Activists battle blackboard jungle

By JANNISE JOHNSON

Valley Press Staff Writer

PALMDALE - The Primer-gray truck with monster truck tires displays a bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t Steal. The Government Hates Competition.” It appears to suggest the owner might have a kind of rebellious streak.

However, the outside of the house, adorned with yard statues, rosebushes and a wooden plaque announcing it’s “The Vidals’ home,” informs visitors that the occupants are fairly down-to-earth people.

Their front yard is also decorated with interesting antique bottles and different kinds of stones that Dino and Anthonette “Toni” Vidal and their children - 10-year-old Dino, 9-year-old Nicholas and 6-year-old Dominic - collect on family excursions to Death Valley.

“It’s relaxing,” Dino Vidal said. “We haven’t done it in a while.”

The home’s interior and backyard of the house is home to the family’s three dogs, a bird, a fish and 20 house plants.

The inside of the house is decorated with antique furniture, dolls and even kitchen devices, a passion the husband and wife share.

So, are the Vidals rebels or homebodies? Maybe a little bit of both.

During the past couple of years, the Vidals have waged a campaign aimed at recalling three of five elected trustees on the Palmdale School Board.

They’ve tried three times without success and are working on their fourth attempt. If nothing else, they are persistent.

Dino Vidal says their effort is all about education reform.

The road that led him and Toni Vidal to their close scrutiny of district practices began with one school principal.

Dino Vidal’s differences with Pat Berry, principal at Mesquite Elementary School began in the spring of 2000 when the entire fifth grade was taken on a field trip to view a Vietnam memorial wall at a local park.

Dino Vidal, who worked as a custodian at Mesquite, contended that the students’ parents were not informed about the trip.

“That’s where it all started,” said Dino, who now works at another school in the district.

Bond measure

The Vidals also said they found themselves at odds with Berry when district officials and many staff members were campaigning to get a bond measure passed a few years ago. As he understands the situation, one teacher could not put her support behind the bond because she did not live in the area.

So Berry allegedly put the teacher’s name on postcards sent home to her students as a way to drum up support for the measure.

The Vidals took their complaints to Superintendent Nancy Smith, who, to their knowledge, took no action against Berry.

“We couldn’t understand why Nancy Smith wouldn’t do anything about it,” Dino Vidal said.

Berry, because of her position as principal, said she could not comment. She referred any questions about the Vidals to district headquarters instead.

The Vidals also question district officials’ awarding of some contracts with only one bid.

Both also say there are many school districts where the same things happen all over the state and probably the nation. But their three children attend school in Palmdale, which is where their concerns lie.

Not all of the Vidals’ experiences with the district are negative.

Anthonette Vidal has been volunteering at Mesquite Elementary for the past six years, where all three of their children attend school.

“She loves the kids. She gets along great with most of the staff,” Dino said.

His wife ran unsuccessfully for the board in 1999.

She said the serial recall efforts are about holding Smith and the board majority of Larry Logsdon, Tom Lackey and Velma Trosin accountable to parents in the Valley’s largest school district.

Together the couple formed a group called “Parents 4 Accountability.”

Anthonette Vidal, who ran fifth in a six-candidate field, says she doesn’t consider her loss a defeat.

“I’m always called the loser,” she said. “I’m not the loser. Do you know how many parents I informed?”

She contends that by running for office, she raised awareness that would help parents reach informed decisions about their children’s educations.

She said she would like to see more parents on the school board.

When asked about the fact that most board members, Logsdon and Lackey included, have children in the district, Vidal and her husband maintain that these trustees are simply using the school board as a steppingstone to higher political office.

Politics

Larry Logsdon - a history teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District - doesn’t see a problem with concerned community members wanting to be more involved in local politics, or “moving up,” for that matter.

“If they did, why shouldn’t they?” Logsdon said. “Just as Gov. Bush became president of the United States. So what does that mean? A person isn’t doing a good job in the position they’re in?”

“I’m a parent,” Logsdon said. “I have two kids in the district.”

Logsdon maintains the Vidals have continued with their efforts, even in the face of failure, to stir up controversy for the board.

And their continued failure to gather enough signatures attests to what most registered voters in Palmdale think of their campaign, he asserted.

“If anything, the community has strongly supported us,” he said of the sitting board. “No one’s at our board meetings. No one is showing up screaming at us. To do a recall, you have to do a whole lot more than these people are doing.”

A recall effort against Logsdon failed in March.

The group also is attempting to recall board President Velma Trosin and Trustee Tom Lackey.

Lackey is also a board member with a child in the district, a kindergartner.

He said he has no political aspirations at this time. His desire to serve the community was his only reason for becoming a board member, he said.

Lackey said he is at a loss to explain the Vidals’ motivation for the serial recall attempts.

