Barbs fly prior to elections
Union lodges allegations against school board and superintendent

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — It's just three days before county voters go to the polls to vote for new school board members so it's not a surprise that local union and public school officials are arguing with each other.

Two positions on the Gallup-McKinley County School District are up for election Tuesday.

Voters in Zuni will select board members for their school district and the University of New Mexico-Gallup will have its election for positions on its advisory board.

The only major news coming out of any these elections continues to be between the county school officials and representatives of the McKinley Federation of United School Employees.

Union officials are continuing to accuse top officials for the district of using their influence to get Mavis Price re-elected to the board because of her continued support of Superintendent Karen White during her four years on the board.

Brian Bernard, president of MCFUSE, brought this concern up again Friday, pointing out that he and apparently every other household in Gallup received a copy of the January newsletter from the school district just before the election.

And it turns out, he said, Price has a prominent spot in the newsletter, which points out her accomplishments while on the board during the last two years.

"It's obvious the district is trying to influence the election," he said.

Not so, said White, pointing out that the theme of this issue was in connection's with January's observance of National School Board Month.

This was supposed to come out in early January at the start of the semester but was delayed, not because of anything district officials did, but because of problems within the company that has the contract for printing and distributing the newsletter.

The district entered into a contract with The Gallup Herald last August to print 24,000 copies of the newsletter in newspaper format throughout the year, inserting it in The Herald newspaper and mailing out the remainder to the city's 11,000 households.

The district was informed, she said, that distribution was delayed because of a death in Herald Publisher Joe Kolb's family which caused it to come out just before the election.

The union and the district are also squabbling over what is known as PDSAs.

Plan-Do-Study-Act forms have become a very big part of the school system in recent years as the district has gone to the Baldridge approach to teaching.

Under this system, everyone from the bus driver to people in central office have to do PDSA forms to plan their day-to-day operations, said Bernard. Many teachers, he said, do this instead of lesson plans and it's required by the school district of all employees ... except those in central office.

What the union is upset about is that White and others in Central Office have been telling school board members that they also are doing PDSA forms like everyone else but recent documents turned over to the union, he said, shows that they have been lying to school board members about this.

The documents that were turned over to the union, he said, showed that over the past three years White has done only four of these forms detailing changes that she wants to implement.

"MCFUSE is concerned that (White) has been telling the school board all decisions are being made using a systems approach, yet Central Office documentation shows either this is not true or (White) has made only four decisions to improve the district over a three-year period," according to a statement by the union put on its Web site Friday.

The information turned over to the union showed, Bernard said, that the district's assistant superintendents have even a worse record, with several PDSA forms started but none completed, including one by dealing with how the district can improve student achievement.

"This means that Learning Services has no idea on how to improve learning for our students," the union statement said. "Is it any wonder that all 34 district schools are in corrective action?"

White said the information put out by the district is incorrect and that she and others in central office do PDSAs all of the time.

"These forms are not meant to be kept so when the action is implemented, the forms are discarded," she said.

"She's lying," said Tom Payton, the union officials who oversees the requesting of school district documents. "Teachers are required to keep their PDSAs for a year so she's either lying about discarding them or <not?>doing them in the first place."

But White views the union's rhetoric on this as the union's attempt to embarrass her and others in central office by either distorting the facts or only reporting those facts that support their position.