"Fuentes World," part 1

Ever hear of Mark Bucher?

Now, bear with me here. Mr. Mark Bucher is a minor player in “Fuentes World,” the world of Orange County way-right-wingers who continually weave in and out of each other’s political plans and projects. The players of Fuentes World comprise a kind of Christian Neanderthal Rat Pack, and Bucher is maybe Joey Bishop.

EDUCATION ALLIANCE. Back in 1993, Bucher, then a businessman, and two pals—James Righeimer and Frank Ury—fought for passage of the “school voucher” initiative (Prop 174). Apparently, when that measure failed, the three amigos founded “Education Alliance,” in Tustin, an organization dedicated to placing “conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, on local school boards” (Cosmo Garvin).

At the time, Frank Ury was a trustee on the Saddleback Valley Unified School District board—having been elected as part of a slate that took out trustee Raghu Mathur in ‘92!—but, owing to Ury’s support of the voucher initiative, he lost in 1996 to an opponent who was heavily financed by the California Teachers Association (CTA), of which, incidentally, Raghu was a member. (CTA is the parent organization of our own Faculty Association.)

THE CAMPAIGN REFORM INITIATIVE (1998) . Perhaps that experience helps explain Ury, Righeimer, and Bucher’s decision to author the so-called “campaign reform initiative” of 1998. You’ll recall that Proposition 226 would have required “all labor unions to obtain annual written permission from union members before allocating any dues for political action or political education efforts” (Garvin). Evidently, when a very similar measure passed in Washington state in 1992, union coffers took a huge hit. (See Garvin and Cristopher Rapp.)

In other words, Prop 226, whatever its intrinsic merits, was a major threat to the clout of unions in general, and to the clout of teachers unions in particular. The CTA’s continued uber-clout in California definitely depends on the failure of such measures as Prop 226.

By 1998, Education Alliance’s campaign reform initiative had attracted the attention of big-time national Republicans. Bucher and his pals got much of their support in their battle for 226 from out-of-state Republicans who dreamed of passing such measures all over the country. One big contributor was J. Patrick Rooney, a close advisor of Newt Gingrich. Another was Gingrich crony Grover Norquist.

Well, 226 failed.

But wait! What’s all of this got to do with US in the good old SOCCCD?

WAGBERG. Well, in a way, a lot. Back in 1998, the Faculty Association secretly used mucho union funds to elect two anti-union trustee candidates: Don Wagner and Nancy Padberg. Both Wagner and Padberg were affiliated with Bucher/Ury/Righeimer’s Education Alliance.

No surprise there. Over the years, Wagner has openly advocated the school voucher concept, and he was a big supporter of Prop 226. As a conservative, he’s clearly way out in the darkest Fuentes right-wing frontier. In fact, you’d have to say that he’s a denizen of Fuentes World. (Not so Padberg, evidently.)

Wagner helped found, and is presently on the Executive Board of, the Orange County chapter of the Federalist Society, a right-wing attorney group with strong ties to the Bush White House. The FS is associated with the philosophy of “strict constructionism” (as opposed to judicial “activism”).

Only a month ago, the OC Federalists hosted a debate at Gulliver’s Restaurant in Irvine about Proposition 75—you know, this year’s version of the GOP’s anti-union “campaign reform initiative.” (The Republicans are gonna keep pushing this thing until it takes! It’s just a matter of time.)

The debaters? Beverly Tucker of CTA, and—you guessed it—Mark Bucher of Education Alliance.

There are other SOCCCD/Education Alliance connections. According to Kimberly Kindy of the OC Register, Trustee John Williams, who has long portrayed himself as the unions’ friend, “has strong ties to members of the Education Alliance, which supports opponents of union-backed candidates” (10/31/98).

FUENTES. And there are Fuentes-Education Alliance connections aplenty. According to the OC Weekly (in 2000), Education Alliance’s Jim Righeimer is the “longtime trusty lieutenant to [Dana] Rohrabacher and OC Republican Chairman Tom Fuentes….”

