violent incidents.

‘It Starts at the Top’

Stewart was so shaken by her experience as vice principal at Lincoln that she left her career altogether. She still works in education, as a consultant, but said she isn’t ready to go back to work for a school, and doesn’t know if she ever will be.

Stewart said she loved the students, but left Lincoln in 2016 after she said she was retaliated against for filing a harassment complaint against a superior.

In her final year at Lincoln, Stewart was injured in a fight that broke out between two students. Stewart said she grabbed one student by the backpack, trying to pull him off the teenager he was punching, when he suddenly let go. She flew backward and injured her back when she fell.

Records of fights on Lincoln’s campus show students have assaulted teachers and staff members numerous times since 2012. Consequences for such assaults varied widely.

In some cases, students who assaulted staff members received a five-day suspension and were recommended for expulsion. In others, consequences were much lighter.

In 2012, for example, a student punched and attempted to kick her teacher multiple times, then threw objects around the classroom. The only consequence listed on the report indicates the student had to have a conference with a parent. There is no indication the student was suspended.

In fall 2016, a student ripped a handful of hair from a teacher’s head. Another student was also injured in the altercation. Documents show the student was suspended for one day.

Prior to 2014, principals were required to recommend expulsion for students who assaulted teachers or staff. But that rule was among those changed when the district moved toward restorative practices, which might include gathering students together to discuss the impact of their behavior rather than suspending them.

When San Diego Unified first shifted its approach, district officials said they’d provide schools with additional resources to support students and ramp up training for staff members. But, four years after it changed its discipline policies, the district is only now in its first year of training staff districtwide on how to effectively implement the strategies and evaluate whether they’re working.

Stewart said she and other administrators faced pressure from school and district officials to avoid suspending kids and to keep numbers low. So instead of suspension, they started sending students home informally.

“We were constantly reminded of restorative practices and told we couldn’t suspend kids. So we started to think of other ways to suspend them, like blue-slipping. We would just blue-slip them, then we wouldn’t have to document the behavior,” Stewart said.

The Washington Post reported on a similar trend in D.C. Public Schools, where at least seven of the city’s 18 public high schools kicked kids out of school without labeling it a suspension.

As they do with other offenses, administrators look at assaults on staff members on a case-by-case basis, said San Diego Unified spokeswoman Maureen Magee. They consider a number of factors when deciding consequences, including whether the student has a disability, is homeless or in foster care.

This helps account for why students can face such different consequences for the same behavior.

In 2017, for two consecutive days, Lincoln administrators dealt with two students who, according to documents, had been “posturing, mad dogging and name calling” each other. On the third day, when the students got into a fight, one student took a swing at the other, put him in a bear hug and slammed him to the ground. The boys were sent home early that day to “cool down.”

Magee said in an email that it’s not against district policy to issue students blue slips in lieu of suspension. But informally sending students home appears nowhere on the district’s Uniform Discipline Plan, a framework that’s been in place since 2012 for how to handle discipline at school.

“Only in collaboration with parents or guardians are students released from school with a blue slip. In some cases, releasing students with a blue slip can help defuse a situation,” she said.

But Stewart believes this amounts to inconsistent consequences for students. And if students face no consequences, negative behavior manifests and violence can spiral, she said.

“If people are out there robbing banks and nobody is getting in trouble, how many more people will be out there robbing banks?” said Boswell, who worked as a long-term substitute teacher at Lincoln for the entirety of last year.

Boswell is 6-foot-2 and weighs over 200 pounds. He said he believed concerns about assaults on staff at Lincoln were overblown – until he was assaulted.

One day, while teaching at Lincoln, an agitated student charged into him, he said, knocking him backward into a post and injuring his neck and back. Boswell said the student wasn’t expelled, and weeks later came to school with a knife and tried to stab his classmate.

He said he’s speaking out now because he’s concerned for the students at Lincoln – not only for their safety, but their academic progress.

At every school he works as a substitute teacher, Boswell said, he’s found lesson plans prepared in advance for the students. Not so at Lincoln. He once taught an advanced chemistry class in which students were supposed to take a final exam, but when Boswell arrived, he found no exams to give students. He summoned Soto, the principal, who came to the classroom and handed him a stack of crossword puzzles.

“He told me to just give students an A if they completed the puzzle,” Boswell said.

Soto did not respond to a request for comment on Boswell’s account of the exam.

Cindy Barros, president of Lincoln’s parent-teacher organization, said the problems at Lincoln are no different than those on any other high school campus.

If there are issues with discipline, she said, it has more to do with a lack of resources from the central office, district rules that have made it exceedingly difficult to expel students and an administration that doesn’t always document behavior appropriately.

Out of Lincoln’s roughly 1,450 students last year, 450 were English-learners, 250 had disabilities and 1,300 – about 90 percent of the total student body – came from low-income households.

“When you have a population like ours, you need more resources and staffing to support them, and we’re not getting that from the district,” Barros said.

Both Boswell and Stewart chalk up most of the problems to a lack of strong and consistent leadership at the school, and a lack of support from district officials.

In the past 10 years, Lincoln has had five different principals. Soto, who is currently at Lincoln’s helm, is in his first year as principal.

“How are you going to take the most challenging school in the district and appoint leadership with no experience?” Stewart said. “Lincoln is red flag, after red flag – discipline, safety, academics – it’s bad across the board. And nobody can put their finger on the exact problem. But I’ll tell you this much: It starts at the top, and trickles down from there.”

Image via Shutterstock

In 2014, a team of Harvard researchers visited San Diego Unified and produced a report that convinced school district administrators their punitive, zero-tolerance policies weren’t working.

According to the researchers, a disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions had involved students of color and those with disabilities. Students repeatedly suspended from school were more likely to drop out of school or be involved with the criminal justice system.

The year before the report was released, black students in the district represented 10 percent of the student body but made up 25 percent of suspensions and 21 percent of expulsions. They were more than three and half times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. Students with special needs made up only 10 percent of the student body, but 34 percent of suspensions.

Along with school districts across the country, that year San Diego Unified shifted its approach to discipline, moving to what it calls “restorative practices” — a more therapeutic approach than turning to suspensions as a first resort. It was part of a nationwide push under the Obama administration to close the gap between the way students of color and their white peers are disciplined.

Restorative justice is more focused on prevention — addressing students’ underlying issues before they act out — than punishment. It includes things like mediation and dialogue. It stresses the need for students to build relationships in school and understand the impact of their decisions.

The problem is that while San Diego Unified changed its discipline policies four years ago, it’s only now in its first year of training staff members districtwide. This year, it hired a staff member to oversee the program and inked a three-year, $866,000 contract with National Conflict Resolution Center to train teachers and administrators on how to implement the strategies. But according to the district’s timeline, restorative justice practices won’t be fully implemented until 2020.

