The importance of trust

By Peter Attwood

Well-earned distrust is expensive, and earning trust is the only way the district can get it done with less money

As in most districts, and in the entire education industry, lying, spinning, and eye-service are pervasive in Chino Valley Unified. It's usual, for instance, when they move a principal, to make the principal write a letter saying she wants to be moved. It's a small thing, but can people who lie in such little things expect anyone to trust them to tell them the truth about big things when it's inconvenient?

For the special ed department to lie to parents about the law in order to cheat them out of needed services, to delay things to death, or just to bully them is policy. I can reduce what parents want to three things:

Don't lie to me. Don't cheat me. Don't hurt my kid.

In Chino's Special Education Department, these 3 principles are an unknown language. All this trickery is designed to save money. But does it save money to keep a kid from getting what he needs so that he limps through the district for 12 years or more and then fails in life, when doing the job right might have caught him up, or at least made things much better? And if the kid winds up in prison at $50K per year, or in a state institution at $300K per year, because the district wanted to save a few thousand a year by wrecking his life, can we complain if the state then has no money for the district?

The public and employees are constantly lied to in the same way. The board entertained a proposal to "save" $19.6 million - taking care as in all budget "study" sessions to take public comment before the proposal was presented so that speakers could not know the subject in advance. ALL the guidance counselors and school nurses were to be eliminated, among other absurdities.

In the first place, it was not serious; it was a ploy to pressure the teachers for concessions. Second, the contemplated savings built in the assumption that such cuts would cause no students to go elsewhere, along with their state ADA money at $5000 each. Not only did the board not challenge this malarkey; it was complicit.

Board members have expressed their understanding that trust is essential. But the answer on offer is to blame people for not trusting them more, and that conduct only confirms that trust cannot be given. There's only one way to increase trust. Trust is earned, starting by not asking for it.

We will not in the foreseeable future see more money. We need a new culture, in which trust is earned, so that we can get more done with less money.