Perhaps you know—and perhaps you don’t—that there are three notorious right-wing “Board Majorities” among OC school districts. Fuentes, being the sort of guy he is, has hovered in the background, and sometimes the foreground, of all three. They are: (1) the Orange Unified School District “Board Majority” (which was offensive enough to be successfully recalled in June of 2001), (2) our own SOCCCD “Board Majority” (which was much dissipated by the inclusion of Bill Jay and the awakening of Nancy Padberg), and (3) the notorious Westminster School District “Board Majority,” which has taken aim at laws requiring fair treatment for gays. (Re Fuentes and the OUSD Board Majority, see OC Weekly, 12/28/01)

Mark Bucher was the Orange Unified BM’s attorney—yes, he quit his contractor's business in favor of the law in 2000—but he was quickly fired after the BM was replaced. Later, he became the Westminster School Districts BM attorney.

These guys sure do get around!

Plus, Bucher is the current Treasurer of the OC Republican Party—the organization that Fuentes chaired for twenty years and until recently.

Got all that straight?

AHMANSON. One more thing (for now). The initial sugar daddy of Education Alliance, and the chief backer of the OUSD’s Board Majority, was Orange Countian Howard Ahmanson. According to Jerry Sloan (http://www.skepticfiles.org/fw/alliance.htm), Ahmanson is a “Christian Reconstructionist idealogue and daddy deep-pockets [who has] embarked upon a plan to capture California’s school boards.”

What’s a Christian Reconstructionist? Well, according to Wikipedia,

Christian Reconstructionism is a highly controversial religious and theological movement within Protestant Christianity. It calls for Christians to put their faith into action in all areas of life including civil government, and envisions the private and civil enforcement of the general principles of Old Testament and New Testament moral law, including those expounded in the case laws and summarized in the Old Testament Decalogue.

(Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism)

In 1992, Ahmanson, a creationist, was quoted as saying: “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives.” (See website of American United for Separation of Church and State.)

Funding the Education Alliance in its early years was, according to Sloan, part of Ahmanson’s plan to carry out his Reconstructionist philosophy in California/Orange County. (It appears that Ahmanson stopped funding EA by the late 90s.)

Ahmanson is on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute. Guess who else is on CI’s Board?

That would be Tom Fuentes.

That's some world, that Fuentes World.

More soon. —Chunk

(For a brief bio of Mr. Ahmanson, see:

http://www.nndb.com/people/374/000058200/)

WHAT KINDA GUY DOES SOMETHIN' LIKE THAT?

I left the last Board Meeting early, at about 9:30, and so I missed the fireworks that occurred during its last hour. As I reported on the 15th and 16th, Tracy Daly, the district's irrepressible Director of Marketing and Public Affairs, was grilled that night by the Board re her (and the Chancellor's) request for $229,830 basic aid dollars for IVC and SC marketing, outreach and recruitment.

That wasn't pleasant. Tracy took some heat from skeptical trustees, especially Wagner and Fuentes. But at least Mathur spoke up to defend the request. It had his name on it, not just hers.

Today I ran into a friend who witnessed the part of the meeting that I missed. I mentioned that I thought things were getting a bit unpleasant re the request for marketing moola.

She said: "That was nothing! You shoulda seen what happened later!"

She told me that, during the last part of the meeting, Tracy was again grilled, only this time things got really hot. The grillage concerned item 43, revision of the district "logo/graphic identity."

My friend reports that some of the Trustees were peeved about the item. How come we're changing our logo? We never asked for that! How come the mountains on this logo are too big?

--That sort of thing, she said. The 'Tees were generally miffed. Maybe not all of 'em. Like I said, I wasn't there.

But, sheesh. Talk about your micromanagement!

Evidently, Tracy took ALL of the heat for the perceived impudence or effrontery, or whatever it was, that the trustees saw in Tracy's logo revision activity.

Now get this: I have it on very good authority that, in fact, Chancellor Mathur was up to his eyeballs in the logo revision project! Without doubt, he knew about it and gave it his "OK"!

Like I said, Tracy took the heat, and there was a lot of it blastin' her way.

Did Chancellor Mathur speak up on Tracy's behalf? Did he stop everybody to say, "Wait a minute, I OKed this thing, so leave this gal alone!"?

He did not. He just sat there, watchin' Tracy's body jerk around as it was machine-gunned with bullets of bombast.

--You know, like at the end of Bonnie and Clyde. Only without Clyde.

