Laguna Beach Unified is getting another independent review, and I think that is a good thing.

As I have shared before, the employee healthcare contribution issue was serious because public funds were involved, collective bargaining agreements were not followed, and the District paid more for employee benefits than required. The District must understand how it happened, correct it, strengthen controls, and provide the public with an honest accounting of what went wrong.

Now the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) has asked the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) to conduct another formal review in response to requests from members of the Laguna Beach community. LBUSD will be providing the records and information FCMAT requests. OCDE has made it clear that initiating the review does not indicate fraud, misappropriation, or illegal fiscal practices, and that the purpose is to conduct an independent assessment and determine whether the evidence requires reporting under Assembly Bill 139.

The questions now are what FCMAT finds, how the District responds to those findings, and whether Board members who spent months demanding this scrutiny will consistently apply that same respect for public accountability when community members raise documented concerns about the Board itself.

OCDE supports Orange County’s 28 school districts while overseeing state-mandated fiscal matters. It reviews budgets and financial reports, provides operational and legal support, assists with countywide services, and has statutory responsibilities when concerns develop about a district’s financial procedures.

FCMAT operates statewide and was created to help California school agencies identify and resolve financial, operational, and data-management problems. Most of its work is preventive management assistance intended to improve systems before a fiscal crisis develops. At the same time, a smaller portion involves assignments from county and state agencies, including extraordinary audits conducted when there is reason to examine whether fraud, misappropriation, or other illegal fiscal practices have occurred.

The name sounds alarming because it includes “fiscal crisis,” but the organization does more than respond after a district’s finances have failed. FCMAT reviews staffing, contracts, purchasing, internal controls, special education, organizational structure, data management, and other areas where an outside team may identify problems a district has missed or tolerated.

Laguna Beach Unified has worked with FCMAT before.

In September 2017, the District agreed to have FCMAT review LBUSD’s special education program. The Board approved the study unanimously, with staff describing it as voluntary, proactive, and part of continual improvement. Board members clarified that LBUSD requested the assistance and was not facing a fiscal crisis.

FCMAT conducted interviews and reviewed records in January 2018, then issued its final report that May. The study examined general education supports, special education staffing, paraeducators, related-service providers, identification rates, outside placements, organizational structure, due process, and the District’s financial contribution to special education.

The report identified areas for improvement, including student-support processes that varied across school sites; some special education and paraeducator staffing levels exceeding FCMAT standards; inconsistent procedures for assigning certain individualized supports; and an increase in the District’s unrestricted contribution to special education. FCMAT recommended stronger coordination among special education, business services, and human resources. It also suggested a closer review of outside providers and placements, as well as a formal process for resolving parent disputes.

These important findings affected some of the District’s most vulnerable students and involved substantial public resources, complicated legal requirements, and decisions likely to shape a child’s entire school experience. The report did what an outside management review is supposed to do: it examined systems, identified variances and financial pressures, and provided the District with recommendations to improve them.

Sometimes a school district asks FCMAT to help improve a program. In other cases, a county office requests an examination after employees, parents, or community members raise concerns. Sometimes the findings support serious allegations, while at other times a lengthy investigation concludes that the evidence does not establish intentional wrongdoing, even though policies and internal controls still need substantial work.

The current LBUSD review falls into a different category from the 2018 special education study.

OCDE says it initiated this process after receiving requests from members of the Laguna Beach community, and the scope includes employee health-benefit contributions, associated contracting decisions, and the use of District resources. The people who submitted those requests have not been publicly identified.

Howard Hills has spent months pressing substantially the same issues, describing the healthcare contributions in the most alarming terms available to him, questioning the conduct of former District leadership, reviewing potential action by county and state authorities, and arguing the Board should continue pursuing the issue whether the district attorney or another outside agency acts or not.

His public campaign around healthcare has included paid advertisements, communications with outside allies, repeated use of the larger $1.77 million figure, and an email titled “CONFIDENTIAL: Unofficial Communications Management,” where he discussed media coverage, op-eds, full-page advertisements, and the need for someone to coordinate press around District issues, yet somehow he’s calling people he disagrees with “political gossip columnists.”

