Candidate Mike Winsten explains a key element of his reform platform: "Spend our tax dollars equitably throughout CUSD."
Oct 18, 2008 Filed in: Public
Statements | Reform Campaign
4Q08
"Please vote for me and I will help lead CUSD forward while making sure every school site is treated equally. I will not quietly tolerate one school site being treated more equally than others due to shadow politics and favoritism. Thank you for taking the time to make an educated vote for our public schools."
Mike Winsten, an attorney and independent businessman, is the reform candidate for CUSD Trustee Area 3, which covers most of San Clemente. His opponent, Duane Stiff, is one of the two remaining, old guard, Fleming-era trustees.
As noted in my candidate statement on file with the Registrar of Voters and in the sample Ballot Statements recently mailed by the Registrar of Voters, a key element of my platform is ensuring that CUSD spends our tax dollars equitably throughout CUSD, and stop taking money dedicated for one community to spend on unfair projects in another community. For instance, recent audits by the City Councils of Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita established that under the old Board, there existed a long standing pattern of education money flowing out of these cities into other CUSD cities, while many of the school facilities in Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita suffered from overcrowding and lack of maintenance for far too long. Similarly, Mello Roos funds that should have been spent on new or upgraded school facilities in Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and San Clemente, were instead spent on the obscenely oversized and underutilized new Administration Building, that white elephant overlooking the 5 freeway in San Juan Capistrano, while school facilities where those Mello Roos dollars were collected, are suffering. My opponent enabled these practices with a series of ‘yes’ votes, without ever dissenting against this imprudent spending of your money.
To correct the inequitable treatment of the past, the CUSD Board of Trustees needs to focus itself and the Administration on the following priorities, and must ensure that the Superintendent and Administrative Staff faithfully follow and implement these policies:
1.
Smallest Possible Class Sizes. Keep and implement the
smallest class sizes possible. Keep the Class Size
Reduction program in place for grades K- 3. Implement
the smallest class sizes possible in the older
graders, with a particular emphasis on the smallest
class sizes possible in the earliest grades
(especially in grades 4 - 6) so students get more
personal attention in their formative years.
2. No Draconian Background Checks. Instead of creating barriers to parental involvement with overly draconian background checks, CUSD needs to encourage and maximize parental involvement in our schools. In all fairness, the current Board did not approve the current intrusive background checks, they were created and implemented by the Superintendent taking an activist and expansive view of a much more reasonable level of background checking initially approved by the Board.
3. Classroom Needs #1 Budget Priority. CUSD must stop balancing its budget on the backs of the children in grades 4 – 12 and their parents. In 4 out of the last 5 years, the old guard Board of Trustees increased class sizes in grades 4 -12, reducing the number of teachers needed, while at the same time giving huge salary increases to the superintendent and top level administrators. This is wrong and it must stop.
4. Long-term Facilities Planning. Learning is enhanced when school facilities are right sized, well designed and properly maintained. CUSD needs to engage in long term comprehensive and well coordinated strategic planning that takes into account the cyclical nature of the economy and state funding, instead of short term plans which are implemented on short notice under duress in reaction to external factors.
5. Strategic Partnerships. As part of its long term planning effort, CUSD must insist that the master developers of new communities that want to join CUSD, such as Rancho Mission Viejo, either commit to actively and constructively engaging in early forward planning with the school district or look elsewhere for their school district. CUSD must make it clear to developers of new communities that we expect they will commit to advance team planning for the right number of schools, in the right locations, on sites that are large and roomy with ample athletic fields and playground space, with attractive well designed brick and mortar buildings that will not have to be supplemented with short life span portable buildings after being only a few years old, and with efficient traffic and parking patterns, that are located in community centers to allow and encourage students and their families to walk and bike to and from their true neighborhood school. In other words, unlike most of the new communities developed over the last 15 years, which we now see joined CUSD without proper school site planning and construction, CUSD must insist developers start working in partnership with CUSD so new communities are built around excellent school sites, from elementary schools up to high schools. The past long standing CUSD practice of accepting badly located and undersized school sites, that were literally the “leftovers” from the master planning process, has resulted in dozens of badly located and undersized schools, surrounded by dysfunctional ingress and egress traffic patterns, and woefully insufficient parking. This all needs to end.