In September, school board members diverged from their typically glowing evaluation of Superintendent Cindy Marten when they dinged her for being slow to implement restorative justice practices across the district.

And now some educators are voicing concern about the unexpected consequences of the softened approach to discipline. They say the change has actually increased violence in schools.

Lindsay Burningham, president of the San Diego Educators Association, said she’s heard concern from teachers about how the program is being implemented.

“Members have raised concerns about the implementation of what should be a great opportunity to keep kids in school, end the disproportionate number of suspensions for students of color and put a dent in the school-to-prison pipeline,” she said. “I think, in general, our members believe in restorative justice but they don’t have the resources or training to make it successful.”

Two educators who have worked at Lincoln High told VOSD that teachers and administrators are under pressure to keep suspension rates low. But without adequate training or support, administrators improvised by sending students home informally instead of suspending them.

Behavior reports from Lincoln High show that’s what happened in 2014, when two students who’d been challenging each other for two consecutive days got into a fight. A student bear-hugged the other and slammed him to the ground. The document says administrators sent them home informally that day to “cool down.”

A district spokesperson said the practice, known as “blue slipping,” doesn’t violate any rules, and can be an effective way to diffuse a tense situation. But informally sending students home appears nowhere on the district’s Uniform Discipline Plan, a framework for how to handle discipline.

And blue slipping students in lieu of documented suspensions puts into question the accuracy of the school’s — and potentially the district’s — suspension rates. Kicking kids out of school for the day is a suspension, whether it’s labeled that way or not.

The Washington Post reported on a similar trend in D.C. public schools in July, when it found at least seven of the district’s 18 high schools had kicked kids out of school for the day without labeling them as suspensions.

The Lincoln educators I spoke with say the practice creates unclear and inconsistent consequences for students, which contributes to a cycle of negative behavior.

Similar tensions are playing out in other cities. In Buffalo, N.Y.,  a survey of 1,217 teachers — representing a third of the district’s teachers — found that less than 10 percent of teachers believe disruptive student behavior is being handled quickly and properly in their schools.

In Oklahoma City, teachers said they felt more like babysitters than educators, and one reported that teachers were told misbehavior would not result in suspension unless there was blood.

Anthony Ceja, a senior manager for the San Diego County Office of Education who helps train schools on how to implement restorative practices, said they absolutely can lead to more chaotic classrooms when they’re not done properly.

To do restorative practices effectively, he said, administrators and teachers need to have clear communication. He often hears from frustrated teachers who say they send kids out of the room, only to see them reappear later. Because the teacher doesn’t know what was said in the office, he or she may assume the student faced no consequences.

“When you have a disconnect between teachers and the main office, that’s a formula for disaster,” he said.

Ceja said one of the biggest mistakes school districts have made is conflating lower suspension rates with restorative justice.

“The mistake that a number of school districts have made is tying restorative practices to reduced suspensions. If you do restorative practices well, the suspension rates will probably go down, but it’s not meant to be an alternative to discipline.”

Too often overlooked, Ceja said, is the relationship-building component of restorative justice, which helps students and staff see each other as people.

“This is what some schools really aren’t willing to do: Invest the time in the relationship building aspect of restorative justice. When students are able to humanize staff and other students, they’re much less likely to act out or hurt their classmates,” he said.

The Link Between Safety and School Discipline

Last week, San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan joined Superintendent Cindy Marten for a press conference to assure the public that students who call in threats to schools will be identified and held accountable.

In the weeks that followed the shooting in Parkland, Fla., Marten said the district received 49 threats to schools, which has resulted in more than 125 hours of overtime for officers, lost staff time and missed instructional time. In addition to student walkouts and protests calling for increased gun control, one outcome of the shootings in Parkland has been a nationwide conversation about the link between safety and discipline in schools.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is among those who called on U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to revise Obama-era discipline policies, arguing the “federal guidance may have contributed to systemic failures to report Nikolas Cruz’s dangerous behaviors to local law enforcement.”

Any effort to roll back the federal guidelines, however, would likely have little impact on California’s statewide discipline policies or its newly established accountability measures, EdSource reports.

When a former Minneapolis schools superintendent launched her own review of discipline referrals for kindergarten boys, she had a troubling revelation, reports the New York Times.

“The descriptions of white children by teachers included ‘gifted but can’t use his words’ and ‘high strung,’ with their actions excused because they ‘had a hard day,’ the Times reports. “Black children … were ‘destructive’ and ‘violent,’ and ‘cannot be managed.’”

That finding raises uncomfortable questions about teachers’ biases — something that research indicates is seen as early as preschool.

It’s difficult to explain away those differences without confronting racism. That point is at the center of a groundbreaking new study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, which found “black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds.”

Among other revelations, the study found that most white boys raised in wealthy families will stay rich or upper middle class as adults, but black boys raised in similarly rich households will not.

The tentacles of racism and discrimination reach across generations. Only 60 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for white and black students were fundamentally unequal. Linda Brown, who was at the center of Brown v. Board of Education, died this week at 76.

• A San Francisco public school student failed every class in high school and not a single adult stepped up to help him. The story lays bare the ugly results of social promotion. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Charter Schools Group Endorses Villaraigosa

With just 70 days to go before the June primary election, the battle lines are drawn. Charter school advocates are throwing their support behind Antonio Villaraigosa for governor, while teachers unions are going for Gavin Newsom.

The California Charter Schools Association Advocates, CCSA’s political arm, emphatically endorsed Villaraigosa at its annual charter school conference in San Diego this week.

CCSA president Jed Wallace said that if elected governor, Newsom would “‘inflict major harm on our schools and claim to be our friend,’” EdSource reports. Newsom’s camp dismissed the criticisms as “name-calling and distortion.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post said the California Charter Schools Association endorsed Antonio Villaraigosa for governor. The endorsement came from The California Charter Schools Association Advocates, the group’s political arm.

Nicole Stewart is a former Lincoln High vice principal. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Two San Diegans with ties to Lincoln High School met on Wednesday with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to discuss the impact of Obama-era discipline policies, which called on schools to reduce racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates.

Nicole Stewart, a former vice principal at Lincoln, and Eileen Sofa, whose son was the victim of a suspected rape at the school, met with DeVos to help inform her work on a new Federal Commission on School Safety, as the education secretary considers rolling back the federal guidance issued in 2014, the Associated Press reported.

Following that guidance, school districts across the country, including San Diego Unified, softened their approach to discipline, deprioritizing suspensions and adopting a more therapeutic approach to discipline known as “restorative justice.”

Restorative justice focuses more on prevention than punishment. It includes things like mediation and dialogue – to address students’ underlying issues before they act out – and stresses the need for students to build relationships in school and understand the impact of their decisions.

