School District Made Up of Abnormal People

 Why Can't Emery School District Attract 

Normal People to its Administration?

Stark Differences Between the School District and the Community

Community Wants to Help the Poor & Downtrodden Among Us, the District Doesn't

News Analysis

The people that run the Emery Unified School District are bizarre.  By ‘bizarre’  we mean not normal.  What else are we to believe when we have a local government agency in a democracy that demonstrably represents the polar opposite of the values of the community in which they exist?  Not to put too fine a point on it but the opposite of normal is expressly, not normal.

Here in Emeryville, we have a community that wants to help the working poor among us.  They want to help build a more equitable community that empowers all in the community.  We know this by the results of many votes taken over the years.  Yet our school district is here working to highjack these values, despite all their propaganda to the contrary. 

Consider what it is that Emeryville residents want: we want to increase the wages of the poorest among us.  We know this from votes taken in 2015 and 2019 and the election of each of the pro-minimum wage ordinance City Council members.  Our School District however, wants to keep wages low.  We know this from their actions and their statements.  Also, we want to hold ourselves accountable for past bigotry.  Our School District however wants to change the subject, run away from accountability.  We want to help our teachers thrive in our community.  Our School District wants to fire teachers.  On matters of existential importance like this, the community and the School District are opposites.  It’s all very curious. 

 

Emeryville’s record on raising the hourly wage of the working poor is impressive; we easily passed 2005’s Measure C, the ‘living wage for hotel workers’ when 54% of voters said hotel workers should make at least $9 per hour.  The school district on the other hand, was 100% against it.  Unsolicited, every single school board member signed a letter urging Emeryville voters to say NO to the wage increase.   In 2015, the City Council voted to increase the minimum wage in town to $14.03 with cost of living increases baked in.  Later when three Council members voted for a wage roll back at the behest of business owners, the residents of Emeryville fought to keep the progressive minimum wage by petition with the threat of an election.  The Council backed down because they could see the writing on the wall: Emeryville people support living wages. 

Increasing the wages of the poorest workers in our community is very popular with the whole community (except at the Emery Unified School District).  Current school board member and former City Council wannabe John Van Geffin pledged to voters in 2016 he would try to kill the Minimum Wage Ordinance at every single City Council meeting if voters would only elect him to that body.  Voters resolutely said NO to Mr Van Geffin for City Council.  So off he went to where he is more welcome: the Emery School Board.

In addition to keeping worker’s pay low, Emery Unified has sought to stop affordable housing for families in town.  In 2018, only two school board members were willing to endorse Measure C, Emeryville's affordable family housing bond then on the ballot for Emeryville voters to decide (the same Measure C name but distinct from the 2005 hotel workers measure).  A majority of board members said NO to the Measure and as a result, the District failed to endorse it.  A full 72% of Emeryville voters passed the Measure C affordable housing bonds.  Again, very compelling and illuminating numbers; almost three quarters of residents supported the housing bond but the school board couldn't even get a majority to support it.

72% of Emeryville voters were in favor of the
Measure C  affordable family housing bond.

In the 1970s, our school district fired a teacher for being a transgender person.  By 2020, a groundswell of citizens in the community sought to make amends for the District’s role in that anti-transgender bigotry.  The grass roots action was seen by our school district as something to put down.  And so they moved in and disallowed naming the school gymnasium after the teacher they had fired so many years ago.  The bigotry continues at Emery Unified.  The community is now trying to name the athletic field at the school site after the fired transgender teacher but again, our School District is actively pushing down this new community effort against bigotry and for accountability (see upcoming Tattler story on this).

In 2014, the board hired a new superintendent of the schools, John Rubio.  Mr Rubio used his office in a multi year radical effort to wholesale fire veteran teachers putatively to drive up test scores at Emery.  The effort placed Emery in the unenviable position as the worst school district in the entire Bay Area for teacher retention, a well known benchmark for assessing a school district’s success.  After a couple of years at it, Superintendent Rubio was firing new teachers he himself had hired.  Emery’s test scores fell every year Mr Rubio was at Emery, a point lost on the school board who continued to support him as he drove Emery down to the bottom, becoming the worst school district in the East Bay.  More important than raising test scores was the board's bizarre need to fire teachers.

60% of School Board members were against
the Measure C  affordable family housing bond.

In a scathing rebuke, nine teachers testified against Superintendent Rubio at a now legendary school board meeting.  The board, working for Mr Rubio,  gave individual fired teachers only three minutes to speak their piece on their way out the door.  Some of these teachers had worked for the District for over a decade.  Afterward, the school board, in a whitewashing response, refused to faithfully record the event in the official minutes as they are required to do.