Under the leadership of the reform trustees now leading the CUSD Board, CUSD has just recently started a forward looking comprehensive and long term planning process. CUSD is due to soon receive a long needed district-wide facilities needs assessment, which will for the first time allow the Board members and their constituents to see all the of the school district facility needs throughout the district in one snap shot, to enable the Board to prioritize how to spend our scarce tax dollars in the most prudent manner to ensure fair and equal treatment of all schools in CUSD -- as opposed to the past practice of over funding the old Board’s and former Administrators’ pet projects, while they took care of everything else on an ad hoc - shoot from the hip - ‘band-aid’ - approach, running from putting out one fire after another without proper advance planning and budgeting, and blamed their difficulties of everyone but themselves, accepting no accountability.
Please vote for me and I will help lead CUSD forward while making sure every school site is treated equally. I will not quietly tolerate one school site being treated more equally than others due to shadow politics and favoritism. For more information, please visit www.cusdrecall.com or you can contact me at mike@cusd.us. Thank you for taking the time to make an educated vote for our public schools.
– Mike Winsten
2. No Draconian Background Checks. Instead of creating barriers to parental involvement with overly draconian background checks, CUSD needs to encourage and maximize parental involvement in our schools. In all fairness, the current Board did not approve the current intrusive background checks, they were created and implemented by the Superintendent taking an activist and expansive view of a much more reasonable level of background checking initially approved by the Board.
3. Classroom Needs #1 Budget Priority. CUSD must stop balancing its budget on the backs of the children in grades 4 – 12 and their parents. In 4 out of the last 5 years, the old guard Board of Trustees increased class sizes in grades 4 -12, reducing the number of teachers needed, while at the same time giving huge salary increases to the superintendent and top level administrators. This is wrong and it must stop.
4. Long-term Facilities Planning. Learning is enhanced when school facilities are right sized, well designed and properly maintained. CUSD needs to engage in long term comprehensive and well coordinated strategic planning that takes into account the cyclical nature of the economy and state funding, instead of short term plans which are implemented on short notice under duress in reaction to external factors.
5. Strategic Partnerships. As part of its long term planning effort, CUSD must insist that the master developers of new communities that want to join CUSD, such as Rancho Mission Viejo, either commit to actively and constructively engaging in early forward planning with the school district or look elsewhere for their school district. CUSD must make it clear to developers of new communities that we expect they will commit to advance team planning for the right number of schools, in the right locations, on sites that are large and roomy with ample athletic fields and playground space, with attractive well designed brick and mortar buildings that will not have to be supplemented with short life span portable buildings after being only a few years old, and with efficient traffic and parking patterns, that are located in community centers to allow and encourage students and their families to walk and bike to and from their true neighborhood school. In other words, unlike most of the new communities developed over the last 15 years, which we now see joined CUSD without proper school site planning and construction, CUSD must insist developers start working in partnership with CUSD so new communities are built around excellent school sites, from elementary schools up to high schools. The past long standing CUSD practice of accepting badly located and undersized school sites, that were literally the “leftovers” from the master planning process, has resulted in dozens of badly located and undersized schools, surrounded by dysfunctional ingress and egress traffic patterns, and woefully insufficient parking. This all needs to end.
Under the leadership of the reform trustees now leading the CUSD Board, CUSD has just recently started a forward looking comprehensive and long term planning process. CUSD is due to soon receive a long needed district-wide facilities needs assessment, which will for the first time allow the Board members and their constituents to see all the of the school district facility needs throughout the district in one snap shot, to enable the Board to prioritize how to spend our scarce tax dollars in the most prudent manner to ensure fair and equal treatment of all schools in CUSD -- as opposed to the past practice of over funding the old Board’s and former Administrators’ pet projects, while they took care of everything else on an ad hoc - shoot from the hip - ‘band-aid’ - approach, running from putting out one fire after another without proper advance planning and budgeting, and blamed their difficulties of everyone but themselves, accepting no accountability.
Please vote for me and I will help lead CUSD forward while making sure every school site is treated equally. I will not quietly tolerate one school site being treated more equally than others due to shadow politics and favoritism. For more information, please visit www.cusdrecall.com or you can contact me at mike@cusd.us. Thank you for taking the time to make an educated vote for our public schools.
– Mike Winsten
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