David Bolling on The censure of John Kelly

6 thoughts on “David Bolling on The censure of John Kelly”

1. What does this mean David?

   “But his presence on the board also highlights a longstanding crisis in the unmet needs of special education students”

   Does he represent himself as on the board to fix the unmet needs of special education students?

2. Thank you David Bolling, for this excellent summation of the facts.

3. I trust that the remarks in this article attributed to Steve Page were made by him as a private citizen and not as the apolitical Sonoma Alcade. If that is the case, the honorary title of Alcade should not have been included in this article.

4. My only experience in viewing Mr. Kelly came a few years ago when I watched a school board meeting. I do not know the facts outlined in this piece. But, I did see Mr. Kelly yell at and threaten people in this meeting. He behaved in a rude and unprofessional way. There were staff he targeted and treated horribly. I could tell these people were in fear of him. Each time one of them tried to speak, Mr. Kelly cut them off and refused to hear them, while being verbally abusive. It reminded me of my 18 years in corporate life, with crazy, out of control bosses. Beyond having the credentials for a position on the board, candidates should possess emotional maturity and be required at all times to conduct themselves within rules of decorum and treat everyone with respect: Other board members, the public and school district employees.

5. It is very easy to file a Bar Complaint with the California State Bar. His Bar Number is 225961. Why has this been allowed to go on for this long?

6. The John Kelly Dust Up In Sonoma Valley
   — Deeper Than You Might Imagine

   KELLY CHALLENGES THE POWERS THAT BE

   ATTACK ON TACTICS — Steve Page, Chuck Young, and their friends have been on the at-tack against Sonoma Valley Unified School District trustee John Kelly for some time now, tracking his every supposed misstep and calling for his resignation in long letters to the Index-Tribune (IT). The attacks have been so relentless it makes you wonder what’s up.

   Most of the attacks have to do with Kelly’s tactics — getting a controversial decision made before a new board was seated, overseeing the sudden firing of a school superintendent, rais-ing his voice against her replacement, then charging him and the board with wrongful acts themselves. But an attack on tactics often hides an attack on goals, and perhaps this does.

   LATINOS FIND THEIR VOICE — In 2016, Kelly was the first in a dozen years to challenge a sitting trustee in an election and did so for the West Side and the Springs. Gary DeSmet, who Kelly trounced at the ballot box, lives up above Verano Avenue in the Donald St. neighbor-hood, which he calls North Sonoma and defends against being part of the Springs.

   Kelly ran when the Latino workforce outside city gates were beginning to find their voice — on housing, immigration, and particularly education, in which they thought they were being short changed. But though Kelly represented a specific area, under the old rules he had to run dis-trictwide. He campaigned on the school’s lack of success, winning with 56% of the vote.

   Early On: Threats Of a Recall

   OLD-BOYS CLUB — The school board had been something of an old-boys club, elected largely by the white well-to-do anchored in Sonoma’s East Side. The board and superinten-dent generally followed the wishes of the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation, funded by even wealthier folks retired to the Valley or in second homes, a kind of noblesse oblige.

   By going up and winning against DeSmet, an Ed Foundation supporter, Kelly upset the apple-cart, and the powers that be have been after him ever since. When he began sticking his nose into the district’s finances, and did so publicly, then-superintendent Louann Carlomagno quit in a huff, precipitating a big turnout at the next school-board meeting.

   CHUCK YOUNG — There, Chuck Young, retired to the Valley after 29 years as chancellor of UCLA, professed that Carlomagno was the best superintendent he’d ever seen, and threat-ened Kelly and an unnamed trustee (thought to be Britta Johnson) with recall. But longtime community activist Mario Castillo said he didn’t think Carlomagno had been that great for Lati-nos.
   Castillo was quickly fired from his job at El Verano Elementary, but the board chose Young, then in his 80s and with no experience in K-12, as interim superintendent. “Chuck can fix the board so we can hire a qualified superintendent,” said board president Dan Gustafson. His own modus operandi, Gustafson said, was to hire a superintendent and then sit back.

   * * * *
   CHANGING CONDITIONS AFTER 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS

   LATINOS — Here it’s important to understand that while it was obvious that individuals had changed — and that there was dissidence on the school board — conditions had changed as well. After the 2008 financial crisis, the local economy had not recovered, people had lost their homes, vacation rentals were increasing, and rents in the Valley were skyrocketing.

   Meanwhile, the Mexican farmworkers who had built Wine Country as migrants were settling down and raising kids. And as English-language learners, many needed special attention. Un-der changing circumstances, what worked in the past generally won’t work in the present, and trying to force it to work merely holds things back. Hence, the dissidence.

   ‘ARROGANT’ — Which is to say that personalities and tactics are not the fundamental issue here. Both Kelly and his adversary Chuck Young over his many years as chancellor have repu-tations for being abrasive. (“Arrogant,” one of Young’s UCLA board members called him.) But it’s what they stand for — or, better, whose interests they serve — that matters most.