Now tell me! What kinda guy does somethin' like that? --CW

UPDATERY by Chunk

1. Leaf eruptions quelled. Not long ago, Dissent's crack photographer, Raul, took some pictures of one of the so-called "temporary" classrooms at IVC. One photograph, which appeared in this blog, revealed the poor condition of the eaves of a prominent and notorious classroom--the one between A300 and the IVC Bookstore, which is affectionately called "the sh*thouse." (Well, that's what I call it. But affectionately.)

As Rebel Girl has explained, the eaves of this particular building appeared to be stuffed chock-full of very old rotting leaves. So stuffified were these eaves that they even sported unpleasant "leaf eruptions"--i.e., places where the cheap plywood could not avoid blooming hideously outward like one of those deep-fried onions at Outback. See pics.

Recently, we noticed that workers had ripped the old wood away and had removed the leaves. (See.)

Well, that's a good start. We appreciate the effort. We hope to see further progress soon! I mean, you're not gonna leave it like that, are you?

2. Can I have two? We are a peevish lot here at Dissent. A while back, we presented a picture of the typical whiteboard "eraser" at IVC, namely, a filthy old rag that looks like it may have originated in Howard's bathroom or worse. (See pic.) It's been stinkin' up A405 for months, maybe years.

Well, again, we've noticed a change. A week or so ago, Rebel Girl informed me that a set of white towels, each with a delightful blue stripe, suddenly appeared in her classroom and in another classroom of a colleague.

"Didn't they put some of those blue-stripe towels in your classroom?" she asked.

"No," I said. I was peeved.

But today I noticed that, sure enough, A405 sports exactly one towel of the blue-stripe variety.

I guess that's an improvement. Could I have another one?

That reminds me of an old movie I saw once. In the movie, a kid cries about having no shoes. His dad feels bad about that. Then, on one fateful day, dad proudly presents his son with a gift. It's a shoe! "Here you are, my son! Just what you wanted!"

The kid looks at it. Then he looks up at Dad. He asks: "Can I have two of 'em?"

Dad smacks him upside the head.

Just for laughs, I present a picture of an actual whiteboard eraser. (See.) I do appreciate the effort represented by the new blue-stripe towels. Still, why not purchase some ACTUAL ERASERS?

I would be happy to supply a hard copy of the photograph to the individual charged with purchasing erasers. Let me know. I'm in A239--you know, the office that forms stinky puddles near the window (underneath my computer) during rains. We've got tiny livestock, too.

3. Air testage. Somebody told me that, two days ago, some guy was in A200 with fancy equipment to test the air. Somebody asked him, "What are you doing?" He said: "I'm testing the air." The guy did not elaborate.

In the meantime, long-suffering Mr. S continues to stew in heavy juices of rank peeviosity in his unfortunate, spore-bedevilled office. He's particularly peeved about his rank and heavily spore-ified carpet.

One day, he told me that he was personally gonna rip the carpet out of his office and throw it out the door.

I urged him to hold off on that.

See? Chunk's no trouble-maker! He's a trouble-stopper!

THE UCI ALL-STARS!

DISSENT the BLOG has once again attracted the attention of Matt Coker of the OC WEEKLY. Check out his Nov. 18-24 posting at:

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/06/11/web-coker.php

(Or click on the link to "Clockwork Orange" at the right.)

Coker presents Trustee Fuentes' curious remarks about luring part-timer "stars" from UCI. (See Nov. 14 post on Dissent the Blog.) Then he writes:

Dissent the Blog's Rebel Girl (think Commie Girl, only not Commie Girl) just reported over the weeknd on all the reasons UCI's star faculty would not want to come to the South County campuses, including bad pay, part-timers must pay to park, crappy part-time faculty offices, crappy classrooms and various molds, spores and other nasty junk that wafts from the campus ventilation systems.

But other than that, they'll love it! Which is why Clockwork enthusiastically forwards this list of UCI faculty members we're just sure Fuentes & Co. would welcome with open armaments:

Urban theorist/SoCal doomsayer Mike Davis

Political scientist/thorn-in-OC-GOP's side Mark Petracca

Sixties historian/Nation contributor Jon Wiener

Middle East historian/Bush war critic Mark LeVine

Chicano historian/OC's preeminent labor historian Gilbert Gonzalez

The entire Cross-Cultural Center

French deconstructionist/UCI part-time faculty member Jacques Derrida (Mitigating factor: they'd have to dig him up!)