DeVos also met with civil rights advocates who worry that repealing the Obama-era guidance will have a disparate impact on students of color, who are disproportionately expelled and suspended, reported the Huffington Post.

In 2013, the year before San Diego Unified softened its discipline policies, black students in the district represented 10 percent of the student body but made up 25 percent of suspensions and 21 percent of expulsions. They were more than three and half times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. Many believe that increased the chances those students had with becoming involved with the criminal justice system, often called the school-to-prison pipeline.

But since 2014, educators across the country, including some in San Diego Unified, have pushed back against the softened discipline policies, arguing they have led to inconsistent consequences for negative behavior and in some cases have actually made schools more violent.

Stewart was so disillusioned by her experience at Lincoln that in 2016 she left her career altogether. Stewart, who served as a Lincoln vice principal from 2014 to 2016, said she injured her back trying to break up a fight between students in her last year at the school.

“The kids run that school from the opening bell to the closing bell,” Stewart told me last month.

Before the district shifted its approach, principals were required to recommend students for expulsion if they assaulted teachers or staff. But in 2014, the district eliminated “assaults on staff” from its list of zero tolerance policies, and thereafter principals had discretion on whether to recommend students for expulsion.

Discipline records from Lincoln High show that led to wildly different consequences for similar offenses. Since 2012, some students who assaulted staff were later expelled. Others, including a student who ripped a handful of hair from a teacher’s head, only faced a one-day suspension.

And earlier this year, a student who Lincoln administrators caught with a knife on campus was not expelled. Two weeks later, he came to school with a knife and slashed a classmate’s neck.

Had the student brought a knife to school five years ago, the principal would have been required to recommend him for expulsion. But that changed in 2014, when possession of a knife, by itself, became no longer enough to automatically expel a student.

That change is also meaningful to Sofa, who joined Stewart on the trip to D.C. to meet with DeVos.

In 2016, a boy with a long history of violent and sexual offenses brought a box cutter to Lincoln High, which could be considered a dangerous weapon. Administrators did not attempt to expel him, and several months later he confessed to sexually assaulting Sofa’s son, who has special needs, in a bathroom at Lincoln.

Inconsistent consequences for serious conduct like assaulting staff members is behind the calls teachers are making in other school districts for DeVos to rescind the federal guidance.

But there’s an ideological divide over how to proceed. Those who want to keep the Obama-era guidance argue adequate progress has yet to be made on eliminating the gaps between the way white students and students of color are disciplined. Those on the other side argue the policies aren’t working and in some cases are making schools less safe.

A point that’s been largely missed in this debate, however, is that the two sides aren’t mutually exclusive. Restorative justice, when it’s not coupled with sufficient training for staff or resources to address students’ underlying issues, actually can make schools more violent, a senior manager for the San Diego County Office of Education who helps train schools on how to implement restorative practices, told us last week.

That’s what happened in San Diego Unified, which softened discipline policies in 2014, but after stops and starts is now only in year one of a plan to train staff districtwide.

In other words, if the Obama-era policies are ineffective, it’s possible that has as much do with how restorative practices are being implemented as it does with the policies themselves.

School board trustee Mike McQuary speaks at a town hall at Ocean Beach Elementary School. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Protesting low pay, underfunded schools and concerned about a looming Supreme Court decision that’s expected to cut deeply into union coffers and membership, teachers across several states have walked off the job, shut down school districts and demanded action.

San Diego teachers had suggested that they too could be headed toward a strike, and billed a series of scheduled town halls as a chance to mobilize members in their quest for a new contract.

But at 1:40 a.m. the night before Wednesday’s town hall at Ocean Beach Elementary, SDEA and the district reached a tentative agreement that will give teachers fully paid health care through 2020, three weeks of paid maternity leave, a 1 percent raise in August and an additional 2 percent raise next year.

So instead of fireworks, Wednesday’s town hall discussion with school board trustee Mike McQuary, who represents schools along the coast, had a notably low-key tone. Only about two dozen people showed up, fewer than planned, leaving plenty of empty chairs in the school’s auditorium and uneaten pizza for teachers to bring home.

San Diego Unified hasn’t released details on the specific costs of the agreement, but SDEA President Lindsay Burningham said at the meeting every 1 percent raise equates to roughly $6 million, for a total of $18 million over the next two years, not including other benefits. As with teachers’ previous contract, the new three-year contract will include a reopener to negotiate wages in its final year.

The agreement comes two months after the school board approved more than $8 million in cuts and a month after the board voted to eliminate 271 jobs, or 203 full-time equivalent jobs next school year to address its budget shortfall.

Despite the early victory, Burningham said the town hall meetings scheduled to happen at five schools would continue as planned so educators can press school board members to continue increasing teacher salaries and come up with a plan to address declining enrollment in district schools.

San Diego Unified has seen a relatively steady loss of students over the past 10 years, as students moved out of the district. About 20 percent of those who stayed in district boundaries attended charter schools last year, a percentage that’s leveled off in recent years.

Each student who leaves the district or transfers to a charter school represents a loss of funding for San Diego Unified, which means less money to cover operating expenses, pay teachers and cover rising pension costs.

Even though SDEA signaled in its campaign for a new contract that it would target charter schools and the “privatization” of education, charter schools barely came up during Wednesday’s meeting. Instead, teachers pressed McQuary on what the district is doing to improve student attendance, which would improve the Average Daily Attendance dollars that fund schools.

One middle school teacher said he has students who regularly miss days of school, and when they do come back, they feel lost. He asked McQuary to explain the district’s process for following up with those students to get them back in school.

“I don’t know, and I’ll look at that. Because for me, it’s (leaving) money on the table,” said McQuary.

In the past few years, school board members and Superintendent Cindy Marten have called on the state to improve school funding, pointing to figures that place California 46th nationally in per-pupil funding.

At the meeting, Burningham agreed school funding needs improvement, but also challenged McQuary on the way in which district officials have chosen to spend money.

According to numbers from SDEA, five years ago salaries for teachers, counselors, nurses and other non-supervisory certificated staff made up 40 percent of the district’s budget, but by this year it dropped to 35 percent.

In a document SDEA sent to its members, it pointed to central office bloat and excessive payments to consultants: “25 years ago, the district had 125,000 and three lawyers. Now they have 100,000 students and 6 lawyers! And they still contract out some legal services!”

There’s truth to the claim: Despite expansions to the district’s in-house legal services intended to keep costs down, the amount the district spends on outside lawyers rose by $1 million in the last two years alone. And those numbers don’t include settlements paid out to families or complainants.

To put the legal fees into context, the $12.7 million paid outside legal firms between 2012 and 2017 could have funded 26 teacher salaries per year at an average salary of $80,798.