   “UCLA has become a bigger and bigger business,” the New York Times wrote in 1995, “and Young is its top businessman.” He had led UCLA “into a new realm of high-stakes business ventures” based on expansive private fundraising. “The man moves freely between the edu-cation institution and the corporate community,” one LA businessman commented.

   Chuck Young, Les Vadasz, and the Education Foundation

   CLOSE FRIENDS — That paid off for both Young and the corporate community that benefit-ted from what he did with UCLA. During his tenure, Young sat on a number of corporate boards, including Intel, where in one year he cashed in $300,000 worth of stock options. On the Intel board he worked with Les Vadasz, now 85, an Intel founder who oversaw its invest-ments.

   Close friends and fishing buddies, both Young and Vadasz retired to Sonoma Valley. There they have become central to the non-profit philanthropy that has played such a big part in shaping the school district — and in designing the education of the working-class Latino kids whose families live doubled and tripled up in the Springs, the parents working two or three jobs.

   RED & WHITE BALL — Young lives above Sonoma under the Mayacamas on a $6-million
   estate, Vadasz on the other side of the Valley on a $17-million spread at the foot of Sonoma Mountain. There he is a neighbor of ex-Citibank CEO Sandy Weill, who pioneered the sub-prime loans that brought many Valley families crashing down during the bank crisis.

   When the two retired here, Young joined the board of the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation and then became its president, while Vadasz took a seat on the board. Both families are major contributors to the Education Foundation, and both are top sponsors of its annual Red & White Ball, the proceeds of which go to the schools — to whatever the Ed Foundation de-cides.

   AN OFFER THE DISTRICT CAN’T REFUSE

   VERY WEALTHY PEOPLE — In the IT after he was appointed superintendent, Young gave an insight into just how this worked. “The Ed Foundation didn’t just give the district money to spend. We gave them money for particular programs. We said, ‘We would like to do something along these lines. Does it make sense to you? Would you do it if we gave you the money?’”

   Imagine. You are the superintendent of schools. The Education Foundation has well paid staff and an office — on school property, no less, right next to your office. Some of the wealthiest people in the district (and there are very wealthy people in the district) run the foundation. Their friends sit on the school board. They come to you with an offer. You can’t refuse.

   FUNDING THE CHARTER — Gary Nelson, 84, has made a couple of such offers. (Nelson is not one of the wealthy men hammering on John Kelly.) Founder of the Nelson Family of Compa-nies, he made his fortune supplying “human capital” to big tech. He recently told the IT that he has moved to Texas so he won’t be embarrassed to tell people that he voted for Trump.

   Nelson has been a major underwriter of Sonoma Charter School. He made that clear during the pandemic in a letter to the IT calling on the district to open up the schools for K-3 kids (and their teachers), threatening to withdraw his financial support if the goals of his Grade Level Proficiency Project (GLPP) were not met.

   ‘Systematic Mismanagement’ of Special Ed

   KIDS LEARNING ENGLISH — Nelson introduced the GLPP into the Charter School, Sassarini, and Dunbar in 2015, with funding from the district and the Ed Foundation later on. In a com-munity with “demographics which challenge our educators” (i.e., Latino kids learning English), he promised that every student would be at grade level in reading and math within two years.

   Seven years later, that still hasn’t happened. Indeed, the regular failure of programs for Eng-lish-language learners instituted by the likes of Nelson and the Education Foundation is a major bone of contention for parents of the district’s Latino-student majority. They are rarely con-sulted in these decisions — and, when consulted, rarely listened to.

   RENEWED CALLS — The parents’ group in that struggle, the Special Education Advisory Council, has stopped working with the district, citing “a lack of collaboration, transparency, and consistency.” Kelly’s support of SEAC — and his charge that Palazuelos and the board had discussed getting rid of it — brought the wealthy clique’s renewed calls for Kelly to resign.

   “The district is the one who is wrong here,” Kelly told the IT when the SEAC parents walked out. “The withdrawal of the Special Education Advisory Council signals the defeat of the single best effort made to address the ongoing civil-rights violations caused by the systematic mis-management of Sonoma Valley Unified’s program for special education.
   CLIQUE’S REAL TARGET: PAYING DECENT WAGES
   STEVE PAGE — The calls for Kelly to resign began after he rallied the board to pass a project labor agreement (PLA) in early 2021. That he tried to do so without discussion — and at the last meeting he chaired before a new board was seated — is the charge leveled against him by the clique (and apparently true). Their real target seems to have been the PLA itself.

   Leading the attack is Steve Page, 67, another of the beloved “community leaders,” so labelled by his wealthy peers, based on his power and commitment to the cause. Page recently stepped down from being the longtime big boss at Sonoma Raceway and was rewarded by the Sonoma City Council appointing him honorary alcalde, a faux position in faux Spanish.

   SRJC TRUSTEE — Page was thusly honored for his support of local charities — serving on their boards and making donations, often from the charitable arm of the Raceway’s multi-track parent, Speedway Motor Sports. Speedway also funded at least one political candidate he backed, wine-industry exec Jeff Kunde, one of two SRJC trustees who opposed PLA’s there.

