Dear Editor,
I will not vote for Jaime Rosso, John Gurich, and Bob Kraemer
because they have failed to reply to my repeated requests for
information about the Kristen Porter firing, and I urge Gilroyans
who desire honest and open management of our schools to not vote
for them either.
Dear Editor,
I will not vote for Jaime Rosso, John Gurich, and Bob Kraemer because they have failed to reply to my repeated requests for information about the Kristen Porter firing, and I urge Gilroyans who desire honest and open management of our schools to not vote for them either.
At the time of Kristen Porter’s firing, The Dispatch published my letters asking the Board for an explanation of what they can and cannot divulge about employee matters – there was no reply from any Board member. While I support the letter and spirit of laws regarding confidentiality, I have no doubt the Board could have revealed limited information; I believe the Board showed a regrettable shortage of integrity when they failed to respond to inquiries.
When I didn’t receive replies to letters in The Dispatch, I wrote a very polite personal letter to each member asking, among other things, if the administration had in March recommended the firing of Kristen Porter immediately following the school board’s approval of the administration’s annual personnel recommendations in April – this I think is key to letting the public know whether Ms. Porter was fired for inadequacies that had been noted during her evaluations or if she was fired for publicly asking tough questions of the Board.
I received one voice message from Mr. Owens stating the familiar, “We can’t discuss personnel matters,” which I am sure is a half-truth. I later elicited an email reply from Mr. Rogers that contained the same familiar half-truth (to be fair, the Board may have been instructed by lawyers not to make any comment; if that is the case, the Board subordinated their obligation to the public by submitting to lawyers.)
On May 8, I sent Mr. Rogers this response: Actually, in our questions about Kristin Porter, we sought not comment, but fact. … It is difficult to see why question #1 would be a problem as it is public record that her dismissal was recommended, the only issue is the timing. If we modify the question to say, “Did his [Edwin’s] March 4 recommendations include the dismissal of any teacher immediately following the Board’s adoption of the recommendations?,” why couldn’t that question be answered? Why can’t question #2 be answered as one Board member addressed his personal experience on that count in The Dispatch? … We look forward to your response.
As you can see, I altered my question so that it did not refer directly to a particular employee – can any reader imagine why the Board could not answer the restated question? I regret to tell you that Mr. Rogers never replied to me and I think that failure highlights the current Board’s shortage of integrity!
As the editor has aptly pointed out, the GUSD Administration and Board has also hidden behind such flimsy justifications for terminating teachers as, “… was not a good fit.” I ask readers to judge if the administrators directly involved in the firing of Kristen Porter are “a good fit.”
Phill Laursen, Gilroy