“I don’t know what drives them,” he said. “My biggest disappointment is they don’t bring positive suggestions, and that’s what makes the district a better place.”

“I think what they mean is they want parents who share their animosity and viewpoint.”

Three areas

The Vidals and other members of their group have always cited three main areas of concern as reasons for initiating the recall efforts.

They suspect that students are not safe at the Pueblo Learning Center, which opened in October. The center is in a shopping center at 47th Street East and Avenue S. They believe the center has too much traffic and is too close to a nearby gas station.

The board also approved substantial pay increases twice last year for Superintendent Nancy Smith. Smith was given a 6.7% raise in June. Then the board approved an additional 11.4% increase in July because members heard she had received an offer from Beverly Hills.

The final item on the list of the Vidals’ grievances was board approval of a three-track, year-round system, which the group considers disruptive to learning and the ability of parents to schedule their off time.

District officials have defended those decisions. The board majority contends Pueblo Learning Center is safe, that Smith’s compensation was increased to keep her from leaving the district and that the three-track system was needed to alleviated school crowding in the absence of a construction bond.

Smith’s raise, Logsdon said, was set to bring her salary in line with those of superintendents in similar-sized districts throughout the state.

In an earlier interview, Smith summed up the recall efforts and their main complaints when she said, “I think that these people’s goal is to cause disruption.”

In order to successfully force a recall election, the group needs 7,504 valid signatures per board member, according to the registrar-recorder’s office.

Parents 4 Accountability filed the blank petitions with the county Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office in October. The petitions were approved for circulation that same month.

Dino Vidal said the group has until mid-March to collect the signatures they need.

Most recently, members of the group collected signatures in front of Stater Brothers market at the corner of  Avenue S and 47th Street East in mid-January as part of an attempt to get their forth recall effort under way.

Vidal said Smith decided not to allow circulation of fliers with the group’s Web address at Mesquite Elementary School. The fliers also said if parents wanted more information about board meeting agendas, it would be posted at the Web address.

The fliers also gave a street address and telephone number where interested people could mail a request for agenda information if they did not possess a computer.

The group made the request to circulate the fliers on Dec. 22.

Smith, in her written denial regarding the fliers, said distributing the additional information was not necessary because the district already had a Web site where agenda items and information are posted.

Vidal said the district officials didn’t start posting agenda information on the Web site until after his group asked to distribute the fliers.

The group wanted to send the fliers home with children from district schools.

Vidal said the group will fight the district about this because students are allowed to go home with fliers about outside activities.

Trosin could no say exactly why Smith refused to let the fliers be distributed, but she guessed it was because that information is already on the district’s site and Parents 4 Accountability is not a district sponsored club or group.

The group, which meets once a month, decided at the Jan. 2 meeting to find a venue and have a town hall meeting to discuss the recall and other district issues, Vidal said.

So far, he said, it hasn’t had any luck.

“People don’t want to give us a location because they think it’s too political,” Vidal said.

He said all interested community members and all board members would be invited to attend if they wished.

However, Trosin, when reached at her home, said she has no interest in going to such a meeting.

“No, I don’t even think I’d bother to go,” Trosin said. “there are so many important things that we have to do as board members, I consider my time more valuable than to go to something like this.”

So far, the Vidals say they have collected 400 signatures on their own.

In addition, he said, they have six people collecting signatures on the east side of Palmdale.

In an earlier interview, Vidal said the first recall effort against Logsdon failed by just 800 signatures.

Signatures questioned.

At the time, Logsdon questioned whether the signatures they had were actually those of voters registered within the Palmdale district boundaries. He also doubted if they actually had that many signatures.

During a recent phone interview, Logsdon also said the Vidals are linked with Diana Beard-Williams, former public relations spokeswoman for the district.

Beard-Williams was terminated in April 1999 for a range of offenses that the board used in reaching its decision. Beard-Williams is suing the district in federal court.

Dino Vidal said his wife and he are friendly with Beard-Williams, but that has nothing to do with why they continue to be at odds with the district.

He did admit that he believes the district set Beard-Williams up in order to fire her two years ago.

For his part, Logsdon contends the Vidals have not raised any pertinent issues.

Logsdon said the district’s yearly audits, performed by the Los Angeles County Office of Education, come out clean.

The district’s test scores have been up steadily for the past two years, he said, and the district is getting funds for new schools.

The Vidals say that even if the most recent recall effort fails, they will continue to be active in issues surrounding the Palmdale district as long as they believe there’s a need for them to do so.

The most important thing is informing the community about the most important topics affecting them and their children.

“They need to know that if we band together we can get a lot done,” Toni Vidal said. “It’s not about money. It’s about the children. That’s all right, though; we’ll hang in there, and we’ll get it done.”