Another former Emery Superintendent testified in federal court against teacher unions.  Superintendent Debra Lindo, a very popular superintendent with the school board, used her time at Emery to try to take down the teacher’s union, netting a ‘teachers resolution’ countering Ms Lindo and signed by 93% of teachers.  Later, little Emery Unified was featured in the notorious 2014 Vergara v. California, a case with national implications.  Our superintendent supplied the billionaire tech titan plaintiff, David Welch, with a legal declaration in which she said teachers unions must be destroyed 'for the sake of the children'.  

What are the odds that in a fair world, the values of the democratic government would so nearly be completely at odds with the governed?  Take the minimum wage issue: how many people are in favor of increasing the minimum wage in Emeryville?  We know by the 2005 plebiscite that number is 54% (and that’s with a massive campaign spending imbalance in favor of the NO side).  One would expect at least half of a school board who presumably would want to help poor families in our town, to be on the same side as the majority of residents.  And yet 100% of our elected school board members, inextricably people culled from our community, were against it.

This long standing record of Emery employees shows us what this public agency stands for.  And what they stand for is what the people of Emeryville stand against.  The Emery Unified School District is an alien presence in our community.  These are not normal people.   But why should abnormal people be ensconced in a democratic agency?  Shouldn’t our values be reflected in an agency that’s answerable to the people?  One would think so but the fact this is not the case tells us political ideologues are in charge at Emery.  

This school district is and has been steadfastly and demonstrably against the working poor in our community.  They are anti-union.  They are anti-transgender.   There is a culture at Emery School District that works against the people they are paid to work for. 

We don’t know why this district attracts people so wholly against working poor families like this but such a paradigm should be inherently unstable in a community such as ours.   The only way it can endure is in darkness.  Emeryville residents should shine some light in there.  

School Board Member John Van Geffen
He's really not fond of the working poor.
As a City Council candidate in 2016, he said if elected 
 he would try to overturn Emeryville's Minimum Wage
Ordinance at every single Council meeting over
his entire four year term if needs be.

School District Moves Against Bicycling at Center of Community Life Site

"Pimps and Drug Dealers" Will Prey On 
Our Children

No Intent to Build Required Path

The Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee ruled Monday against a plethora of high level authorities that had assembled at the City Hall meeting asking to approve a plan for bike parking at Emeryville's proposed new school and to remove a bike path adjoining the school.  After the Committee voted unanimously to require the path be built and the City Council concurred in April, the Committee was descended upon Monday by a dozen City and School District staff members and department heads.  Included in the fray was the Superintendent of the Schools, the Chief of Police, the head of the Recreation Department and the President of the School Board all pleading for the Committee reverse its earlier vote to compel the District to install the required bicycle/pedestrian path adjoining the incipient Center of Community Life.  The Committee refused Monday to reverse the earlier vote. The assembled group uniformly expressed concern that the proposed bike pedestrian path, called the ECCL Path, would attract a criminal element and that the children at the adjacent school would be imperiled.

Monday's appeal to the Bike/Ped Committee seems to represent a desire on the School District's part to get as much support as possible for not building the ECCL Path but the District indicated it has no intention of building the path in the foreseeable future regardless of the Bike/Ped Committee and the City Council vote forcing them to.  

"I'm Sorry, I Don't Have That Information" Part 2
The throng also asked the Committee members to accept a bike parking component of the Center of Community Life plan but the Committee rebuffed the proposal citing insufficient parking spaces. The plan called for 44 total bike parking spots (22 secure) for the entire Center of Community Life which will include 800 students plus teachers and staff plus the Recreation Department faculty and staff plus members of the public.

Emery schools architect Roy Miller
Again, he doesn't have the information.

The Committee attempted to determine how much bike parking would be appropriate based on how many people would be using the site on a given day, the standard metric the Committee uses as it recommends bike parking for commercial projects in town.  The School District architect, Roy Miller told stunned Committee members he had no idea how many people could be expected to be on the site leaving them unable to make an informed decision, "I'm sorry, I don't have that information" he said, in a moment of deja vu.  Mr Miller had uttered the same remark to the planning Commission and then the City Council in April about size of the existing school pool deck, as those decision making bodies attempted to determine whether to shrink the deck to make way for the ECCL Path.
After Mr Miller punted on the number of people expected at the Center of Community Life on a daily basis, the Bike/Ped Committee members determined on their own it must be more than 1000 and they called for at least 10% bike parking spots or 100 for the cramped site, a number that seemed to stun the school officials.

"Classist"

Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo
Bike/Ped paths are bad..."drastic" even 
So why are WE being picked on? It's not fair!

