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Andra Belknap | First Published June 6, 2023 to OLO | Edited June 8
The three women’s departures — regardless of individual culpability — have marked a significant turning point in the school reconfiguration conversation’s tenor. Not a single Board member elected prior to 2022 remains part of the body. As one former Board member said to me, “Nobody survives this. Nobody survives closing schools.” And in the space of eight weeks, the narrative of this crisis has moved from blame to cautious optimism. Lueck herself — a contractor with the Ventura County Office of Education (VCOE) assigned to help OUSD through its financial crisis — will complete her work with the district in early June — a significant sign of progress.
Long-time OUSD administrator Sherrill Knox (former assistant superintendent under Morse and an OUSD parent and alumna herself) now serves as Interim Superintendent while a $25,000 search is underway to find a permanent replacement for Morse. In mid-May, following two public interview sessions, the three-member Board voted unanimously to fill the two empty trustee seats by appointment. Blair Braney, current president of the Mira Monte Parent-Teacher Organization, will replace Chandler while Kathy Smith, who served as the executive assistant to OUSD’s last three superintendents, will replace Griffen. Both women are graduates of Nordhoff High School (2003 and 1976, respectively). Smith is now the only member of the Board with teaching experience (nine years at Monica Ros School). Following the May 17th votes to appoint Braney and Smith, the OUSD board room erupted in applause — a signal of approval I’ve not seen in a long while. Both seats will be up for reelection in 2024.
FROM LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATES’ PROPOSAL
BLAIR BRANEY FROM OJAIUSD.ORG
KATIE SMITH FROM OUSD.ORG
Notably, Braney and Smith were selected from a group of eight impressive applicants, including Maggie Doran Rogers, a former OUSD employee who now serves as a purchasing technician for VCOE, former OUSD teacher Eric Solecki, and Dr. Lynne Goldfarb, an eight-year Ojai resident whose PhD work “focused on school policy and effective change for public school districts.”
Given the negativity experienced by their predecessors, it was encouraging to see such a robust group seek a place at the table. The amount of work required (demanded) of a School Board Trustee — I think — is clearer than ever. As are the harsh consequences the public can deliver. And still, eight community members raised their hands to volunteer. That’s perhaps the most heartening piece of this drama the community has witnessed thus far.
The constellation of the Board is far from the only change at OUSD. During the first full week of May — which, ironically, is also recognized as Teacher Appreciation Week¹ — the three-member Board voted to finalize layoffs impacting 31 staff members, including ten full-time teaching positions.
However, due to a series of staff resignations and retirements, OUSD has been able to rescind a number of these layoffs, according to an OUSD human resources representative. However, regardless of the reason for departure, OUSD will enter the 23-24 school year with nearly three dozen fewer staff members. In total, this reduction of employees yields approximately $2.6 million in savings, according to OUSD Executive Director of Fiscal Services Ryan Worsham.² The reality of school finance — as I see it — is that closing schools doesn’t save much money. Firing employees does that.
Following this elimination of more than 30 staff positions, OUSD has another challenge on the horizon: long-stalled contract negotiations with its remaining staff. Ojai’s teachers — AKA “certificated staff”³ — represented by the Ojai Federation of Teachers (OFT), have labored under an expired contract since June 2021.⁴ OUSD’s classified staff (employees who don’t have a teaching credential — janitors, bus drivers, office management, etc.) are in a similar position but represented by their own union — the California School Employee Association (CSEA). The classified staff’s contract expired in September 2021. To say OUSD employees are frustrated is an understatement. Remember: these are the folks who shepherded OUSD students through the pandemic.
In May, local CSEA chapter President Chuck Crawford told the Board that the classified staff feel exploited. He added, “The reason we feel exploited is that [the cuts are] landing on us.” He’s not wrong. And a quick glance at the classified staff’s salary schedule demonstrates their reality. Currently, a new OUSD school bus driver earns about $17 an hour — just above minimum wage.
FROM OJAI FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
We have a bit more insight into active negotiations on the teachers’ side. Union negotiations are confidential, but OUSD and OFT mutually agreed to make some information available to the public. OFT has publicly requested a 16% raise — which sounds like a lot until you take a look at OUSD’s salary schedule in comparison to other districts. According to OFT, “even if the district came in with [a] 12% [raise], Ojai teachers would still be among the lowest paid in the county.” In response to OFT, the district has counter-offered raises of approximately 4%. That offer was not accepted.
This fight for fair compensation is not unique to Ojai: teacher’s unions across the state are lobbying for — and winning — salary increases. In early 2023, Ventura teachers and classified employees successfully won 10% raises. In 2022, the Santa Paula Federation of Teachers won a 7.9% raise.
According to OFT President Richard Byrd, union negotiations came to a standstill under Morse’s leadership. “The health of a school district is completely based on the ability for its leaders, on all levels, to communicate,” Byrd said, and “she just cut us off.” Byrd and his OFT membership announced a near-unanimous vote of “no confidence” in Morse in January, and formal mediation between OFT and OUSD paused in March, he said. Now, with Knox in the superintendent role, negotiations have restarted. “I can't speak to anything currently that we're discussing, but what I can tell you is the utter tenor of the feeling in the room has changed,” Byrd said. And though the conversation has begun anew, he made the high stakes of negotiations clear. “Basically, we could strike right now because we’re on an expired contract,” he said while making clear that “no imminent strike is being planned.”
OUSD staff contract negotiations take place against the backdrop of a national conversation about public school salaries and teacher workload. A recent national survey found that teachers’ job satisfaction is at its lowest level in 50 years. This problem has not gone unnoticed by policymakers: Sen. Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill to increase teacher pay to a minimum of $60,000. Here in California, Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi introduced a bill to raise teacher pay by 50% over the next seven years.⁵ What’s inarguable is that America’s teachers are reaching a breaking point. It also seems clear — to me at least — that there’s not (as of yet) sufficient political power to meaningfully address this challenge. At present, multiple national crises are coalescing around public school employees: gun violence, book banning, and a mental health crisis amongst students. Public school employees across the United States are effectively charged with holding together the threads of a battered social safety net.
¹ It often overlaps with National Nurses Week. There's something to say here about how underpaid careers in the “care” sector receive holidays instead of raises, but now is not that time. ² In total, OUSD cut approximately $3.3 million from its 23-24 budget, according to Worsham. ³ It’s very literal — these are the employees with a teaching credential.⁴ Technically, the current contract was extended via Covid-era Memorandum of Understanding, which itself expired in June of 2022.⁵ Previous efforts by Muratsuchi to pass similar teacher pay increases have failed to gain sufficient support. The other massive challenge ahead of OUSD in the next few months — oh yes, there’s more — is the implementation of a radically new district configuration. Come August, Ojai’s elementary school footprint will be halved, and Nordhoff High School will begin serving 7th-12th graders. In a matter of months, Nordhoff will become the only public junior-senior high school in Ventura County. Here’s a look at the transformed district students, parents, and school staff will experience come August. Among other things, Nordhoff is going to need a new name.
The unification of the high school and middle school students (minus the sixth graders, who will be sent back to elementary school) was initially the most controversial piece of the school reconfiguration plan — particularly among parents.
During a February Board meeting, Gisele Muňoz — who identified herself as an OUSD graduate and as a representative of 150 Hispanic families in Ojai — tearfully pled with the Board: “No unir Matilija y Nordhoff,” she said (“Do not combine Matilija and Nordhoff.”) Other parents expressed concern about young adolescents sharing a campus with older teens. In Trustee Phil Moncharsch’s words: “No one in their right mind wants a whole bunch of 12-year-old girls with 18-year-old boys.”⁶
During these initial reconfiguration conversations, the Board, recognizing discomfort with the junior-senior high school configuration, aimed to offer parents a choice: seventh and eighth graders could either attend a to-be-formed K-8 elementary school or the newly reimagined Nordhoff. However, the K-8 plan didn’t manifest due to a lack of enrollment.
Trustee Jim Halverson, an early champion of combining the middle school and high school, told me that his goal was to “revitalize Nordhoff.” He continued, “When [young] kids get to Nordhoff, [they] may be one of only 450 kids,” referring to a 2022 enrollment study that projected Nordhoff High School enrollment will fall to approximately 470 students by the 2031-2032 school year. “I don't even know what electives you're going to have,” he said. “I was trying to think five to ten years ahead.” Nordhoff currently houses more than 700 high schoolers, but that number is projected to drop rapidly given current and projected elementary school class sizes.
ENROLLMENT PROJECTIONS REPORT BY SCHOOL OF ATTENDANCE FROM COOPERATIVE STUDIES’ 2022 ASSESSMENT
Today, discussion of the junior-senior high carries a far more positive tone than early conversations (perhaps because there’s no going back at this point). “I have a child who's going to be in seventh grade and one in eighth next year…I did not like the idea at all, I’m going to tell you that flat out,” Doran Rogers said during a School Board candidate forum in May, “But my seventh and eighth graders, next year, are so excited to go to Nordhoff.”