Investigative journalism lecturers/commie pinko fags Will Swaim and Gustavo Arellano

Is that enough star power for ya?

--Chunk here. Incidentally, Petracca is an old fan of Dissent (he used to ask me to send him the latest editions) and Wiener once shared the stage with IVC Philosophy instructor Roy Bauer when each received an award from IVC's Student Liberties Club circa 1998.

Plus Jacques Derrida once borrowed Rebel Girl's snorkel equipment. Or was it a kayak?

He returned it, sans deconstruction. --CW

Twinkle, Twinkle, Trustee Tom

"Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars,
Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars…"

At the most recent board meeting, Trustee Fuentes opined that we should try and lure star faculty from UCI (and OCC) to come and teach at our little campus in the orange groves. (See "Nov. 14 Board Meeting, part II," 11/16.)

His proposal begs questions aplenty, but Rebel Girl will leave the begging of those to others more suitably irreverent and “sophomoric” (Red? Chunk?). She will presently address only one: Besides the glamour of working with Trustee Fuentes, what, exactly, is in it for these “star faculty”?

Who does the starry-eyed trustee imagine might feel motivated to traipse across town and teach for the paltry adjunct faculty compensation offered by the district, not to mention return some of it for the privilege and convenience of parking on campus?

Lousy compensation and paying for parking aside, let’s consider the bountiful resources available to our present part-time faculty. Perhaps these will attract the stars from the U of C at I.

Take for example, the part-time faculty office in A-200 (please!). A modest hand-lettered piece of paper taped to the door affirms that it is, indeed, the part-time office. The otherwise unadorned facility serves, theoretically, the needs of some 60 or more part-time faculty and their students.


The office resembles a windowed closet (with one window broken and leaning against the wall for months now), tucked away between a mail box arrangement and the cheerful Howard Gensler Memorial Xerox Cubicle, its constant rhythmic sound and light show, a jolly mechanical celebration of the ingenuity, creative thinking, and can-do spirit of that clever fellow. (See "The Howard Hilton," 9/30/01)

For those nostalgically inclined, the part-timer’s office conjures the sites of those screwball college pranks of the 50s where students crammed into telephone booths and Volkswagens, even as their parents cowered in bomb shelters under the house.

A quick survey reveals the bunker is equipped with two desks--that’s one for every thirty “star” instructors, teacher-to-furniture ratio-wise. The drawers of one desk are broken and splintered (or the equivalent of the splinters produced by particle board), no use to anyone unless they are going to use their gaping cavity as some kind of “cubby” or public storage unit. Or maybe this is what the Martha Stewart-type magazines mean by “distressed”?

Our inventory is completed by noting one table, one bookcase, three chairs, two computers, a telephone, and a scattering of table lamps.

But there’s more. Need I remind anybody that the part-time office is also an outpost or protectorate of the now famous colonies of mold of the A-200 building? There’s something perhaps the pedagogy stars are not getting in enough quantities over at UCI. Nothing quite like being exposed to Penicillium (a potential allergin-–I think that this is related to the stuff that if I ingest can kill me!); Aspergillus (allergy, respiratory infection) and my favorite: Stachybotrep (allergy, respiratory and skin irritant and some strains give off gases that are nerve toxins). I bet they don’t have this stuff over at UCI--at least not in faculty offices and classrooms, maybe in the labs--but not, you know, available for the taking or breathing. Not just giving it away!

And don’t get me started on the classroom conditions “star” UCI faculty would face once they leave their part-time office. You know how Rebel Girl feels about rodents in the ceiling, podia, floors and broken furniture. (Hey, has anyone seen the broken window over in the CEC building yet? Or the cascades of mulched leaves eating away at the sagging eaves? We’re talking YEARS of leaves here. Good compost, poor roofing material.)


She feels, well, like calling the health department.

That said, part-time faculty do, to their credit, use their sad little part-time office. After all, our part-time faculty may be employed part-time but they are full-time professionals. We all see them in there, making do and doing as well as they can.

It makes me wince. They deserve so much more--and so do their students.

The beautiful thing about Fuentes’ nutty offerings a few nights ago is that nobody takes him seriously. Or do they? I look forward to his follow-up and welcome a concrete proposal for a campaign to, yes, stay with me here: attract Senate and, presumably, Non-Senate Faculty to apply for teaching positions at Irvine Valley and Saddleback colleges. And what might such a proposal look like? How would it be promoted? A junket to UCI? Lunch with Chancellor Drake (who’s got a liver ailment, not to mention contract struggles with his own faculty and staff unions)?

