THOMAS ULTICAN: MAGA Politics Have Arrived at a San Diego School District - OB Rag

MAGA Politics Have Arrived at a San Diego School District

MAGA Politics Have Arrived at a San Diego School District

Election of Mike Allman to San Dieuito Union High School Board Achieves MAGA Majority

By Thomas Ultican / Tultican / March 15, 2021

One of America’s wealthiest public school districts typifies the damage MAGA Republicans are doing to public schools.

San Diego County’s San Dieguito Union High School District (SDUHSD) serves just over 13,000 students in five middle schools and five high schools. With former Republican congressional candidate Mike Allman’s narrow school board victory, a MAGA coalition has achieved a 3 to 2 majority.

This election result advances using school reopening as a political wedge issue. Normally nonpartisan school board elections have been turned into partisan political battle grounds.

May 25, 2020, the former President Tweeted,

“Schools in our country should be opened ASAP. Much very good information now available. @SteveHiltonx @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2020”

In July, the former Secretary of Education declared,

“School leaders across the country need to be making plans’ to have students in the classroom. There will be exceptions to the rule, but the rule should be kids go back to school this fall. And where there are little flare-ups or hot spots, that can be dealt with school by school or a case-by-case basis. There’s ample opportunity to have kids in school.”

Carl Hulse’s Feb. 12, 2021 New York Times article ran under the banner, “Republicans Seize on Shuttered Schools as a Political Rallying Cry” with a subtitle stating, “As President Biden struggles to keep his CONTINUE READING: MAGA Politics Have Arrived at a San Diego School District

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record

Technology personnel trained top-level district officials on how to permanently delete sensitive emails from the district server to subvert public records requests, an official who took part in the training told Voice of San Diego. 

School districts, like all government agencies, are required by law to preserve emails so they can be accessed by the public. But at San Diego Unified School District, officials devised a way to make their emails disappear permanently, according to interviews and documents obtained by Voice of San Diego. 

Technology personnel trained top-level district officials on a three-step procedure to permanently delete sensitive emails from the district server, an official who took part in the training told Voice of San Diego. The training took place two months after San Diego Unified entered into a court-approved agreement to keep emails for at least two years, as part of a lawsuit with Voice of San Diego.

“It seemed like the reason we were being trained to do this is because records requests were coming in and it was becoming a problem. And so we needed to understand how – when we sent things that we didn’t want the average Joe to see – to get rid of those emails,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“I saw it as a training on how to protect the district,” the official said. 

The official also said that top district officials frequently chatted in Google Docs in order to avoid communicating by email — a strategy commonly used among students to chat with one another without leaving a paper trail.

Records retention law in the state of California can be murky. Most documents are supposed to be retained for at least two years. Others that are considered of lesser importance can be deleted sooner, said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, when he was a state Assembly member last year, passed a law specifying that emails are among the types of communications that must be preserved for two CONTINUE READING: Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

Locals – Including NAACP – Oppose Biden’s Pick of Cindy Marten

Locals – Including NAACP – Oppose Biden’s Pick of Cindy Marten

Locals – Including NAACP – Oppose Biden’s Pick of Cindy Marten

Ken Stone over at Times of San Diego published a piece Monday that included critiques and opposition to President-Elect Biden’s choice of San Diego Unified schools chief Cindy Marten for a federal education post. Marten was nominated for a Deputy Secretary of Education post.

Locals who are not happy with Biden’s nomination include the NAACP’s San Diego chapter and community activist Tasha Williamson, the former mayor candidate.

Amidst the wide-spread praise for Marten, Stone writes – and he ticks off praise from everybody from Mayor Gloria to Assemblywoman Weber to former mayor Faulconer – he adds that the NAACP and Williamson oppose her nomination:

Katrina Hasan Hamilton, the local NAACP’s education chair, said:

“Educators at all levels must have a track record of dismantling the harmful practices of Anti-Black Racism that occur in schools. Cindy Marten has a historical pattern of allowing CONTINUE READING: Locals – Including NAACP – Oppose Biden’s Pick of Cindy Marten

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

An error filled online posting, devoid of context, with misleading assumptions has led to death threats and vile messages aimed at staff in the San Diego Unified School District, according to Board of Education Vice President Barrera.

Efforts to create awareness of racism as a systemic rather than an individual problem have stoked indignation in far right circles during the Age of Trump. Authors and publications seeking to educate the public and provide previously unheard historical context have been denounced as being racist themselves and part of a left wing conspiracy.

Now San Diego has its own mini-scandal, which should be laughable, except that threats and violence from right wing extremists have become normalized. Ninety percent of extremist-related killings in 2019 were attributable to right wing groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

What’s at issue here is a segment of an SDUSD staff development program concerning racial injustice, based on the Racial Healing Handbook by A.A. Singh, which was wildly misrepresented in a “drum up the outrage” article by the Discovery Institute’s Christopher F. Rufo.

The story has been picked up by Murdoch’s New York Post, The Daily Wire (the top right-wing publisher on Facebook), the San Diego County Republican Party’s “News Desk,” and spread via social media nationwide.

KUSI-TV interviewed Barrera, and -to their credit– gave him a decent amount of time to discuss the issues CONTINUE READING: Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools