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San Diego District A school board candidates say inequities, transparency with parents need work

San Diego Union-Tribune - 2/17/2020

Three San Diego Unified School District parents running for the District A school board seat all say that district inequities and parent communication need to improve.

They also are interested in addressing a variety of issues, ranging from school choice to charter schools to negative press for the district.

Entrepreneur Stephen Groce, educator and nonprofit consultant Crystal Trull, and health educator Sabrina Bazzo are running for the school board seat that represents District A, a subsection of San Diego Unified that includes Clairemont, Mira Mesa, Madison and University City high schools.

They are running to take the place of Board President and District A Trustee John Lee Evans, who is not running for re-election.

The District A race is the only San Diego Unified School Board race that is currently contested in the March 3 primary. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election in November.

District A is the only San Diego Unified race that has more than two candidates on the ballot. That could change if write-in candidates apply and qualify to be added to the ballot in the next several days. People can apply to be a write-in candidate until Tuesday.

The other San Diego Unified School Board races are happening in District E, in southeastern San Diego, and in District D, in south-central San Diego.

UC San Diego business development manager LaWana Richmond is challenging current Trustee Sharon Whitehurst-Payne for District E. And current Trustee Richard Barrera is running unopposed for District D.

All three District A candidates are parents: Groce and Trull have children attending District A schools, and Bazzo's children graduated from Mira Mesa High.

The candidates differ in what they mention as priorities.

Groce, who is running for a second time after being defeated by Evans in 2016, criticized actions by district leadership, including the decision to move public comments to the end of board meetings. Groce, a businessman, said organizations like San Diego Unified must serve their clients first.

"Our students and our teachers have to be our customers and clientele, and unless we treat them the best that we can and make them first and foremost, we can't have positive outcomes," he said.

Groce also takes issue with the district's declining school choice opportunities, saying there are not enough spots for students to transfer to a district school that is not their neighborhood school.

Groce said he sees inequity in the opportunities and programs available at certain schools. For example, he said he has met Lincoln High students who were upset that their friends got into another district high school with a nursing program, which Lincoln does not have.

"When you look at certain school clusters having more segregation than others — call it what it is — that's just not fair," Groce said.

Groce also said he thinks diversity on the school board has been slow to keep up with diversity in the district. Three of the board's five members are white while only 24 percent of San Diego Unified's students are white, according to state data.

Groce, who is black and Filipino, said he's "challenged" to be, to his knowledge, the first black person to run for a school board seat north of the 8.

"So every minority trustee has to be out of District E? That doesn't make any sense to me," Groce said.

Bazzo has been a parent volunteer in the Mira Mesa cluster for about 18 years, where she helped run fundraisers that provided field trip funds and senior scholarships.

She said Mira Mesa has been lucky to have strong community support, but other neighborhood schools have been "beaten down" and are struggling with enrollment or performance.

"We need some people that are gonna be standing up for our neighborhood schools, and also for full and fair funding for all our students," Bazzo said.

Bazzo said a primary issue is charter schools taking money from district schools and "draining a lot of the reserves."

District schools lose state per-student funding when their students leave to attend charter schools.

Bazzo said she is not against charter schools, but she thinks several charter schools are low-performing, lack transparency and are selective, even though charter schools are not allowed to selectively enroll students under state law.

Bazzo said current district leadership has made "quite a few accomplishments" in overall test scores and percentages of students qualifying for state college and university admission, but gaps among student groups remain. Special education under-staffing needs to be addressed for equity and safety reasons, she said.

Evans and the teachers union have endorsed Bazzo.

"Although I've been endorsed by the president of the school board, I'm not one that's not going to speak my mind," Bazzo said.

Trull, a candidate with a nonprofit background, said she would focus on allocating resources in a way that aligns with the district's mission if she wins.

"Are we strategizing?" she said. "Are we thinking long-term, or are we just being reactive to the budget constraints that are happening year after year? Is what we're doing making an impact? How do we know that?"

She said she would work to increase parent engagement by making information from meetings and reports easier to understand and deploying more online tools for parents to talk to the district.

Trull said she has been troubled by the number of "negative" stories that media outlets have published about the district, which she said indicates that work needs to be done.

"It just seems like a lot of bad press or negative press about how terrible they're doing, which is something I want to change," Trull said.

Trull said she doesn't have solutions for how to address the district's inequities, budget struggles and other issues, but she plans to use data and talk to people to find them out.

"I don't know that I have the right answers right now, but I have the right questions to figure out what those answers are," she said.

The primary election is on March 3.

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