April board meeting: Notes, part 1

     I arrived at about 6:05, and the meeting had not yet started. Oddly, Trustees Dave Lang and Marcia Milchiker were sitting in their places over on the left, Trustee Bill Jay was in his chair way over to the right, and Chancellor Raghu Mathur was sitting alone and forlorn, somewhere in the middle. Somehow, the scene was grim, a partial and perverse Last Supper. Usually, the seven trustees emerge from their super secret buffet/lounge all at once, but not last night. After about ten minutes, Trustees Don Wagner, Tom Fuentes, and John Williams emerged very much in lockstep--like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in that restaurant scene in Bringing Up Baby--and took their seats. (I lost track of Trustee Nancy Padberg.)

    

     The real fun starts about 4 minutes in. More grimness. I really don’t know what it meant. Maybe these people were at each other’s throats during the closed session. Maybe nothin’. Dunno. Our trustees love to do “resolutions,” and there were lots of ‘em last night. A middle-aged lady got a Rez for picking up a bag with $3,000 in it (at Saddleback) and turning it in. It was money raised in some charity. I guess these trustees are the kind who'd take the money and run, so they were stunned that anybody'd return it. They didn't seem to know what to make of her. Well, the woman got all teary-eyed and introduced her kids. Looking at them, she wimpered something like, “This is how I feel about you kids when you do the right thing.” More tears. Wailing. During “public comments,” Karla Westphal offered her usual objections to trustee prayers. She then held up prepared statements from two faculty who could not attend the meeting, and Board Prez Don Wagner said something like, “If they wanna speak, they can show up.” Karla explained that at least one of these instructors teaches on Monday nights. Wagner sniffed and then let her read for a bit, but when she got to the second letter, he just shut her down and sent her packing. Karla stalked off. I think she was steamed. When will Don learn that his petty and hot-headed ways are counter-productive? Never, it seems. Well, let's face it. That he acts like such a punk kid is his charm. Trustee reports were unremarkable. I don’t recall a thing that Bill Jay said. Padberg literally said nothing. Fuentes yammered like he does about his boy Mathur’s leadership on some task force. There was a “breakfast” at IVC on April 17, and lots of Republican pols showed up for that. A food fight broke out, evidently.

     Williams announced that he has discovered that textbooks are expensive. Milchiker reported that she has seen yet another version of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”—this one at IVC. Didn’t she see this very play at Saddleback last month? Yup. Marcia seems to live in Wacky World. It was student Trustee Hannah Lee’s last night, and the board gave her some prizes for being pretty and causing no trouble, I think. Her replacement was in the audience, and she seemed to be the equal of Hannah in perkiness and cuddliness. Maybe she can think and speak, too, but that would appear to be unlikely. During his report, a subdued Chancellor Mathur said some obvious things about our “basic aid” gravy train being under threat. He seemed to be in a state of shock. Dunno why. Evidently, some education bills are likely to fail in the upcoming election, and that will make the budget situation even worse for education. Mathur quoted someone who said that “now is the time to clean up the barn.” Most just stared at him, uncomprehending. John Williams commenced yammering about textbook costs. I do believe he said that “we are moving to a virtual society.” I looked around. Nobody was laughing. Not even me.John has some ideas, he said. Instructors could scrape up stuff from the “public domain” and post that somewhere. Instant textbook. Free. Or, he said, we could get instructors together to write a textbook, which the district would own. Use that. Again, I looked around the room. Nothing. I saw a guy studying lint that he had found in his pocket. Next came a report about “Early College Program/K-12 Outreach.” There were three speakers, and they were brief. That's the way Don Wagner likes it. Marcia heard one of ‘em talking about Tiger Woods, and she was all over that. Somebody used the word “viral,” and Marcia didn’t understand that. She said she thought that “viral” things were “bad,” not “good.” She sported a quizzical expression. Suddenly, Tom Fuentes roared forth, “How about Home Schoolers!?” “From what I've seen,” he said, they are “excellent.” How odd to have a man who hates public education on the board of a community college district. IVC Prez Glenn Roquemore had spoken about some early college classes at local high schools, and that got Fuentes worried. How come these kids aren’t just taking online courses? he asked. Some are, said Glenn, but they’ve gotta get the principal’s permission. Yadda yadda. I stopped listening. Then: “Boundaries!” roared Fuentes. “We’ve got to keep boundaries!” He was referring to poaching done by some districts in other districts’ territories.

   

     Kumquats! There was a report concerning “opportunity for growth.” If we wanted to, said Gary P, we could grow 15%, but that would mean offering more courses, and it would be costly and deplete our Basic Aid bucks. We don’t receive any money from the state for growth, since, unlike everybody else, we’re on Basic Aid. Gary noted that the board, in its infinite wisdom, has decided not to pursue public bonds. That’s good, he seemed to say, ‘cause, owing to Basic Aid, we actually spend more per student than other districts do. I studied Fuentes’ face for tics or twitches. I studied the horizon for storm clouds. Gary said that the colleges want direction from the board concerning how to deal with this tension between building and maintaining good facilities (on the one hand) and offering more courses (on the other). The trustees started discussing the ongoing threats to our Basic Aid funding, which, up to now, has made us filthy freakin' rich. “Maybe we should circle the wagons,” said Fuentes, chewing on a hayseed. I’m not real sharp on fiscal issues, but I gather that the state might get out its six-shooters and plug our Basic Aid with led. Then they might pull a switcheroo on us and throw our local property tax money on a stagecoach for Sacramento. So our little SOCCCD posse was figuring out ways to thwart these varmints and head 'em off at the pass. I fell into a coma. Then Fuentes started yammering about how, maybe, we could have a summit of OC community college districts, and they could divvy-up online instruction. That is, Coast could do math, NOCCCD could do, say, underwater basket-weaving, and SOCCCD could do, like, writing and chemistry. “There’s no need for duplication,” declared Mr. Fuentes.He was staunch. Lang chimed in largely in agreement with Fuentes’ points about varmints and such. He noted that we’re about to spend shitloads of money on ATEP, and we gotta worry about that. And if we expand courses, what if we hit hard times? Can we sustain the level we’ve expanded to? It was right about then that Bill Jay woke up and started reminiscing about the old days, when, if a student in our area bolted for OCC, we’d have to send money up there for ‘im! I do believe that Nancy Padberg then rolled her eyes as though she were hearing the infernal bleatings of a dying mule. …to be continued.