A current Matilija student, 12-year-old Lucas McCracken-Kern, provided his perspective during an early spring Board meeting, “I wanted to say that going to Nordhoff isn’t so bad because I’m excited that there might be new possibilities for new electives there.” He added,
Indeed.
Now, OUSD faculty and staff — alongside a group of committed parents — are scrambling to combine the junior and high schoolers on the Nordhoff campus. Again, initial reconfiguration conversations presumed that seventh and eighth graders would be walled off from their high school counterparts — another pledge that will not come to fruition. According to Asli Ruf, President of the Nordhoff Parent Association and a parent representative on the Nordhoff/Matilija transition team, it’s simply impossible to keep them separate.
According to Ruf, the current plan is for seventh and eighth graders to take core classes like English, social studies, and science with their peers. Middle schoolers who take advanced math or Spanish, however, will likely be in class with high schoolers. Electives like drama, dance, and band, too, will include both middle and high schoolers. The most challenging piece of the transition work, she said, was figuring out the bell schedule — middle schoolers require far fewer instructional minutes than high schoolers.
PHOTO ANDRA BELKNAP 2021
In this school reconfiguration conversation, I think it’s important to state the obvious: OUSD students and staff have grappled with tremendous change since 2019 — that’s the year Matilija Middle School (MMS) added sixth graders to its campus. That first class of MMS sixth graders also happened to experience the Valley’s first pandemic-related school closures in more than a century. The following two school years — 20-21 and 21-22 were marked by school closures, fear, isolation, mask mandates, and community vitriol. In October of 2021, OUSD headquarters was defaced with an imperative in blood-red paint: “UNMASK MY KIDS!” The 22-23 school year — now coming to an end — has been similarly fraught.
“That’s why I’m so concerned about the Board deciding to move with this this year,” Ruf remarked. “These kids have had the short end of the stick academically.”
Ruf, who has a long record of involvement in OUSD’s parent-teacher organizations, does see a reason to be hopeful about the junior-senior high school. “I think Nordhoff is going to be very vibrant next year,” she said. To her, OUSD has the chance to create a strong culture of mentorship at Nordhoff and expose middle schoolers early to opportunities they’ll have as high schoolers.
Ruf, like Byrd, is skeptical that the unification of Nordhoff and Matilija will lead to any significant cost-savings. OUSD administrators have stated that they expect a 5% drop in enrollment due to school reconfiguration and the associated controversy. Ruf believes the drop could be far more significant due to parents being skeptical of sending their young teens to a junior-senior high — especially given that Villanova Preparatory School is starting a middle school program in 2023. In the words of Solecki, who has taught at both Nordhoff and Villanova, “I think that [the Villanova Middle School is] potentially lethal to OUSD.” Remember: for every student OUSD loses, so goes approximately $10,000 in state funding.
⁶ It’s one hell of a loaded statement: gender roles, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. And in initial conversations, a vocal minority shared this concern. I’ll note that OUSD middle schoolers and high schoolers do currently attend summer school on the same campus.We’ve arrived at the close of the 22-23 school year. And together, we watch the version of OUSD that I and countless others experienced as young people fade from reality. Our experience of education in Ojai becomes history. And that’s painful.
In the six months I’ve now spent reporting this series, one realization has become paramount: our public schools are what we make them. Extracurricular activities like art, music, and sports are not guaranteed to our students; they are opportunities created by dedicated community volunteers and OUSD staff. Public education is a community endeavor — that’s what’s beautiful (and deeply frustrating) about it.
Something I noted at the beginning of this piece is that the mood of our public reconfiguration conversations has noticeably shifted. Why do I find that so interesting? Because that change occurred only after the community, as a collective, banished three women⁷— with varying degrees of culpability — from their respective offices. In my mind, this phenomenon reveals two things: a misunderstanding of a systemic crisis that continues to unfold and the misogyny present in our public debate. I’ll explore this idea further in the final piece of this series, as well as what I see as the future challenges facing OUSD. I’ll give you a hint: we — the public — now possess a lot of extremely valuable, empty space. What becomes of those public spaces — I think — will define our community’s future.
⁷ Four, if you include Penelope DeLeon (click for link).
EARLY ACCESS TO PART 4 WILL BE GIVEN TO OLO MEMBERS
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