Good schools deserve a board that asks questions in public.

When our kids needed more help, this district hired it: counselors, psychologists and social workers went from 12 to 20 in two years. That was the right call. I'd have voted for it.

Hiring is the easy part. Twenty people are now in one of the hardest jobs here. Many of them are new and caseloads, mentoring, and onboarding have never appeared on a board agenda. We buy professional development every year; it has come back to an agenda for review once since 2021.

Every 2025-26 raise in the district took effect the same day: July 1, 2025. The difference is when each one was approved. The superintendent's contract amendment: June 9, 2025 — three weeks before the school year began. The teachers' new salary schedule: approved March 26, 2026, eight and a half months into the school year. The classified staff — aides, office staff, custodians — waited until April 16, 2026.

Retroactive pay is normal — bargaining takes time. But the impact wasn't abstract: teachers worked for eight and a half months of the school year on the old salary schedule — aides and custodians three weeks longer. The back pay arrived but the waiting was real and it wasn't shared by everyone. Bargaining explains the wait. It doesn't explain the order — the order is a priority and priorities are what a board sets.

I'd put a workforce report in open session once a year — one evening focused on the people side: staffing and vacancies, caseloads, turnover, onboarding. The board has heard twenty-four briefings on its bond program; the people doing the work deserve at least one night a year.

Del Aire Elementary shows both patterns at once. The buildings are well served — over $4 million in Measure EE work is landing there now. When parents asked to join the principal search, the district did it right: a survey, a community meeting, and a parent back at the podium to say thank you. That's this board at its best.

The people side at Del Aire Elementary moved differently. Del Aire lost its counselor, a speech therapist, and its principal. No small change at a school of 596 kids that, like every Wiseburn Unified elementary school, runs on a single administrator. More than thirty staff arrived in the same window. Every move, both directions, bundled into one vote. If the board ever weighed any of it, the written record doesn't show it.

When the community asks, this board can choose to respond. The principal search proved that. What the record never shows is the board weighing the people side on its own, without being asked. Staffing deserves what the buildings get without anyone having to show up: an agenda item, a discussion, and a recorded why.

The 2026-27 budget names exactly one school for staffing reductions: Del Aire Elementary — "contingent on continued enrollment trends" while the district's own projection holds flat. The budget itself says the board may adjust that plan at the First Interim, scheduled in December, the month the new board is seated.

I'm not promising positions. I'm promising the question. State law already puts that budget review on the December agenda — and I will be asking why.

Here's what the eight-year record shows:

In eight years and 4,508 votes, this board has never voted down a contract, an agreement or a purchase. It has voted something down four times — every one an employee asking for leave or a reduced schedule. Nearly half of everything passes bundled on consent. The problem isn't the yes votes — it's that the record never shows the why.

The district's savings account doubled to $13.5 million by 2023, then fell back to $7.5 million. The plan is to keep spending more than comes in for the next three years. Wiseburn isn't broke. It keeps the state's required minimum reserve every year and its own projection shows the deficit narrowing to about $64,000 by 2028-29. This timeline leaves no margin: unassigned reserves — the money with no strings on it — fall from $2.8 million to about $276,000 by 2029, a 90% drawdown on the district's own numbers. A plan that spends the whole buffer works only if every assumption holds. One of those assumptions is the Del Aire Elementary staffing plan. They call the drawdown intentional, and I'll take them at their word. I just can't find the meeting where anyone walked through, in public, which cuts close the gap, what was assumed, or what we can do if the assumptions don't hold.

The audits are clean — the annual financial audit, and two straight years of Measure EE bond audits with zero findings. But a clean audit tests whether the rules were followed, not whether anyone asked the hard questions. In June 2024, a board member voted against an architect contract that had grown to $714,849 after the board authorized $50,000. He lost 4–1. That's what one voice looks like — and why one isn't enough.