   Backed by unions composed of hundreds of Sonoma County construction workers, Kelly was contesting Kunde for the Sonoma Valley seat on the board. Kunde’s funders were big local wine families, including his own, and big construction. Among the latter were the county’s major contractor, Wright Construction, as well as the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC).

   Wine Industry Training at Public Expense

   SRJC FOUNDATION — Page contributed $1,000 to Kunde’s campaign, Speedway $5,000. Page is president of the SRJC Foundation, the college’s version of the Valley’s Ed Foundation. As such, he oversees raising and, to a certain extent, dispensing the JC Foundation’s mostly corporate donations, nearly all of which are tied to their donors’ pet projects.

   Working families in Sonoma County often see the JC as a way to get the training needed for a local job. Local industries, on the other hand, see it as a way to get their workers trained at public expense. A major subgroup within the SRJC Foundation is its wine-industry fund. The members of the JC’s wine advisory council are all well known industry names.

   WORKERS, ORGANIZED — Organized labor, the masses of workers who have organized themselves into unions for a united voice in the workplace, support PLA’s in construction be-cause they take the cost of labor out of competition, guaranteeing good wages and benefits on those jobs. Their contractor opponents would rather compete by paying workers less.

   Of course, anti-union contractor groups like ABC don’t put it that way. The public face of their attack is to decry supposed increased costs to the taxpayers, and of late they have been claiming that PLAs “create barriers for local, minority, and women-owned” construction com-panies. At least, that is what PLA (and Kelly) opponent Eric Christen has to say.

   * * * *
   KNOWN BY THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

   ERIC CHRISTEN — Christen shows up and speaks at board meetings — SRJC, Sonoma Val-ley USD, any Cal institution considering a PLA. He represents the anti-union Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction. In San Diego, he works out of the local ABC chapter. CFEC’s other addresses include a PO box and Christen’s 40-acre ranch outside Grass Valley.

   But attacking PLA’s is just Christen’s day job. In his time off, he is a “local firebrand” in Grass Valley, where he recently led an anti-mask walkout from his daughter’s school and was chas-tised in a school-board meeting after calling one resident a “Satanist” and accusing teachers of using the pandemic as an excuse to take a longer break from the classroom.

   ‘CHAOS’ — This is apparently par for the course for Christen, who in 2003 resigned just days before being recalled from his seat on a Colorado Springs school board (by a 3:1 margin). Ac-cording to the local press, he had called his colleagues buffoons and unbalanced, labeled his opponents racists, and threatened “guerrilla warfare” against the school board itself.

   Christen had advocated issuing parents vouchers to pay for private schools, and he is now plugging home schooling. His online presence features Wuhan, Joe Rogan, school-board con-frontations, and denunciations of “woke” culture. “Chaos theory is part of the plan,” Christen told the Grass Valley newspaper. (Gents, you are known by the company you keep!)

   * * * *
   AT STAKE: WHO CONTROLS THE BOARD — AND WHO RULES

   ANNE CHING — One reason that Page, Young, and their friends got upset when Kelly rushed the PLA through that last board meeting was that they’d just spent a lot of money electing one of their own, who would sit on the next. In 2020, Anne Ching had unseated Britta Johnson, whose $8,500 campaign was funded (as Page noted in his attack) by construction unions.

   What Page and successive letter writers did not point out was that Ching’s $17,000 campaign had been largely funded by wealthy folks in and around the Education Foundation, including Young and Vadasz, but also board members Mark Mance and Graham Smith. Ching herself had been a board member and one-time president of the Foundation.

   DISTRICT ELECTIONS — Kelly after all, had overseen the shift to electing trustees by sepa-rate subdistricts. The shift was precipitated by a letter from the Sonoma Valley Housing Group suggesting that the district-wide elections were contrary to state law, since they allowed the wealthy white East Side to vote on trustees for the heavily Latino West Side (the Springs).

   In the ensuing 2020 election, candidates ran in three of the five new districts. Ching won on the East Side. Kelly ran unopposed in one of the two districts with significant Latino populations. And two newcomers, neither of them with any financial backing, ran for another West Side dis-trict, with Troy Knox, a Napa elementary-school principal, the winner.

   Preparing the Way for Another Ed Foundation Trustee

   DUMP-KELLY CAMPAIGN —That may help understand why these folks are hounding Kelly to resign. His resignation would give them a chance to get yet another Foundation candidate ap-pointed to the board (who could then run as an incumbent when the seat comes up in 2024). At worst, they are laying the groundwork for a 2024 dump-Kelly campaign.

   There is little doubt that John Kelly’s tactics have opened the door to their attacks. But what’s at stake is who controls the school board — and the schools. The money that the Val-ley’s very wealthy put into “our” non-profits decides much about the lives other people, in-cluding “our” workforce and their families. So what’s at stake, more broadly, is who rules.

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