Given that record, it is reasonable to wonder whether Howard, one or more of his colleagues, or people in his “communications circle” submitted the requests that led to OCDE’s decision. It also matches his stated strategy and the work he has done to extend the healthcare issue beyond LBUSD.

Still, OCDE has not named the requesters, and reasonable suspicion does not turn speculation into fact just because it fits neatly. Until those requests become public, I cannot say Howard submitted them.

I will say he is probably pleased.

He wanted a state or county agency to examine the healthcare issue, and one is now doing that. He has argued the District’s own review and corrective actions were insufficient. FCMAT will request records, examine the underlying processes, and decide whether the evidence supports the level of wrongdoing Howard has repeatedly suggested.

He should celebrate the review if he believes in it, and the District should not treat his satisfaction as a reason to resist the process. Public officials, employees, and community members should be able to request outside scrutiny without being accused of disloyalty merely because the eventual finding may be uncomfortable.

The same principle applies when the request comes from people Howard disagrees with.

Over the last year and a half, community members, employees, and advocacy organizations have signaled concerns about LBUSD’s closed-session practices, agenda control, public-comment procedures, trustee communications, and growing uncertainty about where Board governance ends and District operations begin. Some concerns resulted in formal Brown Act cure-and-correct demands. These allow a public agency to review an alleged open-meeting violation and correct it before the dispute proceeds to litigation. A couple of these demands have been made public, and I know of a few more that have been submitted privately.

A cure-and-correct demand does not prove a Brown Act violation any more than a community request to OCDE proves someone committed financial misconduct. Each begins with an allegation supported by whatever facts, records, and legal arguments the person submitting it believes justify further examination.

The receiving agency is then responsible for fully reviewing the complaint, responding through the appropriate process, and correcting the conduct when warranted.

I think Howard cannot reasonably support community requests that trigger an outside examination of District employees and financial procedures, then dismiss other community complaints as political theater when they ask whether the Board majority followed open-meeting law. He can disagree with the claims, challenge the evidence, and defend the Board’s conduct, but the legitimacy of the process cannot depend on whether he likes those who use it.

The Board’s response to the FCMAT review will tell us a great deal about what its members actually wanted from this process.

Will they allow FCMAT to conduct the review without changing every records request into another public accusation against staff? Will they wait for the findings before announcing what they may prove? Will they accept a conclusion identifying administrative weaknesses without validating Howard’s more extensive narrative of corruption? Will they implement recommendations even when those are technical, procedural, and less dramatic than the story Howard has been selling?

When a complaint involves closed session, trustee communications, or the Board’s use of power, will they show the same patience and respect for the process that they now expect from the employees being reviewed?

Based on several FCMAT reports, Mountain View Whisman School District appears to offer the closest recent comparison to what may happen here.

In 2024, the Santa Clara County Superintendent of Schools requested an AB 139 extraordinary audit after parents, employees, and community members raised concerns about business relationships, contracts, transactions, travel, and reimbursements involving the school district’s former superintendent. FCMAT conducted a broad review of expenditures, internal controls, vendor payments, board approvals, travel, credit card purchases, and reimbursements.

The public debate surrounding that school district became intense, with disputed contracts and spending decisions presented as possible evidence of corruption. After reviewing the transactions, FCMAT concluded it had insufficient evidence to establish fraud, misappropriation, or other illegal fiscal practices. The report still led to improvements in contract procedures, written documentation, credit-card controls, travel policies, and delegated purchasing authority.

Mountain View Whisman shows how an outside review can validate stronger systems without validating every accusation behind it. Community members were entitled to raise questions, the county was entitled to examine them, and FCMAT’s conclusion depended on evidence rather than on the intensity of the public campaign.

Based on the records we have available so far, I think Laguna Beach may end in a similar place.

