The Learning Curve: Time’s Running Out for Grossmont Union Trustee Recall Effort

This post has been updated.

The Grossmont Union High School District has had a tough year.  

The district was roiled by a spate of layoffs that included the cutting of its librarians. That proposal turned board meetings into a raucous affair filled with protesting community members, and a hot mic moment.  

A couple of months later, Voice of San Diego revealed that an eyebrow-raising deal allowed a former district employee who’d resigned under investigation to get a high-paid job. The Union-Tribune also found that members of the board’s four-person conservative bloc had schemed about board business in private text chains, a move that experts said likely ran afoul of Brown Act laws, and engaged in underhanded election plots to harm opponents’ chances of winning. 

Despite the uproar, the board hung on and eventually approved the cuts that sparked all the outrage. Even so, it gave birth to a recall effort that targeted Scott Eckert, one of the board’s conservative bloc. Eckert narrowly won election in 2024 thanks, in part, to a “ghost” candidate funded by allies of the conservative board members. 

Now, the effort is up against a hard deadline. The volunteers have until Monday to gather the signatures needed to get the recall on the ballot — 15 percent of the registered voters in Eckert’s subdistrict. Organizers say they’ll likely come up short, but that even if they do, this is just the beginning. 

Over the past seven months, more than 200 volunteers with the Recall the Trustees group have organized 36 canvassing events across Eckert’s subdistrict. They’ve also amassed support from political organizations like the La Mesa Democratic Club and unions like the Grossmont Education Association and the San Diego and Imperial County Labor Council.  

Even fellow board member Chris Fite has endorsed the recall. For him, it felt like the only way to hold his colleagues accountable. After all, in the months after the damning news reports, board members essentially said they didn’t do anything wrong, but also that they wouldn’t do it again. 

“I supported this because trying to do things around the margins seemed kind of useless,” Fite told me. “These guys are beyond help. The community outrage doesn’t mean anything to them.” 

Laura Preble is a former teacher and librarian at Grossmont Union schools and has served as the effort’s media relations manager. Preble said over the past two years she’s become ever more troubled that the board did not have the best interest of students in mind. The district has been embroiled in controversies surrounding LGBTQ students in recent years, but it was the scandals of the last seven months that pushed her to action.  

“Due to media coverage, people started to see a pattern of cronyism, secret meetings and illegal texts between certain board members and employees, financial recklessness, and retaliatory behavior toward staff. Most people had no idea about any of this. They were angry and felt betrayed,” Preble wrote in a text.  

James Messina, the president of the union that represents Grossmont educators, said this year of outrage has been a wake-up call to the community at large. It’s even been something of a wake-up call for the union, which has never been involved in something like this.  

He said he’s proud of the work parents and volunteers have done, and the connections they’ve forged through the effort. Even if it fails, Messina said the recall effort has built potent infrastructure for future political organizing.  

That new activist streak could be on display before tomorrow’s board meeting, when supporters plan to rally to support a resolution authored by Fite that would enact guidelines for how district officials interact with immigration agents should they come to campus.  

But the real tests would come next year, when three of the four board members are up for re-election. Preble and others said they plan to play an active role in those elections. 

“I sure hope the board understands that parents are paying attention and that they want what’s best for their children,” Messina said. “They’re engaged now.” 

School Shooting Industry Is Ready for Its Closeup 

Next week, HBO is dropping a new documentary “Thoughts and Prayers,” which explores a grim byproduct of our violence-addled education system – the school shooting industry. You’ve undoubtedly seen flashes of this burgeoning $3 billion industry in the form of fold out bullet-proof walls designed by students or trainings that urge children to run, hide or fight school shooters.  

Rolling Stone has a bleakly fascinating writeup of the doc, which it calls an impressionistic tour of the “dystopian morass of military-grade preparedness drills, innovations in school-hardening technology, and children who have accepted that any day a gunman could massacre them and their friends, and forces the viewer to digest it.” 

More from the Rolling Stone article: “Every time there is a shooting, we see an uptick in business,” says a man who sells bulletproof skateboards, among other products. “Every time there is a tragedy, it economically benefits my family. It’s not what I wanted. We could be a $300 million company by the time this documentary airs.”  

Active shooter drills (and the consultants that design them) are an integral part of the twisted industry that’s sprung up from our country’s tolerance of the slaughter of children. Last year, I wrote about a particularly traumatic one that took place at Harriet Tubman Village Charter School in 2023. During the unannounced drill, a school administrator played the sounds of screaming and gunfire over staff walkie-talkies. Needless to say, it terrified staff and students alike. 

You can watch the preview for “Thoughts and Prayers,” here. 

Housing Commission Approves Central Elementary Safe Parking Contract 

The San Diego Housing Commission’s board on Friday approved a contract with Jewish Family Service to operate a safe parking site for homeless families with children at San Diego Unified’s now-vacant Central Elementary. The unanimous vote was the final hurdle for a setback-plagued project first floated by district officials nearly two and a half years ago. 

UCSD Entrants Are Getting Much, Much Worse at Math 

A shocking report from the University of California, San Diego’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions found that incoming students’ math skills have plummeted in recent years. The report found that one in eight students’ math skills were below middle school level.  

Not only did the number of students taking remedial math courses increase by more than 1,000 percent from 2020 to 2022, the university also found those students were missing skills learned in much earlier grades than they used to. The report blames a confluence of factors on the frightening result, from pandemic learning loss to ending SAT requirements in applications to grade inflation.  

On the grade inflation front: I’d heard a whole lot of concerns about grade inflation, so last year I pulled the grades of every junior at a San Diego Unified high school and compared them to those schools’ test scores.  

I found massive gaps between the percentage of students who passed classes and the percentage who met state standards on tests, with differences as high as 70 percentage points at some schools and in some subjects.  

What We’re Writing  

San Diego Unified implemented its much-touted Vision 2020 plan, which sought in part to keep kids in their neighborhood schools, nearly a decade and a half ago. But students are no more likely to stay in their neighborhood school than they were 13 years ago. In 2011, 58.5 percent of students who lived within the district’s boundaries attended their neighborhood school. In 2024, 58.9 percent did. 

San Diego Unified leaders have made student wellness their No.1 priority. Now all they need to do is figure out how to tell if they’re making a difference. That’s why they’ve started work on a student wellness metric. Many of the details are still TBD. 

Correction: This post has been updated to correct the percentage of signatures needed to recall a board member.

The post The Learning Curve: Time’s Running Out for Grossmont Union Trustee Recall Effort appeared first on Voice of San Diego.