How about we just recognize the trustee’s yammering for what it is? A few minutes of hot air offered to distract whomever is listening from real issues. A purposeful blowing of smoke. Or as Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” says: “Merely corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

Of course, trustee Fuentes doesn’t even bother with corroborative detail. He just says stuff.

-- Rebel Girl

SOME CARTOONS

We at Dissent used to have fun adapting old cartoons to our contemporary Dissentular purposes.

I thought it might be fun to reprint some of the cartoons from old issues--cartoons that might still have meaning or might have a new meaning.

Or not.

1. LEAVE! This cartoon appeared in the 'Vine (the predecessor of Dissent) on July 28, 1998. By that time, Raghu had experienced a massive (76%) vote of "no confidence" from full-time IVC faculty. As you know, he later (in 2000) suffered a 90% vote of "no confidence." In 2004, as Chancellor, he managed to hit 93.5% "no confidence," a personal best. (If you click on the image, it should get bigger.)


2. THAT MUST BE UNCOMFORTABLE. Eight or nine years ago, faculty warned the Board that the district's reserves were too low. The Board Majority dismissed such warnings, for it dismissed anything the faculty had to say (unless the faculty were Old Guard union patrons like Lee W, Sherry M, et al.).

This cartoon appeared in September of '98. At the time, Kathie Hodge was the acting chancellor.


3. LITIGATION ATTRACTOR. This next cartoon, which alludes to the Accreditation team's visit, is from an issue published on July 6, 1998. By then, the Board had been spanked pretty hard for its "persistent and defiant" Brown Act violations. And it had also been sued for (Raghu's) violating students' free speech rights (those suits were ultimately successful):


4. FROGUE IS "TOPS." Fiinally, this one is from the period in which Trustee Frogue was receiving tremendous attention owing to his embrace of wacky conspiracy theories, his apparent Holocaust denial (so swore numerous former students), and his plan to invite a crew of crackpots and anti-semites to a forum at Saddleback College:

THE NOVEMBER 14 BOARD MEETING, Part II

As I indicated yesterday, Monday night's Board discussion of marketing and outreach was kinda interesting, if "interesting" means "worrisome."

It started with the grilling of Tracy Daly, the gal in charge of marketing and chirpiness. Tracy explained that IVC's pattern of enrollment decline has ceased, and Saddleback's enrollments are slightly on the upswing. She's no logician. She immediately and unapologetically attributed these trends to her much-ballyhooed "Next Step"/Surfer marketing campaign. --You know, the one in which a moron represents studentry and our colleges are like wax.

(The campaign is not "ballyhooed" on the cover of the latest Lariat, which declares: "Ad campaign reviews mixed: campaign fails to attract many students despite winning national marketing award.")

Some trustees questioned the reliability of Tracy's "post hoc" reasoning. Good for them. I like Tracy, but a fallacy is a fallacy.

In the course of the discussion, Trustee Fuentes displayed his philosophical repulsion at the very idea of our luring students to our colleges. Something deep within him causes the fellow to cringe and squirm and squeal at the very thought of messin' with the "marketplace."

And this phenomenon of district's poaching in other district's territories? Well, that's a "cancer." That Fuentes sure has a way with words. He's got a point, though. Why don't all the districts get together and declare a moratorium on poachitude? Wouldn't that be sensible? For all I know, they're doing that.

Another aspect of the discussion concerned the responsibility of faculty for outreachery at the High Schools. Some have suggested that faculty are inclined to resist participation in outreach, and if they're gonna do it, they oughta be compensated.

Naturally, Trustee Fuentes seems to view such attitudes as a further demonstration of his Lazy and Overpaid thesis re full-time faculty, which he articulated on TV a year or so ago.

Check out his suggestions about luring "star" part-timers. Maybe you can explain to me what he's saying.

In the end, the item--a request for a big chunk of basic aid money--passed, with only Fuentes and Wagner voting against it.

FUENTES: ...Will [this marketing] be in our district geographically? Or are we talking about advertising and promoting like the other districts do outside of [their own] district?

DALY: Most of it’s here in our district.