The healthcare issue showed that agreements were not administered correctly, the District paid more than required, and controls needed strengthening. Michael Bishop & Associates examined spending variances, collective bargaining compliance, and internal controls, while leaving legal impropriety outside its scope.

The District eventually proceeded with a corrective-action figure of about $1.04 million and decided against recovering that money from employees who did not establish the contribution rates or administer the benefit structure. Howard continued to cite the larger $1.77 million figure and framed the issue in terms of staff oversight, unions, and former District leadership.

FCMAT will likely obtain documents the public has not seen, interview people who provide important new information, or identify a contracting problem beyond the contribution calculations already discussed. An independent review has value because the conclusion must remain open until the work is finished.

Even with that possibility, the evidence currently available looks more like an administrative, contractual, and internal-control failure than an intentional scheme to steal public funds or improperly enrich employees. I expect FCMAT will confirm that the contribution process was flawed, identify weaknesses in documentation and oversight, recommend clearer delineation of responsibilities and more frequent reconciliation, and find insufficient evidence to support the larger claims of deliberate fraud or malfeasance.

Howard may say procedural failures proved him right, while others may say the absence of corruption proved him wrong. Both reactions would oversimplify what will likely be a more complicated report.

The healthcare problem required correction, but the evidence has never supported treating teachers and staff as suspects for receiving benefits calculated and administered by the District. Howard was right to ask how the error occurred and how to prevent it. His public campaign against staff, unions, former leadership, and anyone rejecting his framing also remains part of the record.

What happens next will reveal whether Howard and his “colleagues” wanted independent answers or public validation for conclusions they had already reached.

If FCMAT finds misconduct, the District needs to address it directly and publicly. If it identifies weak controls, administrative failures, or poor documentation, the District should implement the recommendations and explain the changes. If FCMAT finds insufficient evidence of fraud or malfeasance, the Board owes the public the same clarity and should not stretch procedural failures into unsupported allegations.

The Board should remember the standard it helped establish. OCDE took community financial concerns seriously, and FCMAT will examine the records before reaching a conclusion. Documented concerns about closed sessions, trustee communications, agenda control, and the Board’s use of power deserve the same review and respect for evidence, even when those under scrutiny sit on the dais rather than work in the District office.

Howard has spent months insisting that outside scrutiny is necessary when the allegations involve employees, unions, and former District leadership. He cannot reasonably celebrate that process while dismissing cure-and-correct demands and other governance complaints as meaningless simply because they involve his own Board majority.

The community should pay close attention to what FCMAT finds, but the Board’s response may tell us even more. Howard wanted someone outside LBUSD to look closely at what was happening inside the District, and now that review is here. The harder test will be whether his circle still believes in transparency when the call for accountability comes from inside the house.

I was not at the May 14 protest, but the people there were not strangers to me.

They were my friends, neighbors, my kid’s coach, and the parents I see at school events, on
the sidelines, in parking lots, and around town. They were the people who talk when something feels wrong, show up when it matters, make signs in someone’s kitchen, buy snacks at Costco, bring the kids, and somehow turn a group chat into civic action before dinner.

In other words, they were acting the way people in Laguna Beach often act when something feels wrong: they showed up to exercise their First Amendment rights.

Of course, this is the part the Board majority now seems very keen to blur.

On July 7, the ACLU of Southern California sent a letter to LBUSD alleging the Board violated the Brown Act by discussing the May 14 protest in closed session. The letter was sent on behalf of local parent Meredith McMahon, who helped spark the protest and, from what I can tell, felt a duty to defend what that protest actually was.

To be clear, Meredith is not suing the district for personal financial damages, nor is she seeking a payout. The ACLU letter clearly asks the Board to fix the alleged Brown Act violations and commit to not repeating them. If litigation ever follows and attorney fees become an issue, that would be about legal fee recovery for the ACLU under the Brown Act, not money going to Meredith.

The ACLU letter is bigger than one parent, one protest, or one very Laguna group-chat mobilization. It asks whether the Board majority can take public criticism, reframe it as a safety threat, send it to legal counsel, and then hide the response from the public.