Burningham mentioned other contracts, such as outside consultants hired to provide professional development, which she said educators could handle in-house.

Last year, the district agreed to pay PR consultant Tony Manolatos $25,000 to compile and disseminate information on the district’s 2016 graduation rate, despite the fact it has at least three full-time communications specialists.

Joshua Alpert, a teacher at Dana Middle School, said after the meeting he believes the district wastes money on bureaucratic redundancies.

“They’re always saying they don’t have enough money. My argument is, ‘You have plenty of money. You just choose to spend it in a (messed) up way,’” Alpert said.

SDEA members had until this week been nine months overdue for a contract renewal. Adding to the urgency is a case before the Supreme Court, Janus v. AFSCME, which could end “agency fees” and strip unions of much of their financing and power.

Many expect the outcome of that case to cripple unions and reduce their size – by some estimates, unions could see a 15 to 30 percent reduction in membership.

Despite SDEA’s contract victory this week, the Janus case was on at least one teacher’s mind.

“This is our last chance to get a good contract before members say, ‘I’m out. I’m not going to pay those fees anymore.’” Alpert said. “We’re going to lose some members, and likely some power at the bargaining table.”

Summer Stephan / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

The way District Attorney Summer Stephan describes it, prostitution, as a legal term, is all but vanishing in California. Virtually any woman who engages in sex work for money is to be considered a victim who should not be prosecuted for a crime, she told VOSD on a recent podcast.

Stephan has made her experience combating sex trafficking a centerpiece of her campaign for district attorney. She has served as chief of the district attorney’s office’s Sex Crimes and Human Trafficking Division and chaired the San Diego County Human Trafficking Advisory Council.

On a recent podcast, she shared with VOSD some of what law enforcement has done in recent years to identify the trafficking she said is “happening in plain view.”

While prostitution involves the exchange of sex for money, sex trafficking involves compelling a victim to perform commercial sex acts through force, fraud or coercion.

Stephan says the girls and woman who engage in this lifestyle rarely choose it on their own volition and says victims are often forced or lured into it before they turn 18. Victims are often forced to hand over pay to pimps who exploit them, or are forced to work off debts and are enslaved in an escapable cycle.

“There is a limited number of people that can say that they are choosing this as a way to make a living and that they don’t have a pimp or a trafficker that’s deriving their money from that person,” she said.

The conversation appears to have particular relevance locally. The FBI listed San Diego as one of the nation’s 13 highest areas of commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Local figures detailing the scope of the issue are usually drawn from a three-year study published in 2016 by researchers at the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University that said human trafficking is San Diego’s second largest underground economy, behind drug trafficking, and that the average age of girls who are lured into it is 16 years old.

Owing to 2016 legislation, no one under the age of 18 can be prosecuted for prostitution in California. They are treated instead as victims under the law.

On the podcast, Stephan went further, arguing adult women who engage in prostitution are more than likely victims, too. If a woman isn’t explicitly forced into sex work, she said, she was likely pressured into it before she could freely choose.

“Just from being on the ground doing this work for a long time, even those people that tell you they are choosing this life, they were recruited at an early age. … So in my head, you know, how do you really become free if this is all you know when you don’t have (an) education or any other line of work to sustain yourself?”

Genevieve Jones-Wright, who’s running against Stephan for district attorney, has a much different take. On Facebook, Jones-Wright issued a point-by-point response arguing Stephan is conflating sex trafficking with voluntary sex work.

“Who is Summer Stephan to say that someone needs a degree or else they’re never going to be free?” Jones-Wright said, calling the assumption elitist.

“You can’t legislate morality. Some people voluntarily want to be sex workers. And you can’t tell them they didn’t make a choice based on your own morals. This may be hard for some people to understand and digest, but some people actually made a decision as a grown adult that this is what they want to do,” said Jones-Wright.

Stephan has led a campaign to raise public awareness of human trafficking, helping schools and law enforcement agencies understand how teenagers are lured into the industry.

Between 2010 and 2016, as Stephan embarked on the public awareness campaign, the number of prosecutions for both human trafficking and prostitution plummeted. Human trafficking prosecutions dropped by 76 percent, according to the district attorney’s office. Prosecutions for prostitution dropped by 87 percent, according to the city attorney’s office.

The vast majority of defendants in trafficking cases pleaded guilty to crimes that had been reduced to misdemeanors.

Steve Walker, communications director for the DA’s office, attributes the drop in prostitution prosecutions in part to “law enforcement’s increased focus on targeting the ‘demand side’ – criminal buyers – as well as early intervention and prevention through education and training in schools, hospitals and with parents and students,” which he said made victims more likely to report crimes and gave law enforcement officials the ability to intervene early.

He added that the DA’s office also works closely with counterparts at the U.S. attorney’s office, and the human trafficking prosecution statistics his office provided do not include federal prosecutions.

Prosecutors elsewhere have begun treating prostitution the way San Diego’s DA office has.

In 2015, the San Luis Obispo County district attorney’s office announced it would begin to treat prostitutes as victims of exploitation or forced labor rather than as criminals.

And earlier this year in San Francisco, where groups have long called for decriminalization of prostitution, the San Francisco district attorney’s office adopted policies to ensure sex workers who reported violent crimes wouldn’t be prosecuted for misdemeanor prostitution.

Elsewhere, the Philadelphia’s district attorney sent his staff a memo in February advising prosecutors not to charge sex workers if they have two or fewer prostitution convictions. Prosecutors should refer anyone with three or more convictions immediately to diversion court, the memo said.

Stephan said this is in line with her policy. She said it’s rarely appropriate to prosecute women for prostitution.

“With kids you know we don’t charge. With adults, the first bastion that all of the officers have been trained in is to ascertain if this person is a victim [or] if they’ve got a trafficker or a pimp. … So now you’re left under the law with that category of folks that tell you that they’re independent and they don’t have a pimp or a trafficker.”

The law protects minors, but not those who seek to profit from their services. Earlier this year, one countywide Human Trafficking Task Force operation sent 29 men to jail on charges of solicitation of a prostitute.

Stephan told me in an interview several months ago, however, that some law enforcement officers believe there have been some unintended consequences to the law.

Because pimps and traffickers now understand that nobody under the age of 18 can be prosecuted for prostitution, they tell victims to remain quiet if they’re arrested. Whereas before police could use the threat of a prostitution charge to incentivize victims to name their pimps, police can no longer use that bargaining chip to elicit information.

Regardless, one bill signed into law this week will at least make it more difficult to sell the services online. Earlier this month, U.S. authorities seized Backpage.com, a forum that made possible the solicitation of sex services.

