This not only is not your father’s School Board, it is not even last year’s School Board.
Less traditional. Less conventional with — dare one say? — more disciplined, no-nonsense direction?
And that does not even take into account the three new members who entered office in December.
Last night’s expanded School Board meeting, shifted next door to Lin Howe School to accommodate the anticipated truckloads of budget-cuts protestors, started and ended with whimpers.
The cuts were dramatically less than parents and the Teachers Union had feared.
On a 13-item list, the most magnetic item was in the middle — four consultant positions, covering a microscopic $53,000.
Three consultants drew hardly any attention — Safety, Public Relations and Anti-Bullying.
In the best of show business traditions, the School Board earned a booming cheer and at least a one-day reprieve from populist scorn by giving the majority of the crowd what it had been pleading for:
Elimination of the popular Arts Consultant from the list of proposed budget cuts.
Committed to preliminarily slicing $2.5 million from the School District’s $48 million budget, due to a sharp, but still not finalized, reduction in state funding, the Board tight-roped across a minefield.
They achieved their mission with what the audience concluded was scant damage.
That might be called a public relations triumph.
Except the irony would be sour.
After years of steadily shrinking his salary — from $40,000, to $36,000, to $30,000 to $12,000, the School Board eliminated the District’s public relations role, held for years by the region’s No. 1 publicist, Geoff Maleman.
The Director of Special Projects position, at $147,000 a year, was dropped along with the Accounting Supervisor, described as the right-hand person to David El Fattal, Assistant Superintendent for Business.
In another change of note, the role of Assistant Superintendent for Human Sources, long held by extremely well-liked Patty Jaffe, is being downgraded, from a $168,000 salary to $147,000 a year. The title also will change, from Assistant Sup to Director.
Further, both of the above Assistant Superintendents soon will be departing.
Mr. El Fattal has accepted a community college position in Cerritos. He will be departing Irving Place at the end of the month. Ms. Jaffe is retiring in June.
A fairly bloodless evening on the first big budget-cutting agenda of the year is a rare experience for Culver City — as is the salty, tightly focused leadership and the expertly timed satirical humor of Board President Steve Gourley.
He has been away awhile.
A full generation after he first made Culver City headlines two blocks west in City Hall, as a member of the City Council, Mr. Gourley starts his third year on the Board in unquestioned command of the ship. With his trusted colleague Scott Zeidman at his left hand, make no mistake that Mr. Gourley, now in his early 60s, is the admiral of the Board’s ship.
The rhythms and the emotions of the anticipated/feared meeting were brimming with Mr. Gourley’s footprints. He was the one who held the flashlight that guided the Board through the dark.
Larger budget-cutting decisions lie in the coming weeks.