The May 14 protest grew out of the Board majority’s sudden separation from Dr. Jason Glass, which the district described as mutual, even though many parents did not see it that way.

So parents showed up publicly to object.

They had signs. They chanted. They were loud. They were angry, and definitely not subtle. There were “shame” signs, handmade posters, kids, snacks, and even pom poms, because apparently Laguna moms can turn constitutional expression into a spirit squad if given enough notice.

Was it uncomfortable for the Board? I am sure it was.

Was it embarrassing? Probably.

Was it public criticism of elected officials? Absolutely.

And that is protected speech.

The First Amendment is not a feelings-management policy for public officials. It does not protect only soft voices, flattering signs, and calm comments delivered at a podium by the dais. It protects speech, assembly, and petitioning the government, including signs, chants, criticism, and public pressure elected officials may find deeply unpleasant.

Public agencies can enforce reasonable rules about safety, access, noise, and keeping meetings functional. However, this is about the Board majority appearing to take a loud but peaceful protest and recast it as something more troubling.

After the protest, the Board majority’s storyline started to shift. Trustee Dee Perry stumbled while trying to enter the building. Available videos show Perry struggling to enter, with Ketta Brown helping her inside. These videos do not show protesters pushing her, and Perry later stated in the Laguna Beach Independent that she was not pushed.

Shouting, chanting, holding signs, or criticizing elected officials may feel intense, uncomfortable, and even overwhelming. Absent a physical act, an attempt to apply force, or a direct threat of immediate violent injury, fear alone does not turn protected speech into assault. For example, a stumble near protesters does not automatically render a threat to public services or facilities.

But Dee Perry’s fall became the Board majority’s permission slip to reframe the May 14 protest.

A parent protest over Dr. Glass’s sudden exit escalated into a “safety incident,” which then became a legal matter. Then the legal matter became a closed-session discussion the public was not allowed to hear.

By the June 4 meeting, the Board’s posture had visibly changed, with notice-restriction signs and stanchions appearing. Then came the June 8 closed session.

According to the ACLU letter, the Board discussed the May 14 protest under a closed-session item related to “threats to public services or facilities.” Afterward, Board President Sheri Morgan reportedly stated that no reportable action had occurred. She also said safety concerns had been raised after the May 14 rally and that the Board had requested legal counsel or a designee to look into the rally, including what occurred, whether safety protocols were followed, and whether Board policy or law had been violated.

That is the kind of sentence that makes normal people blink twice.

No reportable action occurred, but the Board requested legal counsel or a designee to investigate the rally?

The ACLU argues that LBUSD improperly used closed session to discuss a public protest under a narrow Brown Act exception meant for actual threats to public services or facilities. The letter also argues that the public agenda did not give people fair notice that the Board would discuss the May 14 protest or whether to investigate it.

The Brown Act exists because public agencies must conduct business in public unless a narrow exception applies. Closed session is not where elected officials process feelings about criticism, nor is it a panic room for uncomfortable public feedback.

The ACLU’s point, as I read it, is simple: the Board cannot take a public protest, call it a threat, discuss it privately, and then tell the public there was nothing to report.

Especially when the “threat” appears to be parents speaking up.

That is how public speech gets silenced — it is not always by a direct order to stop talking. Sometimes it happens through vague safety language, shifting narratives, closed-session agenda items, and lawyers looking into what parents did.

I am not a lawyer, but I work at a public institution and follow First Amendment regulations in public spaces. I know the difference between protest and disruption. I know access and safety are important. I also know public agencies cannot use “safety” as a cover for viewpoint control.

The government does not get to treat public criticism as a threat just because the criticism is loud, embarrassing, or effective.

If the Board had legitimate safety concerns, it could have addressed them openly. If protest logistics needed better management, it could have said so in public and allowed the community to respond.

Instead, the Board used closed session to discuss the protest under a “threat” exception and then reported that legal counsel or a designee had been asked to look into it.

The protest was public, so the Board’s response should have been public.