Stephan is hopeful the new law will cut into the illegal enterprise and men will no longer “feel the anonymity of just going online and ordering a person like you’re ordering pizza.”

Jones-Wright, however, called the policy misguided, and on Facebook said it would only drive the sex trade further underground.

“How much harder will it be for law enforcement to actually investigate and know who these people are if they’re now not out in the open? I would prefer for them to be on craigslist and Backpage, because we need to know who are they are,” she wrote.

San Diego Unified board members discuss special education. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Frustrated with a school board election process they felt disenfranchised voters, citizens in January brought to the San Diego City Council four separate proposals that would revamp San Diego Unified’s election process.

Despite the fact the City Council has no authority over the school district, the school board election process falls under the purview of the city charter. So any change to the process would require a vote of the people — either through a ballot measure or a vote put up by the city.

The City Council, however, was reluctant to get involved and shot down all four proposals. They punted the issue back to the school district and advised them to come up with recommendations for how to proceed.

Since then, San Diego Unified school board established a 24-member committee made up of parents, students and union representatives to recommendations on election reforms.

Here’s how I described the school district’s elections process in January:

Unlike the way City Council elections work — where only the people who live in a certain district vote for that district’s representative — school board candidates first run in a districtwide election, then go on to a citywide runoff. Reformers argue that district-only elections would make it easier to see fresh faces on the school board, as city-wide elections are costly and tilt toward candidates with endorsements and financial backing from labor unions and other special interests.

Last May, the San Diego County Grand Jury recommended school board candidates be elected only from within their home sub-district, the same way City Council members, state Assembly and Senate members and congressional representatives are elected.

The district is now hosting a series of townhall meetings so the public can weigh in on some of the changes under consideration. The first of those meetings happened Wednesday at Mira Mesa High School.

Among the possible changes is whether to remove the school board elections from the city charter all together. San Diego Unified is one of only seven school districts in the state whose elections are governed by a city charter. The elections for every other K-12 district in the county fall under the jurisdiction of the county superintendent of schools.

It’s not entirely clear how the new election process would look should the election process be removed from the city charter, but at a City Council rules committee meeting this week, City Attorney Mara Elliott said she’s working on a memo that would clarify the process.

Here are changes under consideration, along with some context and some of the pros and cons discussed during Wednesday’s town hall:

Term Limits

Currently there are no term limits for San Diego Unified board members. Trustees Richard Barrera and John Lee Evans are both serving their third terms, and Kevin Beiser is running unopposed for his third term. The longest-serving school board member, though, was John de Beck, who served five terms over 20 years.

Those who want to keep the current system argue that serving as school board member involves a steep learning curve, so long-serving board members bring stability and institutional knowledge.

The other side argues that imposing term limits would allow for fresh ideas and improve the democratic process, because incumbents usually have a significant advantage during elections.

According to the school board committee, incumbents in San Diego Unified won five times more elections than their challengers over the past 30 years.

District-Only Elections

Most of the largest school districts in California, and the vast majority in San Diego County, use district-only elections to elect trustees.

The Grand Jury and those who want to see this change in San Diego Unified say district-only elections would allow for trustees who are selected by, and accountable to, the voters they represent. In a joint op-ed last year, Barrera and Beiser argued the opposite and said under the current system, trustees have an electoral incentive to represent all neighborhoods.

Some parents on Wednesday pointed to the 2016 election. LaShae Collins beat current trustee Sharon Whitehurst-Payne by a sizable margin during the district-only primary but lost the general election.

More Sub-Districts

The district is more than twice the size it was in 1935, when it established five trustees. Back then, there were about 4,100 students per trustee, according to the committee. Today there are 26,000 students per trustee.

Increasing the number of trustees by two might allow each to spend more time on constituents and schools in their areas. Six of the 10 largest school districts in California have seven trustees.

Adding trustees could also allow for deeper discussion and more debate on the school board, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it.

About seven years ago, a group of community members and business leaders brought forward a plan to remake the school board and add members, but the group didn’t gather enough signatures to get the plan on the ballot.

Who’s Eligible to Vote

Sixteen-year-olds are of course impacted by school board policies, so on one hand, it makes sense to give them a voice in elections. But more than a few adults last night questioned whether teenagers would simply be manipulated by their teachers or whether they’d know enough about issues to make an informed decision. (You could probably make the latter argument for adults, though, too).

As a matter of law, according to the committee, 16-year-olds and undocumented residents can vote in some local elections (but not federal or state elections) across the country.

Full-Time Salaries for School Board Members

One common argument for why it’s so difficult to find willing school board candidates is the low pay it offers. At $18,000 a year plus health benefits, being on the San Diego Unified school board doesn’t exactly provide a living wage, so the candidate pool is narrowed to retirees or those whose jobs have tremendous flexibility.

Increasing the school board salary could be one way to increase the candidate pool. In many cities, school board trustees earn no salary at all. School board trustees in Los Angeles Unified, however, earn an annual salary of $125,000 and are allocated paid staffers.

It’s important to remember the 24-member committee looking into election reforms is only an advisory group. That means the school board is under no obligation to accept whatever recommendations it comes up with.

Suzy Reid, a writer and researcher on the committee, said she’s served on a number of advisory committees over the years and it’s always “defeating” when recommendations are disregarded, but some of that is par for the course.

She said she’s serving on the current committee because she’s tired of seeing the school board seat in her area, currently represented by Mike McQuary, go unopposed.

“If anything comes of this, even if there are no changes to the school board, at least the public will be better informed about the process,” she said.

Jeff Bennett, a National Guardsman who’s also on the committee, said he’s not too worried the recommendations will be dismissed, because the committee will produce a report that will be available for public consumption.

“Even if they don’t follow our recommendations,” Bennett said, “at least they can take that report and go to the City Council with it.”

The school board is expected to return to the City Council with its recommendations by June.

Bragging Rights for San Diego Unified

San Diego Unified landed in the national spotlight for positive news this week for being the only large urban school district to improve math and reading test scores among fourth and eighth grade students.

For the first time, district scores exceeded the national average (by a point) on the so-called Nation’s Report Card, which allows for state-to-state comparisons. The district’s six-point increase in reading scores is considered unusually large, EdSource reported. A decade ago, it was 12 points below the national average. California as whole still fell below the national average for reading and math, but has improved.

Experts caution against attributing the scores to any particular policies, because a variety of variables come into play. Superintendent Cindy Marten, however, said the results “underscore the incredible teaching and learning that’s occurring in San Diego Unified schools every day.”

Court Case Could Hit San Diego Particularly Hard

Within the next three months, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which is expected to end “agency fees” and strip unions of much of their financing and power.

The case has been fueling anxiety among teachers across the country and was mentioned by the San Diego Education Association in its successful campaign for a new contract.

