MHUSD trustees fail to decide on candidate for vacant seat
Published online December 12, 2015 by Morgan Hill Life
By Robert Airoldi and Marty Cheek
The Morgan Hill Unified School District released Friday more emails relating to the recall campaign initiated by activist group Parents For Positive Change against school board president Bob Benevento.
The Morgan Hill Times and Morgan Hill Life separately filed California Public Records Act requests to obtain PDFs of email correspondence between Parents For Positive Change members Rob Guynn, Monica Guynn and Karen Fitch and all seven board members. The first batch of emails were released Nov. 30 and showed political involvement between board members David Gerard, Gino Borgioli and Rick Badillo with the parent group organizing the recall.
The district released another PDF of more than 100 emails at 5 p.m. Dec. 11. These had been sent by the Guynns to board members Benevento, Donna Foster Ruebusch, Amy Porter Jensen and Ron Woolf from Oct. 17 to Oct. 19 demanding Benevento resign. The 64-page document of emails shows a repetitive pattern including a barrage of the exact same email sent over and over during a period of minutes. To download and view these emails, click HERE.
Parents For Positive Change initiated a recall campaign against Benevento in August because they were upset that the board voted 4-3 to move 6th graders to middle schools in the district. The group needs to gather more than 6,000 valid signatures for a special election to be held in spring which the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters said could cost taxpayers more than $500,000. Benevento’s term ends in November 2016.
A series of five emails sent Oct. 17 from Monica Guynn’s address to the four trustees within a few minutes of each other state: “My name is PARENTS4POSITIVECHANGE and I have been following the news of the pending recall of MHUSD Board Trustee and President, Bob Benevento. I support the recall and I intend on signing the recall petition and eventually voting for Trustee Benevento’s removal. The school district has enough things to deal with, besides a special election to have Benevento recalled. Mr. Benevento, I urge you to resign as a MHUSD Trustee.”
Monica Guynn sent another series of the same five emails Oct. 18 within about a 2-minute period of time to the four board members. That email read: “ RESIGN or BE RECALLED You can hide behind the police. You can hide behind the new one hundred thousand dollars P.R. employee brought in to protect your position on the board. You will be unable to hide behind the power of 8000 signatures. PARENTS4POSITIVECHANGE.”
Rob Guynn sent the same “RESIGN or BE RECALLED” email to the four board members a total of 73 times Oct. 18 and Oct. 19. Many of these were sent within less than a minute of each other.
Starting March 13, a string of emails between Rob Guynn and Porter Jensen grew into what Porter Jensen called “harassment.” Porter Jensen left the school board Oct. 28 because of stress arising in part from the emails she received on a nearly daily basis.
Porter Jensen filed papers with the Santa Clara County Superior Court in October, accusing the Guynns of inundating her with emails concerning the recall campaign. She also claimed Rob Guynn made a “disturbing” phone call to her. The court granted her a temporary restraining order against Guynn, but that order was dismissed Nov. 17 in the San Jose Superior Court after she failed to appear before the judge.
At a special board meeting Dec. 8, MHUSD trustees were unable to come to a consensus on appointing a new member to fill the vacant seat left by Porter Jensen. The six trustees ended the meeting in a 3-3 deadlock between finalists Adam Escoto (favored by trustees Gerard, Borgioli and Badillo) and Mary Ann Groen (favored by trustees Benevento, Ruebusch and Woolf).
After the final tie-breaker vote failed to lead to a decision, the board unanimously agreed not to move forward with a coin toss to determine an appointee. The trustees also did not act to order a special election, resulting in the issue now being handed over to Santa Clara County Superintendent of Schools Jon Gundry who must by law call for a special election. The process to choose a new board member to serve until November 2016 can cost between $58,500 or more than $400,000 depending on whether it takes place on the scheduled June 7, 2016 election date or as standalone special election, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office.
In a Dec. 3 email to Morgan Hill Life, Trustee Gerard apologized to his fellow board members and the public for the offensive language he used in emails to Parents For Positive Change members. In the same email, he also criticized Morgan Hill Life and the Morgan Hill Times because the two newspapers “targeted” the three parent group members through the Public Records Act request.
“You can call this a War on Parents. Just like the Salem witches of the pre-colonial times, these three good parents were selected for shunning and worse,” Gerard wrote in his email to this newspaper. “These parents and many others dared to speak up and question command and control District tactics that over time have become a War on Parents. When they told me how they were being threatened and bullied, it sounded very much like my own experience as a board member when I would speak up and question policies that were presented to us as finished products without our input such as the planned elimination of sixth grade from six elementary schools.”
Board members Benevento, Ruebusch, Porter Jensen and Woolf all considered the October barrage of the Guynn’s emails a “nuisance factor” that impacted their day-to-day communication, Benevento said.
“I use my cell phone for business and personal communication and I get my emails on my cell phone,” he said. “I had to literally turn my cell phone off to avoid being harassed by these continuous emails. And the fact of the matter is that it did impact my business communication and my ability to communicate with my children as well as my 90-year-old mother. It was an inconvenience to me as well as a harassment.”
Benevento said he believes the omission of the other three members from the email barrage is “indicative” that they were co-conspirators in the recall movement and that all three were “intimately” involved in the recall activity.
“They were all collaborating or in collusion in the effort,” he said.
In a Dec. 8 press release, MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando responded to the release of Gerard’s emails, stating the district takes the content “very seriously.”
“The comments found in individual emails do not represent the Governing Board, District or school staff, or the Morgan Hill community,” he said in the release. “We nevertheless express our regret for all the offensive and upsetting statements caused by the content of these email communications. I want to assure the community that MHUSD strives to provide a positive environment where employees, students, and community members are safe and free from hostility, harassment, and discrimination…The behaviors and messages revealed to us all are intolerable. Whatever action occurs to those involved will not deter us from the great work we will continue to do for our students and the Morgan Hill community.”
Editor’s note: Despite the fact that our newspaper’s mission is to emphasize the positive aspects of our community, Morgan Hill Life decided this story is important to publish in the public’s interest.
