The Learning Curve: San Diego Unified’s Board President Won’t Run for Reelection

San Diego Unified Trustee Cody Petterson will be a one and done. The current board president still has about a year and a half left on his term, but has decided he will not seek reelection next year. He’s the only one-term board member since Marne Foster, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor of accepting illegal gifts in 2016 and resigned as part of her plea deal. 

Petterson said it was an “honor to serve,” and that he’d wrestled with whether to run again for months. In the end, though, he felt his serving on the board wasn’t sustainable. 

The crunch: Petterson said a simple math problem was at the root of his decision.  

San Diego Unified is a huge and complex district, and Petterson said he routinely spent between 25 and 30 hours a week working on district business. In exchange for that commitment, the district pays board members (both adult and student) a monthly stipend of $1,914.42. So, as a single father of two children. He also had to keep up a full-time day job.  

The day job, the district job, fatherhood, the stipend? It just didn’t pencil out, he said. 

“The people that can run for (the board) are people that maybe have a spouse who is the main breadwinner, or are retired, or are independently wealthy,” Petterson said. “For a person who’s not, it’s a tour of duty in which you basically spend four years just completely frantic.” 

The look back: When Petterson won a seat on the board, heck, even when he ran, he was skeptical that profound change could be made. Just read my 2022 profile of then-candidate Petterson’s paradoxically fatalistic and hopeful worldview if you need any proof. Even given what will be a relatively short tenure, Petterson is proud of what the board accomplished.  

During his time on the board, the district was slammed by scandals. One led to the firing of the district’s superintendent after an investigation found he’d sexually harassed female staff. The district’s long-simmering accountability problem also reared its head with a damning federal report that slammed the way the district handled misconduct claims.  

Still, he feels the district is much healthier now than when he started. He said it operates more transparently than it used to, both with the media and with the community. He also thinks they’ve made progress on everything from social emotional wellness to student performance to discipline to data collection that helps inform decision-making.  

“And I still have a year and a half left, and six months of my presidency, and I’m excited about it. We’ve got a lot more stuff to achieve,” Petterson said. 

What’s next: Petterson isn’t leaving politics for good. He said he’ll likely run for a seat on California’s Board of Equalization, the agency that oversees portions of the state’s tax system. Since 2019, he’s served as the chief deputy for Mike Schaefer, the board member who currently represents the southern tip of California. That position could provide him the full-time gig he needs. 

Were he to run, and win, he said he’d aim to help tackle one of the biggest challenges Californians face – the housing crisis. 

“My priorities are thinking through how you generate revenue in a way that’s sustainable … and incentivizing the sort of transformative changes we need in our housing production system,” Petterson said. “If we don’t solve this problem, it’s going continue to be an albatross around our society and my constituents and their kids aren’t going to be able to live in this community.” 

Sorta related but not really: San Diego Unified’s two newest student board members were sworn in this week. Alina Nguyen is a senior at Hoover High, and Ashley Ordaz is a rising junior at University City High.  

Despite receiving the same pay as Petterson thanks to a 2023 board vote, the district’s student board members still only receive preferential votes. That means their votes are recorded, but don’t count toward final vote tallies.  

Past San Diego Unified board members pushed to change that policy. It even went up for a full vote in 2022, but it was rejected by the majority of trustees, producing one of the only non-unanimous votes the board has taken in years. Another one happened just a couple of months ago. 

National Teachers Union Also Going All In on AI 

Just months after leaders of the California State University system announced it was taking steps to become an “AI-powered public university system,” one of the country’s largest teachers unions has also leapt into bed with the companies hawking the tech. On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers announced they would be opening the National Academy for AI Instruction at the Manhattan headquarters of AFT’s New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers.  

The flashy initiative is launching with a $23 million budget and is bankrolled by some familiar names in the AI space. OpenAI will pitch in $10 million over the next five years, while Anthropic will throw in an additional $500,000. 

The goal of the program is to provide free training to 400,000 teachers – or about 10 percent of teachers nationwide – on how to use AI “wisely, safely and ethically.”  

“When we saw ChatGPT in November 2022, we knew it would fundamentally change our world. The question was whether we would be chasing it or we would try to harness it,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said at the Tuesday press conference. “We are actually ensuring that kids have, that teachers have, what they need to deal with the economy of today and tomorrow,” Weingarten said. 

Schools have long been a cash cow for tech companies hungry for public dollars, and AI companies are some of the most dollar-hungry tech companies around. So, education’s further integration of AI programs – even as they invent falsehoods, are powered by industrial scale IP theft, give rise in deepfake porn, potentially degrade kids’ critical thinking, present catastrophic privacy risks and supercharge financial aid fraud – may be the ultimate fox in the hen house. 

Then again, some teachers say AI is saving them time, so there’s probably nothing to worry about. 

What We’re Writing 

After a year of planning, San Diego Unified’s board unanimously approved a cell phone ban this week. The new policy restricts most students from using cell phones during the school day. 

In the latest disruption to education, the Trump administration froze more than $6 billion in federal grants. Even if the freeze doesn’t become permanent, it could have serious impacts on local schools who rely on the money to help fund everything from service for English learners to before- and after-school care. 

San Diego Unified’s board recently passed a new restorative justice policy they hope will help improve implementation. But thanks to the expiration of a $2.1 million state grant, the district is losing funding used to hire teachers who led the work on the ground.  

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