In an LA School Report commentary, one writer was skeptical of predictions that the court case will “crush” or “decimate” public unions in most places — with the exception of Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, which each have a higher-than-average percentage of members who pay fees.

“Fee-payers comprise about 11.8 percent of the United Teachers Los Angeles bargaining unit. For the San Diego Education Association it’s about 8.2 percent. For both of these locals, the loss of representation fees will have an immediate and significant impact on their budgets,” he writes.

ICYMI …

Two San Diegans with ties to Lincoln High School made a recent trip to D.C., where they met with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to discuss the impact of Obama-era discipline policies, which called on schools to reduce racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates.

Nicole Stewart, a former vice principal at Lincoln, and Eileen Sofa, whose son was the victim of a suspected rape at the school, met with DeVos to help inform her work on a new Federal Commission on School Safety, as the education secretary considers rolling back the federal guidance issued in 2014.

Stewart has since been quoted or referenced by outlets across the country, including the New York Times, The Weekly Standard and even the official blog of the U.S. Department of Education.

Stewart said she was motivated to speak out after a former Lincoln teacher and one of her friends, Nathan Page, committed suicide last year. She attributes his death to the treatment he endured at Lincoln High.

San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

Superintendent Cindy Marten stepped into Kearny High’s auditorium in October 2013, ready to deliver her first state of the district address as superintendent of California’s second largest school district.

It was a momentous night, both for Marten and the five school board members who had sidestepped a public search and quietly chosen her.

Images of rainbows and smiling children scrolled across a screen as Marten described the school district she envisioned, one where every student had the ability to attend a quality school in their own neighborhood. The board had tasked her with making that goal a reality.

“Every problem that we have in the district, there is a solution already in place,” she said. “If not in one of our schools, at least in one of our classrooms.”

Marten’s job would be to take “the pockets of success” she already glimpsed and put them in place districtwide. When that happens, the thinking goes, families will realize they don’t have to look any further than their own backyards to find the answers they’re looking for.

Four months earlier, Marten called the same idea the school board’s “Wizard of Oz theory,” referring to the fact that trustees found their homegrown superintendent serving as principal of a predominantly low-income elementary school in City Heights.

As if to bring the point to life, Marten walked behind a lectern and stepped into a pair of ruby red slippers. She then took center stage and clicked her heels three times.

“There’s no place like home,” she said.

Five years later, the gains have been incremental and difficult to measure. There’s not a quality school in every neighborhood. Enrollment districtwide has declined. And about the same portion of parents are taking their kids across town as when Marten started.

The Vision

In several important ways, the stars aligned for Marten when she stepped into the role of superintendent.

Unlike many large urban districts, where political and ideological rifts lead to infighting between board members, San Diego’s school board was unanimous in choosing her, and walked in lockstep toward an overarching plan for the district – which they called Vision 2020.

California was shifting to Common Core State Standards, and with them, a new statewide assessment for students.

Along with that shift came a temporary reprieve from testing while the state developed a new assessment. And a new test meant there’d be no way to compare the academic progress under Marten to growth that happened under former superintendents.

And after years of recession-era budget cuts, the district’s financial picture seemed ready to brighten.

The same day Marten took the helm as superintendent, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a new way of funding schools, called the Local Control Funding Formula. It promised to send school districts more money and give them more discretion over how to spend it. San Diego voters had also approved a pair of construction bonds that would provide the district with more than $5 billion to spend on construction and technology.

School board president John Lee Evans announces Cindy Marten as the board’s pick to helm San Diego Unified. / Photo by Sam Hodgson

Marten’s leadership would be an experiment that, if proven successful, would repudiate high-stakes testing and accountability-driven sanctions imposed by the federal government.

But after five years, the gains have been incremental and progress often difficult to measure.

Enrollment has continued to decline, expenses have outpaced increases in funding and year after year the board has stared down a budget shortfall that’s resulted in perpetual threats to cut programs, layoff notices and disruptions to special education services.

While districtwide test scores have risen slightly, mirroring scores statewide, the achievement gap Marten pledged to tackle at the outset has gone virtually unchanged.

Trustee John Lee Evans believes Marten has accomplished a great deal by making graduation rates more meaningful and intensely focusing on instruction. But her accomplishments can’t be boiled down to a single measure, he said.

“I know it’s so tempting to have some simple little score or measure of what’s going on, but it’s difficult to come up with that. I think it needs to be a lot of different measures,” said Evans.

There are a dozen ways to unpack the impact of a superintendent, including academic gains, a district’s financial health, transparency and parents and employees’ reported satisfaction.

We’ve taken a look at several of those metrics. Together, they tell a story of an administration that’s moved the needle in some ways, floundered in others and behaved in times of controversy in ways that contradicted the “be kind, dream big” rhetoric on which Marten has staked her image.

Parents Still Wary of Neighborhood Schools

About 10 years ago, district officials began to push back on the pervasive belief that parents needed to drive kids across town or load them onto buses if they wanted access to a solid education.

Busing was expensive, questionably effective and the burden of travel fell most heavily on students of color from low-income communities.

Besides, why shouldn’t every neighborhood have its own quality school, asked school board Trustee Richard Barrera?

Board members drafted a plan to do just that. And by 2013, they believed they found in Marten the perfect person to make it happen.

Marten and the board came up with 12 indicators that would define a quality school, things like quality teaching and leadership. If the reforms succeeded, a growing percentage of students would choose to remain in their assigned neighborhood schools.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

In the 2012-2013 school year, just over 44 percent of parents across the district chose to send their children to schools outside the neighborhood. By last year, according to data provided by the district, roughly the same percentage of families opted out of their neighborhood schools.

The percentage varies by geography, and is seen as a gauge of the confidence parents have in the schools closest to home.

In the affluent La Jolla Cluster, for example, 93 percent of students enrolled in their neighborhood schools last year, a number that’s been consistent with past years. In southeastern San Diego’s Lincoln cluster, by contrast, about 70 percent of neighborhood students opted out of the area high school.

Evans, often credited as the architect of the neighborhood schooling plan, said the goal isn’t as much about the numbers as it is about increasing the options parents want. To that end, the district has increased the number of dual-language programs, added new magnet schools and increased the number of career-preparatory programs.

“The ultimate goal is not that every kid attends their neighborhood school, but that students don’t have to leave the neighborhood because the school is not quality,” Evans said.

“I think we’re approaching the goal in the right way,” said Barrera. “There’s an easy way to keep more kids in neighborhood schools, and that’s to eliminate the choice program. But that’s the wrong way. The right way is to increase people’s confidence in their neighborhood school, and we’re already seeing that happen in places like Golden Hill and South Park. But it takes time to really see that percentage move,” he said.