FUENTES: All right. I think that’s something we need to come to grips with in clarity. It is a cancer that has spread among the districts, that there is this competitive recruitment, and it’s costing us, and it’s costing our taxpayers, and it’s costing the taxpayers of other districts. I wanted to respond to a comment that Trustee Milchiker made about our experience at Irvine Valley’s forum. I guess it’s who hears it, but I heard that very enthusiastic teacher [Spanish instructor Jeanne E.] tell us of her and her husband’s experience in outreaching, and going to visit other campuses, and the non-doing of that by others. I heard her say how few visited other campuses, that day that we went as a Board to sit in that forum. There were only six or seven teachers that came to visit with us, and she made the point, I thought, that more [instructors] needed to participate as she and husband did to go out to the campus….

…We talked about gas prices. And I related that, when this subject was first brought up, that I had a family room full of 18 to 20 year olds, because my son is a college freshman, and that was early in the semester. And many of those young fellas—surfers all—were going to OCC and to Golden West, and I can report to you, on the most unscientific poll ever taken, that they have decided now, at three dollars a gallon, to return to our local campuses! And I think the marketplace is at work, and it’s going to play a role in this.

Now, one of the most striking marketing things that I heard in recent weeks was an ad by our colleagues over at UCI, touting the quality of their teachers, being No. 5 in the nation, a striking contribution and quality in our community. Bill [he turns to Bill Jay] has addressed the merits of part-time faculty, and I would think we ought as a Board be thinking about more part-time faculty, especially star faculty that we might recruit from UCI to come over and teach some courses that would be a draw to students. These young people [students] shop the marketplace; these students look for name and identity, and I think we need to think outside the box and take advantage of the opportunity of part-time teachers. Maybe some of those part-time teachers that [students] are presently going to OCC and Golden West to take classes from might be available to us….

PADBERG: I am going to support the item. One thing that, I think, we’re missing…is the complaint that I hear from my constituent groups that there are not enough classes of the required courses for transfer for students, or they’re not scheduled at convenient times, so [students] have to go to other colleges…to get those. I know that this has been an experience of friends of mine….

HO: …I think the main detractors for students who live in our district, we are not meeting the demand of the classes, and that’s why I propose a mechanism in which we can see, recognize the demand…and respond to it…. [Ho is referring to wait lists and surveys.]

WAGNER: I think I agree with everything Trustee Jay said except his part about supporting the item. I think you’re absolutely right-on about what we need to do in terms of finding out what the students want, and what’s troubled me about this item, what troubled me …when the million dollar item came to us [months ago], and we scaled it back to $100,000—…our focus here with this program is still the wrong focus. What the hundred thousand should have been spent doing was answering the questions that Trustee Jay has asked. What do the students want? Not, OK, let’s try something new; let’s try a new coordinated marketing campaign; let’s do a surfer and have a logo. –All of those may be appropriate down the road, but I don’t feel we’ve done our homework to know that those are what’s appropriate…We aren’t sure we even need a marketing program, and we won’t know what a marketing program ought to say until we know why we don’t have the enrollment we want, and that’s things like, surveys of other districts and what they offer, that’s things like surveys of our students…Those are the things that we ought to be spending a hundred thousand dollars for.

LANG: …There’s a lot of wisdom in some of your comments…I don’t think there’s any question that we need to have a marketing program. I think the question is, is what the focus of that marketing program needs to be…We’re trying a lot of soft things—putting ads in movie theaters, etc…and we really don’t have a good idea whether that’s going to generate the additional student enrollment that we’d like to see…If we understand that students are looking to have a unique program here that they can’t get somewhere else, perhaps that’s what will generate additional student enrollment…It’s seems to me that…one good use of funds…would be to do some polling, to find out, OK, what is it that’s going to bring students here?

[Traci then explained that much of the work that Wagner and Lang identified as important is actually being done by enrollment management groups on the two campuses; they are active and they meet each week, she said. Chancellor Mathur, too, explained that the item under discussion concerns only marketing, and that much other work is being done beyond the marketing.]

MILCHIKER: [Reading from her notes for the forum:] Jeannie Egasse said that she wasn’t sure that Frisbees and surfer logos and things worked. Her kids are surfers, and her kids really didn’t like these things…She said other teachers would like to go out [for outreach at High Schools], but they would like to be given some release time so that they don’t have to go out on their own time….