| By Anita Varghese
Special to The Lookout
May 26 -- After more than three hours of heated
discussion and accusations, the City Council Thursday night
remained deadlocked on whether to boost City funding to the
School District by $530,000 in the upcoming fiscal year.
With all seven School Board members present and Council member
Kevin McKeown unable to vote because he is under contract
with the District, the council failed to come up with the
four votes needed to increase the annual $6.5 million the
City gives local schools under a 2004 joint use agreement.
The district, however, will receive an additional $220,000
increase for inflation.
The key dividing issue was “transparency,” with
some council members worried District officials had improperly
silenced former chief financial officer Winston Braham, who
resigned last fall after opposing a teachers pay hike, and
required parents of Special Education students to sign confidentiality
agreements.
Council members Herb Katz and Bobby Shriver led the opposition
to the funding increase, floating a motion to hold the money
in reserve until the District rescinds all current “gag
orders” and agrees not to enter into any other similar
agreements with financial officers or parents.
“No parent should live in fear, and no student should
live in fear for any reason,” said Katz, whose two sons
were special education students. “We have a great school
district, but there is a glitch, and that glitch has to be
changed.
“This is not micromanagement,” he added. “This
is conscience on a public entity that should be totally transparent.”
Shriver said he, as a public official, could not vote to
enter into a financial agreement with another public entity
that “gags” its financial officials from speaking
about financial matters.
Braham’s settlement agreement includes two clauses
that prohibit the former CFO from speaking publicly about
District finances without permission from District officials
and bars him from making disparaging statements.
Shriver said the clauses were egregious and never should
have been required by the District. Both of the clauses were
lifted before Thursday’s meeting,
On the other side of the dais, Mayor Richard Bloom and Council
member Ken Genser pushed for an agreement that would allow
the School Board to “achieve transparency goals”
without having the Council impose specific policies and policy
language.
With Council members Bob Holbrook and Pam O’Connor
unable to side with either faction, the Council agreed to
hold the additional funding in reserve until “various
unresolved issues” are addressed.
If the council remained deadlocked, those who testified also
failed to agree on the key issue of “transparency.”
Paul Silvern, who chairs the District’s Financial Oversight
Committee, argued that the City’s budget process is
less transparent than the District’s, which involves
numerous public meetings of his committee and the School Board,
must be reviewed and approved by the Los Angeles County Office
of Education and must undergo an annual audit by an independent
certified public accountant.
On the other side, parents of Special Education students
complained of “secret deals” that feature “gag
orders” in exchange for extra District services for
students with special needs that go beyond what is in the
student’s individual education plan.
“The use of gag orders is not limited to the Braham
situation,” said Tricia Crane, a parent of a former
student and member of the Special Education District Advisory
Committee.
Crane said she signed a “confidential agreement”
with advice from a personal attorney in order to get extra
services for her son, who is now enrolled in a private school.
“Parents are routinely being asked to sign gag orders
in order to secure services for their children,” she
said. “As a result, parents not only live in fear of
losing services for their children through an inadvertent
slip of the tongue, but we as a community have no access to
the financial records and no idea how many dollars are being
spent as a result of these agreements.”
Crane said “secret deals” hurt students with
special needs, because the extra services provided are not
part of the students’ official school record.
As a result, they may or may not be transferred or honored
if students attend a different district, where officials can
say the “extra services” are not required in their
efforts to provide an individual education plan acceptable
under federal or state law.
School Board President Kathy Wisnicki said the confidential
agreements are reached properly and are necessary in the District’s
efforts to provide Special Education services in-house, rather
than contract with non-public agencies whose service rates
may be expensive.
The District also is trying to avoid litigation with parents
who allege failure to provide adequate Special Education services,
Wisnicki said, adding that confidentiality is necessary because
each education plan and confidential agreement is specific
to the individual student.
“What is right for one student is not always right
for another,” Wisnicki said. “The confidentiality
may be an attempt to minimize parent concerns over certain
services that may not be research-based or best-practice being
offered to one student and not offered to another.
“We try to resolve disputes at the District level so
that we don’t set ourselves up to be in an adversarial
position. We are following a practice that is followed in
many other districts.”
There may not be a specific line item in the District’s
budget labeled “dispute resolution,” Wisnicki
said, but costs incurred to provide services under confidential
agreements are accounted for in other budget line items.
Under the terms of the five-year “Master Facility Use
Agreement with Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District,”
the City agreed to boost the $6.5 million in annual funds
with a yearly inflation increase and a separate augmentation
to be determined by the City’s and District’s
budget outlook.
This fiscal year’s inflation increase has been calculated
at $220,000 with the augmentation determined to be $530,000.
The District will still receive the base payment and the inflation
increase.
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