Dr. Chuck Young, Sonoma resident and former UCLA Chancellor, has been selected by the Sonoma Valley Unified School District School Board to serve as Interim Superintendent for one year while a permanent replacement is found for the outgoing Louann Carlomagno.
Carlomagno resigned suddenly on June 6, citing irrevocable differences with an unnamed board member. Young, who resigned from the Sonoma Education Foundation in advance of taking the job, was more direct in identifying what he called a “serious case of misfeasance.”
Before being offered the job at the SVUSD meeting on June 29, Young wrote that “the Board has become dysfunctional” since the election of John Kelly in November.
“By all accounts he ran to be in a position to punish Louann and her colleagues for his termination as an employee/contractor of the SV School District,” Young said. “He got his wish. He made her life miserable, doing her job effectively an impossibility and forcing her to resign.”
Despite the rhetoric prior to the unanimous vote, Kelly gave an enthusiastic and unequivocal endorsement to Young’s hiring.
Earlier, Young had suggested that Kelly’s “mean spirited vendetta” was abetted by another Board member. “While two of the Board members were the moving force in creating this serious case of misfeasance, the remaining members, constituting a majority, had the obligation to prevent this from happening. They did not.”
Those members, he said, must now move to return the Board to functionality by using every tool at their disposal to bring about that change, fully and quickly, he said. “If they will not, or do not succeed in doing so, the citizens of this District must take the only effective action at its disposal by invoking the recall process.”
The resulting divisiveness has seriously impaired the ability to focus on the real issues facing the schools, Young said. “What has happened in the last six months has been extremely harmful to the students who (the Board is) responsible for educating.”
At the June 29 meeting, Board President Dan Gustafson described the challenges the Board had faced, given the short time frame, and given that few candidates for such positions were still available for the coming year. As such, Young’s willingness to step into the interim job was met with relief and enthusiasm by the board.
Trustee Nicole Abate Ducarroz pointed out that his tenure at UCLA was notable for increased diversity, the expansion of women’s sports even before it was required, and the creation of Ethnic Studies at a time when the idea was still controversial.
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