Indeed, the board could have eliminated some choice options. But trustees also knew that doing so could cause a number of parents to simply leave the district. And while the district has kept the choice program alive, it’s also quietly slashed bus routes by nearly half and imposed financial burdens on families who rely on busing to attend schools outside their neighborhood.

Schools in certain areas have begun to attract the more affluent residents moving into the neighborhoods. But it’s hard to untangle whether those successes are attributable to the district, or to the parents and staff members at the schools themselves.

Barrera and other board members have held up McKinley Elementary as a model of a school that can be transformed when families invest in their neighborhood schools. Two years ago, when I asked what district leaders did to support that school’s success, Barrera said simply: “We didn’t mess with them.”

Test Scores Rise, But Gaps Remain Stagnant

In April, the release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide test that shows what students know in various subjects, brought a national spotlight to the district.

The results showed San Diego Unified to be the only large school district to make gains in fourth grade math and reading scores since 2015.

Marten touted the scores in a celebratory press release, and attributed the gains to the dedication of teachers. Meanwhile Mike Casserly, executive director for the Council of the Great City Schools, said San Diego Unified “blew the socks off” the test.

“The gains are evidence of, and testimony to, the serious academic work the school district has been doing over the last several years,” Casserly said.

But education policy expert Tom Loveless, former director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the NAEP results must be interpreted with caution.

“The NAEP is like a thermometer. It will tell you if you have a fever or not, but it won’t tell you why. That’s why you have to really exercise caution when politicians want to take credit for it,” he said.

Loveless said politicians on both the left on the right have long seized on the NAEP scores to make the case that the policies they support are working. The problem is that there’s no way to tease out whether scores are the result of federal, state or local policies, he said.

San Diego Unified made gains on the NAEP since 2015, but district scores on the test have also been rising steadily since 2000.

And while San Diego Unified outperformed other urban districts, it also has fewer students in poverty, and a smaller percentage of black students compared with other large urban districts, Loveless said. (The randomized samples of students who are tested match the demographics of the districts where they’re taken.)

A better measurement of the success of a superintendent’s reforms are generally scores on standardized tests, like the Smarter Balanced tests tied to the Common Core state standards, he said. So far, there’s only three years of data for that test to point to.

Between 2014-2015 and 2016-2017, average test scores ticked up for students across the district. The most recent scores show 55 percent of students met or exceeded standards in language arts – a 4 percentage point rise over three years.

In math, scores went up 5 percentage points over the same period, from 41 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards to 46 percent.

But while the scores rose overall, the gaps in test scores between Latino and white students – as well as black and white students – remained largely stagnant, shrinking less than 1 percentage point in both subjects over three years of testing.

Last year, 68 percent of white students in San Diego Unified met or exceeded state standards in math while just 25.4 percent of black students did the same. Just over 17 percent of students with disabilities met or exceeded math standards.

District spokesperson Maureen Magee said Marten wasn’t available to be interviewed for this story, but said the superintendent recognizes the district still has much work to do in closing the achievement gap.

Magee pointed to the rising number of black students who completed college-prep classes, known as A-G courses, which are aligned with entrance requirements to University of California and California State University schools.

Rising graduation rates have been a sign of success Marten and school board members have often lauded.

The district’s class of 2016, the first class required to pass A-G courses in order to graduate, landed a record-high graduation rate of 91 percent.

The graduation rate was accomplished, in part, however, because a significant number of the lowest-performing students who weren’t on track to graduate left for charter schools before they completed their senior years – in some cases on the advice of district counselors.

District officials initially claimed departing students had no bearing on the rising graduation rate, but a study by UC San Diego researchers later confirmed that had students who transferred to charter schools remained in a San Diego Unified high school, the graduation rate would have dropped from 91 percent to around 80 percent.

Still, the percentage of graduates who earned a C or better in A-G courses rose for all students, from 49 percent to 56 percent between 2013 and 2017, which district officials consider proof that the graduation rate has not only improved, but that a San Diego Unified diploma is now more meaningful.

Black graduates who met college entrance requirements rose, too – from 39 percent to 50 percent over the same time period.

“We have seen progress in the rapidly rising levels of achievement among our African American high school students, who posted strong gains in completing their UC a-g coursework with a C or above average,” Marten said, through a spokesperson. “These results are proof that progress is possible, and we are confident other supports in place will help spread these gains throughout the system.”

But to others, progress for black students has been too little, and come far too slowly.

“I’m so tired of hearing district leaders pat themselves on the back and celebrating these incremental gains for African-American students,” said Wendell Bass, a former San Diego Unified principal who has served on the board of the Association of African American Educators.

In 2016, high school resource officer Cheryl Hibbeln incensed parents when she said during a meeting at Lincoln High that far too many students enter their freshman year reading at a second-grade level. But Bass said he saw the same trend when he was principal of Lincoln High 20 years ago.

“You made some improvements and 50 percent of our African-American students are ready for college. But how much failure is acceptable?” Bass said.

Anything for the Kids

In 2013, not long after Marten took the helm as superintendent, I had a conversation with former school board member Scott Barnett, in which we discussed the board’s decision to appoint Marten without seeking input from the community.

During his tenure, Barnett broke with the board majority on many issues. But not when it came to the decision to select Marten.

“Everything that Cindy does is for the kids,” Barnett said at the time. “She will work with you, sweet talk you, go around you, step over you or break your arm to get what she wants if she believes it’s in the best interest of children.”

Five years later, Barnett’s comment has taken on meaning he may not have intended.

To Barrera, who was the first to float Marten’s name as a candidate for superintendent, Marten is an educator who at her core believes every student can learn if teachers are supported and students are given the right set of strategies. Not only did Marten have the expertise to make that happen, she had the rhetorical talent for connecting with audiences.

“Cindy was incredibly articulate about why the approach [she took at Central] was effective, and why it worked, and that’s why I thought Cindy was the right person to lead our system. I saw not only somebody who knew what worked, but somebody who could articulate those strategies to the public. That’s why I’m still incredibly confident that we have the right person,” Barrera said.

In press conferences, interviews and state of the district addresses, Marten still speaks with the kind of flourish that inspires confidence.

But her actions haven’t always matched her public image. And educators and district-watchers have described a culture of fear and retaliation during her tenure that’s grown increasingly pervasive.

Earlier this year, administrators surveyed across the district described chaos brought on by staffing shortages. Many of the complaints related to unreasonably heavy workloads. But several described an atmosphere of fear and hostility that’s come from district leaders.

“This job is hard enough (without) feeling the added pressure of always wondering when the noose will fall around your neck. We shouldn’t be afraid to have opinions, be frustrated and want our voices heard,” one middle school principal said in the survey.

