Q and A for the Pasadena Independent

By Scott M. Phelps

My responses to questions for a local newspaper

2. What experience or talent most qualifies you for the office you seek? My courage to speak the truth, even when politically incorrect, my strong Cal Tech science background, my fifteen years of teaching and program management experience in the PUSD and my current work make me an ideal School Board member. As a faculty advisor and evaluator of teacher interns and teacher training, I am constantly in the classroom, in touch with teachers and students and assessing teacher performance and best practices. I love kids, teachers and teaching!

3. What are the most challenging issues facing the Pasadena Unified School District? We are facing declining enrollment, low achievement in the majority of schools, a lack of oversight from the Board of Education, a lack of student discipline and persistence of effort, a lack of data-driven teacher interventions, a lack of parental involvement by far too many parents and low teacher morale caused by a lack of ethics and skill in the central administration. The latter has also caused skyrocketing legal bills, a mounting fiscal crisis that could result in state oversight of the district, and over 25% of PUSD schools under state or federal sanctions.

4. What issues will you focus on if elected? Explain how you will address those issues and work to resolve them. I would vote to replace the senior administration, which has demonstrated a repeated lack of ethics and lack of skill. The most influential members of the search committee that hired our superintendent now realize that they made a mistake. He does not have any significant skills in the areas of leadership, listening/collaborating and taking input from others, hiring effective principals or employee relations/morale. He has hired far too many administrators simply because he doesn't have the skills he needs to do what is really his job. As a result of his inability to collaborate, he has put the Individual Education Plans of Special Ed students in the hands of expensive attorneys from a now-sanctioned unethical law firm. For the same reason, he has put collective bargaining in the same law firm's hands. Both moves have caused needless and very high legal bills, with the concomitant results of fiscal crisis, poor parent relations and low employee morale. I would hire a superintendent who can collaborate with others, who can work with parents and teachers to resolve common concerns. The law firm would be dismissed and the use of attorneys would be dramatically decreased. I would insist that the recommendations of the Charter Reform Task Force, which include an independent and full management audit, and which were approved in 2000 by 75% of the voters, be completely implemented. The audit would lead to a new, efficient organization chart, which would replace the complicated and unorganized current chart. Many current administrators are not necessary and would be dismissed or reassigned to the school sites.

I would also be a champion of local, site-based initiative and decision-making. I would encourage the formation of charter schools in the district. Right now the central administration has a stranglehold on power and will not allow the sites the control they need to flourish. Students, teachers and parents are the sources of inspiration and improvement, not excessive standardization of curricula and assembly-line schools. Bureaucrats at the Ed Center have not and will not solve our schools' challenges. Local, school-centered efforts will allow the different dreams of our students to come true. We need to nurture those efforts, not stifle them.

5. How will you address the school district's building needs? A new bond measure or other source of funds is needed to finish the schools that were slated to be modernized under Measure Y. In addition, many of the schools already modernized under Measure Y still are not nearly equipped they way they should be. However, I would only support this after the management audit and streamlining of the district's administrative structure, and the sale of surplus and wasteful properties currently held by the PUSD. In addition, I would vote to contract for construction management only with the architects themselves, not with wasteful and inefficient construction management firms.