Things aren’t all that rosy in the Culver City School District!
The main problem is that we have three lawyers and not enough educators on the School Board. As a consequence, we have a lot of lawyer talk, yapping and self-congratulatory talk about what a great job they are doing for the school district.
In fact, the School District is in horrible shape. Not only are we facing budget deficits, intimidation of teachers and classified employees, but physical plant problems as well.
I want to validate what Debbie Hamme said about the physical condition of our schools. I was teaching a third grade class at El Rincon the other day when a swarm of termites started coming out of the walls, spreading throughout the classroom.
A little girl refused to sit at her desk because the termites landed on her table top.(I collected some of these pesky pests to prove my point).
Not only is there a termite problem, the roofs leak and the water fountains don’t work in some schools. All this time, the lawyers have been sitting on $12 million in the capital account for the past 10 years.
Over two years ago, I was the first School Board candidate to call for solar panels that would save more than $600,000 a year on electrical expenses. Shortly after I made that suggestion, Chevron Energy Solutions offered to finance solar panels and other capital improvements to our schools.
The School Board did not act on this. As a consequence, nothing has been done over the past two years. There finally is a proposal to put up a solar panel system with an estimated cost to our capital budget of $2 million.
If we had acted on my suggestion two years ago, we could have had a functioning solar network one year ago that was financed by the saving in electrical bills and have money for capital improvements of our roofs, termite problems and water fountains.
Mr. Zirgulis, a School Board candidate, may be contacted at zirgulisr@yahoo.com