One former principal told us at the time she faced hostility from district officials after speaking with reporters – a claim consistent with the tone of emails sent by the district’s chief public information officer, Andrew Sharp. (Sharp, who Marten selected as chief PIO, twice joked about the murder of a VOSD reporter.)

Under Marten, the district has been slow to respond to questions from the public and members of the press. Last year, a court ruled San Diego Unified illegally withheld emails related to a VOSD investigation of former school board trustee Marne Foster. More recently, the district announced its plans to delete all emails older than a year.

And one case headed to trial next month involves allegations that Marten played a role in attempting to cover up sexual assault at an elementary school.

That case involves Michael Gurrieri, a former investigator for the school district who claims school officials removed incriminating details from a report he produced about an alleged sexual assault at Green Elementary to satisfy Marten’s desire to keep the principal employed.

Marten’s evasiveness during a deposition in the case stands in stark contrast to her stated commitment to accountability.

In response to a question from Gurrieri’s attorney about whether forced copulation on another student constitutes a “serious incident,” Marten answered: “It depends … I need to know all the facts before I would determine the seriousness of it.”

Marten is expected to take the stand after the trial begins on June 6.

Still Waiting to Get Lincoln Right

If increased focus on instruction and meaningful graduation rates are two of Marten’s biggest accomplishments, southeastern San Diego’s Lincoln High represents one of Marten’s biggest failures.

In 2013, Marten described Lincoln as a kind of symbol for the most significant challenges urban schools face across the nation. But she was optimistic her administration could move the needle.

“When we get Lincoln right, we get America right,” she said at the time.

Five years later, Lincoln teachers, students and parents are still waiting for that to happen.

Marne Foster, school board trustee Kevin Beiser and Superintendent Cindy Marten attend the first day of the 2014-2015 school year at Lincoln High. / Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle

Lincoln has seen four different principals in the five years Marten has been superintendent. District officials have restructured and rebranded the school multiple times, with little success.

At a school board meeting in late April, parents and students from Lincoln lined up to air their grievances to Marten and the school board.

Tanja Daniels, a parent of two teenagers at Lincoln, blasted Marten and the board for failing address ongoing violence at the school. Her cousin, Eileen Sofa, died recently, before a lawsuit she brought against the district could be resolved.

Sofa’s son, who has severe disabilities and is non-verbal, was the victim of a suspected rape at Lincoln High. Before her death, Sofa said school staff withheld from her the truth about the case – including the fact that the suspected perpetrator had admitted to police he sexually assaulted Sofa’s son.

One of Daniels’ sons, a junior at Lincoln, told the board he and his brother have been the target of harassment and assaults from other students since September – and that sometimes the violence happened in full view of staff and security guards. When he or his brother sought help from school staff, the concerns were met with indifference, he said.

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you. It’s not like you’re going to do anything about it anyway. Y’all don’t care about us,” the student said.

Trustees were forced to temporarily close down the meeting as members of the audience shouted “Shame! Shame!” at Marten and board members.

The complaints are glimpses into a larger systemic failure to address Lincoln’s shortcomings.

Last year, just over 10 percent of students at Lincoln met or exceeded state standards in math, and 26 percent did so in English. That was the lowest rate of proficiency in English of all district high schools and second lowest in math. More Lincoln students were suspended for violent incidents last year than any other high school in the district – and that’s not even counting the number of students who administrators have sent home informally.

Barrera, however, believes Lincoln is on the cusp of change. He said this is the first year Marten has taken a truly hands-on approach to improving instruction at Lincoln, embedding herself and members of team on campus weekly.

Marten is a true instructional expert, he said, and has tremendous ability to ignore criticism and stay focused on the work. But her strength has a related drawback, he said.

“That same quality of not getting distracted has also been one of her biggest challenges, because you’ve got certain people who don’t necessarily understand what Cindy understands, and they don’t feel like they’ve been brought into the process or feel ownership over the decisions,” Barrera said.

The idea that Marten’s reforms are not the problem – that the problem is instead the public’s inability to understand her work, is a claim district officials have made often.

I asked Barrera why, if Marten has had the tools to improve Lincoln all along, it has taken five years to do so.

“Lincoln is certainly a source of frustration for me,” Barrera said. “I think Lincoln has been incredibly divisive politically, and there are people who take positions sometimes with involvement at Lincoln, and sometimes with no involvement. And that’s created a political environment that’s made it very difficult for teachers to do just do their work,” he said.

But the divisiveness that Barrera points to isn’t isolated to Lincoln. A growing sense of resentment has emerged between Marten and segments of the black community who believe the superintendent has made decisions that show disregard for black students and parents.

Marten did away with a plan to boost the academic achievement of black children that was in place since 2010. She said the plan was outdated, and claimed that because it was never formally voted on by the Board of Education, it was never district policy.

She effectively dismantled the district’s race and human relations office, whose staff members had for years had led work focused on racial justice. In the process, the district lost black staff members who had institutional knowledge and ties to the community.

And she stopped meeting with advocates from the Association of African-American Educators, said LaShae Collins, a former president of the group, but continues to meet with members of other student-interest groups in the district.

The district, via a spokeswoman, sent this response on Marten’s behalf:

“Cindy Marten spent a decade teaching and leading in the diverse City Heights neighborhood. African-American students have made strong gains in the time Cindy Marten has served as superintendent. The achievement gap in terms of graduation rates has narrowed. College readiness – defined as having completed UC A-G courses with a C or better – has improved for African-American students at a rate that is four times greater in San Diego Unified than in the rest of the state – from 2015 to 2016 alone. Much remains to be done, but all San Diego Unified students, including African-American students, are making progress under Superintendent Cindy Marten.”

Bass, a former Lincoln principal, said race relations have been tense since of the beginning of Marten’s term, when she addressed a room full of black community members as “you people,” and said they were more interested in complaining than finding solutions. (The statement was independently corroborated by another person who attended the meeting. Marten did not respond to a request for comment.)

Decisions Marten has made in recent years, like removing black educators from leadership positions, or calling shots at Lincoln High without community input, haven’t eased tensions, Bass said.

“There’s always been a sense from her that only she and other district officials really know what’s best for the community,” Bass said.

To Bass, the story of San Diego Unified is a reflection of Marten’s leadership. With its relative affluence and safety, a large percentage of district students share in the district’s success. But beyond the bright spots, the students who have historically struggled in disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to languish.

And five years after Marten took the district’s top spot, he said, district leaders are still not moving with the urgency needed to address the gaps between the students who have always done well, and those who have not.

“You can’t read people’s hearts so I can’t say someone doesn’t care. But all I can do is go by people’s actions. And through the actions, and the fact that our black and brown children are still at the bottom, I have to believe that we have a district and a superintendent who doesn’t care about our African-American children,” Bass said.