Nearly two years after San Diego Unified leaders offered city of San Diego officials the campus of a now-vacant City Height elementary school as a site for safe parking for children and families. That plan eventually fell apart, and while some are hoping officials will revive it, the two still don’t seem to agree on exactly what was offered.
While originally touting the project, San Diego Unified Trustee Richard Barrera floated some ambitious possibilities back in 2023.
Barrera said the unused classrooms of the now-vacant Central Elementary site could potentially be used for safe camping and the kids staying at the site could use the playgrounds. The prospect of using school buildings would have had the added benefit of giving those staying at the site access to electricity, pre-existing bathrooms, lighting and Wi-Fi.
But Mayor Todd Gloria spokesperson Rachel Laing said that’s not what the district ended up offering, writing in an email, “the district was only offering use of the small faculty parking lot, not the entire site, and the term (less than 2 years) being offered by the district limited the potential for impact.”
Not so, responded district spokesperson James Canning: “San Diego Unified School District offered a 42 space fenced parking lot. In addition, the district allowed additional cars to be parked on 0.75 acres of unused playground area. The district also offered a number of vacant classroom spaces and accessible restrooms. The district also offered that homeless families could use play areas and a turf soccer field for recreation purposes.”
Laing did not reply to a request for comment related to Canning’s assertion. But that wasn’t the only thing that rubbed city officials the wrong way.
“Discussions with the school district did not move forward after we responded to the district’s agreement proposal (attached) with questions and requests for amendments, including asking why the agreement included a financial payment to the district,” Laing wrote in an email.
From the very beginning, district officials said they were offering the site to the city free of charge. But a draft licensing agreement prepared by district officials and shared with Voice by Laing includes a section that says the “licensee,” in this case the city, “shall pay to district the sum of,” but the next bit was blank. When asked if district officials had explicitly requested the city to pay to use the site they’d claimed they were offering up for free, Laing said not exactly.
“We never discussed a specific dollar figure, but when the City’s team balked at the blank space in the license agreement noting a charge, they didn’t get back to us. So while they say they were offering it for free, the only document we have included a placeholder for a charge. And that first draft took six months to get to us, which would seem plenty of time to nail down the language to appropriately convey their expectations,” Laing wrote in an email.
Canning, again, disputed that the district was expecting payment for the usage of the site. He said while district policy requires all licensing agreements to have “some type of value,” for San Diego Unified, the value in this case would have been that the safe parking site “supports our students.”
District officials would, however, have expected to recover any costs the district incurred because of the safe parking site – for example the water or electricity used. Once they knew which parts of the property would have been utilized by the safe parking site and for how long, they would have calculated those costs and added them to the licensing agreement.
Canning added that district officials don’t recall city officials sending them an updated version of the licensing agreement with a request to remove the payment line.
Many of these inner dealings may now be a moot point, since the project fell apart last year. City officials applied for a grant to fund the project from the Regional Task Force on Homelessness and though the proposal was approved, the amount awarded was only about a third of the total funds needed.
But even that money disappeared after city officials tried to reallocate the funds to a project they deemed was a better investment. The Task Force ultimately rejected the reallocation attempt and rescinded the funds because they would not have been used in 2024 as was required. That maneuvering, which was done without the knowledge of San Diego Unified officials or city leaders like Sean Elo-Rivera, a big booster of the project, has rubbed some the wrong way.
Still, that hasn’t stopped some supporters – including Elo-Rivera and Barrera – from urging the city to include funding for the project in the upcoming city budget. City officials have basically told the school district that if they want this safe parking site so badly, they should just do it on their own.
Given that the agencies haven’t been able to get on the same page at basically any point in this process, that may be ideal for everyone involved.
Grossmont Union Posts Meeting Recording – With Notable Edits
For my last newsletter I laid out the tense situation that’s developed at Grossmont Union High School District’s board meetings. The TLDR is that the board voted to close a multi-million-dollar budget deficit by axing over 60 staff members, including pretty much all of the district’s librarians.
That infuriated many in the community. Partly because the layoffs seem excessive to them, especially for a district with such large reserves, and partly because they really like their librarians.
Then I got ahold of an-as-of-then unreleased recording of the March 11 board meeting that included a couple of hot mic moments. At one point a board member called the very librarians people were so worked up saving about “overpaid.” At another point, he said the board’s supporters in attendance were staying quiet out of fear the protesters would beat them up.
A different board member called the protesters the “rudest,” crowd he’d ever seen. He also said they were trying to “vomit,” on, “Bully,” and “humiliate,” the board members.
The clean version: A couple of days ago the district finally posted a recording of the most recent meeting, but the hot mic moments had been edited out.
This is actually standard practice for Grossmont Union. If you peruse their archive of school board meetings, you won’t find any rough edges. The videos start as soon as the board meeting starts and 15-minute recesses in the middle of meetings are removed. This usually isn’t a big deal, but in this case, the tightening up eliminated the hot mic moments, both of which took place either in the downtime when cameras were recording before the meeting officially began or during the 15-minute recess.
This got me thinking about meeting recordings as public records. Is it legal to make seemingly small, cosmetic changes to meeting videos? I had no idea, so I asked someone who might – legal luminary Felix Tinkov.
Tinkov, who helps Voice navigate the messy world of public records, wrote in an email that “It would appear that there isn’t a basis to claim the district unlawfully/criminally altered their public meeting videos.”
In any case, here’s the unedited version, in all its glory.
What We’re Writing
After the pandemic, San Diego County students’ math test scores dropped more than their English test scores. That’s not a huge surprise. Data has long shown that math performance was hit harder by pandemic-era learning loss. What has been surprising is that in the years since, math scores have begun to creep up while English scores have kept falling.
Re the Learning Curve and the Central Elementary site: Seems to me it should not have been so difficult to make an agreement between the school district and the city if both parties would see the urgency to shelter children. Money can be a barrier. Does the city still rent the Boy Scout site at Balboa Park for $1.00 year? Who pays the maintenance at that site? Could a philanthropist have been contacted to donate money to cover expenses at the Central Elementary site, or a corporation looking for good publicity.