Ali Delawalla’s stunning mid-year resignation as Chief Financial Officer of the School District today is the latest bombshell executive fallout from last November’s shakeup and remix of the School Board.
The noisily disturbing waves of unrest and extreme dissatisfaction that have plagued the District internally for months, externally for weeks, has been ratcheted to a new peak that many parents and staffers will find worrisome and harmful.
Formally, the exodus began at last Tuesday’s School Board meeting –Supt. Patti Jaffe announced her resignation, the Board yawned, went on unperturbed with business as usual, minus comment, which made irrevocably clear why she is leaving.
The twin departures from the top of the executive ladder, Ms. Jaffe’s in four months, Mr. Delawalla’s immediately, rips a gaping hole in the District upper tier, which already was strapped for manpower.
The same stressful, Board-centered inner turmoil that hastened the Super’s resignation also drove the popular, immensely capable Mr. Delawalla to pursue alternate employment. He will start next month in his new position on a campus in the Los Angeles area.
The hurried nature of Mr. Delawalla’s desire to resume his career elsewhere is underscored by the fact his final day on Irving Place is a scant 9 days away, Feb. 29.
As the Assistant Superintendent for Business Services, the popular, immensely capable Mr. Delawalla’s exit next week will hang a huge question mark over the identity of the interim keeper of the books and interpreter of a liquid financial situation he and others say changes hourly. Those were his heavily praised strengths.
Until further notice, sources say the single surviving Assistant Superintendent, Eileen Carroll, is the in-house favorite to succeed Ms. Jaffe.
It scarcely seems an exaggeration, a District official told the newspaper, to say that “we are disheveled and in disarray.”
Before an emergency Stop sign or a traffic signal can be installed inside District headquarters, a threatening fire pitting parents against a determined union needs to be settled or extinguished – neither of which looks likely in the near term.
Severe disharmony publicly exploded on a new but long simmering front last week when the war broke into the open for the wider community between Debbie Hamme, the strident leader of the non-teachers union, ACE, the Assn. of Classified Employees, and parents at El Marino Language School, where Ms. Hamme hopes to unionize nearly two dozen parent-funded teaching volunteers of a quarter-century old program.
Enraged parents, from El Marino and other schools, are pushing back with growing muscle.
Meanwhile, the frustrated Ms. Hamme, denying she intends to file a reported pending lawsuit, has taken her campaign for “equality” and “improved lives” to newspapers in a bid for support.
Sources said morale has declined steeply and swiftly around District headquarters and other school enclaves since the Nov. 8 School Board election when, from a combination of factors, the power base sharply shifted.
• The unexpected ouster of Board President Scott Zeidman by voters was traced in part to a curious voting pattern;
• The procedural elevation of Karlo Silbiger to the President’s chair, and
• The election of perceived Silbiger ally Nancy Goldberg.
These three factors, blended with last summer’s decision by first-term Board member Steve Gourley, a Zeidman ally and Jaffe advocate, not to seek re-election flipped the Board’s supposedly entrenched dynamics upside down.
