While local school districts are implementing a new budgeting system and a new set of standards, the Santa Clara County Board of Education will spend the rest of the school year searching for a new superintendent and dealing with a lawsuit based on a 2012 vote.
On March 5, the Ysleta School Board will announce that Dr. Xavier De La Torre will become their superintendent next school year. Dr. De La Torre will leave Santa Clara County after only two years of a four year contract. When he was appointed, then-board president Joseph Di Salvo expressed his excitement when he explained that the county board had cast the “widest of nets to catch the best candidate in the nation.”
Dr. De La Torre has indicated that the county board’s ineffectual approval of charters has hampered his ability to work with superintendents throughout the county. Four elementary school districts have sued the county board over their approval of twenty county-wide Rocketship schools in February 2012. Dr. De La Torre and his staff improved his office’s standing with local districts with their recent extensive review of the Navigator Schools petition received on appeal from the Morgan Hill Unified School District. Trustees voted 4-3 to support staff’s recommendation to deny the appeal.
De La Torre has indicated that, before leaving, he will also improve the oversight process of charter schools. Traditionally, oversight has included an annual report and presentation by each charter school to the county board. De La Torre hopes to use the Office of Innovative Schools staff to do an actual evaluation of educational programs, school governance, and financial records of charter schools. When each school presents to the county board, county staff will also present an evaluation. While charter schools do exist outside of the Education Code, De La Torre seems to be moving toward holding charters accountable for those laws they must follow, for the details of their petitions, and the Memorandums of Understanding they sign with the county.
The Santa Clara County Board of Education might find that “their nets” will not attract much when the bait is a lawsuit with four local school districts.
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