The meeting was punctuated with plenty of hyperbole and overblown bombast as the authorities attempted to throw their weight around and intimidate the Committee members.  Two school security personnel testified that the bike/ped path would be crawling with criminals preying on the school children, upping the ante of the previous "gang rape" rhetoric from Council member Nora Davis.  The chief of school security, Ken Wright noted thugs and criminals would use the path as an access point; "pimps and drug dealers" would be "cutting holes in the fence" to get at the children he said.  In an emotional plea, he hinted children could be "taken" and he said no one would want that on their conscience.
Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo said the bike/ped path is "drastic" and she complained that it is unfair that the neighboring private school, Escuela Bilingue Internacional (EBI) was released from a proposed path alongside that facility while the Center of Community Life is being forced to accepted its path, a double standard.  She called the April decision by the City Council allowing removal the EBI Path "classist",  owing to the advantaged private school and disadvantaged public school dynamic.

Ms Lindo and the anti-ECCL Path crew plans on taking its show on the road after the drubbing it suffered at the Bike/Ped Committee Monday.  They plan on giving the Committee a tour of the site in the near future in hopes of peeling off a majority of Committee members before appealing to the City Council at a later date.

Emery's Roy Miller Obfuscates

"I'm Sorry, I Don't Have That Information"

Opinion
The Emery Unified School District lost a rare battle April 2nd when it failed to convince the City Council to amend the General Plan to delete a planned bike/pedestrian path near the future school site at the Center of Community Life (ECCL), causing School District watchers to conjecture about how the District is going to regroup to try to force the closure of this path.  The fact that even chief Emeryville City Planner Charlie Bryant openly speculated at that meeting that the District would not abide by the Council's decision to keep the path, gives Emeryville citizens an idea about the level of arrogance and the obstinacy of this School District.

The Emery Unified School District really does not like the idea of a bike/pedestrian path running alongside the proposed Center of Community Life.  They never elucidated precisely why they hate the path but the lengths the District went to force closure of this path are really quite extraordinary.  Point man Roy Miller, the District's architect (how many school districts do you know that retains an architect as a permanent employee?) purposefully denied City Hall decision makers the information they need to make an informed decision about it.

The first body to decide about the ECCL path was the Planning Commission at their meeting on February 28th.  At that meeting Mr Miller testified the existing high school swimming pool was going to be saved and the width required for the proposed bike/ped path would mean the pool deck would be compromised to such an extent as to render it useless.  The Planning Commission Chair, Venessa Kuemmerle asked Mr Miller how wide the existing pool deck is in order to get an idea of what he was talking about.  That's when Roy Miller, District architect in charge of the Center of Community Life told the Commission he wasn't sure, "I'm sorry, I don't have that information " he told the Commission.  He did say he knew it would destroy the pool's usefulness, an outright falsehood.  What he failed to tell the Commissioners is that the pool deck has plenty of extra room and it could easily be reduced a few feet to accommodate the path.
Onlookers might have been shocked to hear about a District architect that would not have this basic dimension information at hand especially since Mr Miller has been immersed in all aspects of this school campus build out for some 10 years.

Nevertheless, Roy Miller came unprepared for that Planning Commission meeting, if you believe his claim.  To those who feel inclined to believe Mr Miller, perhaps you should ask why, after he was chastised by Ms Kuemmerle, would he again fail to provide that same information a few weeks later, when asked by the City Council, at the Council meeting on April 2nd?  Once again, the Council needed to know how large the existing pool deck is so they could make an informed decision about the path, but again Mr Miller responded with, "I'm sorry I don't have that information." With schools Superintendent Debra Lindo looking on, he did volunteer that the deck is too small and the path would render the swimming pool useless.

Superintendent Lindo it should be noted, moved to protect her employee after the performance at City Hall.  She refused to comment after the meeting, on Mr Miller's tactics used against the City Council.

Roy Miller was called before the Planning Commission and the City Council to provide unbiased and objective information.  We like to think the three Council members who voted to keep our General Plan didn't believe Mr Miller when he claimed to not know how much space is available at the pool deck.  We're happy the School District's tactics didn't work on April 2nd.

So we have to ask, why is Roy Miller still in the School District's employ?  Is this how the District plans on operating all the way down the line with the Center of Community Life?  Will the District ignore the ruling by the City Council to save our General Plan and our ECCL bike/ped path?
With its history of shutting down dissenters on the Center of Community Life and these sort of arrogant tactics brazenly used, we say its time to reel in this District.  We expect the School District to honor the City Council's decision to save the ECCL bike/ped path.