The First Amendment does not just belong to the Board majority — it belongs to us, too.

A Public Record for Laguna Schools provides independent, community-focused coverage of LBUSD to help make district decisions, public records, board actions, and issues easier to follow. If you value this work, becoming a paid subscriber or patron helps make it sustainable by covering the research, writing, and platform costs that keep this information accessible to everyone. I am deeply grateful to anyone who reads, shares, subscribes, or supports this work in any way.

One of the most important things I have learned from studying school board governance is that poor governance rarely announces itself and will usually show up under a much nicer name: responsiveness, urgency, efficiency, transparency, and community input.

I have spent the last couple of years watching Laguna Beach Unified board meetings, reading agendas, and trying to understand how an idea becomes a district decision. Somewhere along the way, the California Education Code and board bylaws became recreational reading. This has done very little for my social life (thank you to my friends and family for listening to my newfound knowledge), but it does satisfy the part of me that wants to know how public systems are supposed to work, where authority ends, and why certain procedures were put in place before someone decides they are inconvenient.

As summer break begins, LBUSD is heading into another superintendent transition, a new budget cycle, and a board election in November. We do not yet know the full field of candidates, but before the mailers arrive and everyone discovers a passionate commitment to transparency, it seems worth deciding what the job actually requires.

What kind of school board would serve this district well?

We do not have to answer that question on instinct, since California law provides a solid framework. The California School Boards Association offers guidance, and LBUSD already has policies and bylaws that define responsibilities. Other districts have built governance systems that Laguna Beach can learn from.

The harder part is finding trustees who believe those rules still matter when they slow down something the board wants to do.

The California Education Code gives school boards broad authority. Section 35010 places school districts under the control of a governing board. Section 35160 gives boards wide latitude, provided their actions are consistent with the law and the purposes of public education. Section 35161 allows boards to delegate responsibilities while still holding ultimate accountability.

That authority belongs to the board collectively, but it does not make board members district administrators.

The board governs through policy, budgets, contracts, goals, superintendent hiring and evaluation, bargaining direction, accountability systems, and public votes, while the superintendent and staff run the district. Education Code Section 35035 identifies the superintendent as the board’s chief executive officer and assigns responsibilities involving implementation, budgeting, staffing, financial reporting, and carrying out district plans.

Essentially, the board sets the direction, the superintendent carries it out, and then the board monitors the work and evaluates the results.

This arrangement is not complicated, but it can quickly become messy when individual trustees act as though they have their own chain of command. Staff should not have to sort through competing instructions, and the public should not have to guess whether a decision came from the board, the superintendent, a site administrator, or one notably persistent trustee.

An engaged board should ask difficult questions, demand reliable information, examine budgets, evaluate the superintendent, and push for better results without taking over the work. The line gets crossed when trustees begin deciding which employee should handle a task, which vendor should be selected, which venue should be used, or which public complaint should be assigned to staff immediately.

For LBUSD, that distinction stopped being theoretical this year.

In January, the board introduced a change to Bylaw 9322, which controls how meeting agendas are developed. The existing language called for the board president and superintendent to work together, but the revision gave the board president final approval.

That may sound like a small procedural adjustment, but it wasn’t.

No history of repeated agenda failures had been presented to explain why such a change was necessary. At the time, Dr. Jason Glass said the existing system followed normal practice and that he had always had a productive working relationship with the board president—until a disagreement arose over one particular agenda item with the new board president, Sheri Morgan.

Staff, both employee unions, and hundreds of written and in-person public comments opposed the change. The majority moved forward anyway.

Agenda control is easy to dismiss as board policy minutiae until it determines which issues make it onto the dais and which decisions the board can take into its own hands.

The revised bylaw was passed on February 12. That same meeting included a lengthy discussion about the graduation location, and the item returned for action at the board’s very next meeting on February 26.

I am not claiming that the bylaw change caused the graduation vote, but the sequence shows why the change mattered. Almost immediately after the board president gained final agenda authority, a decision traditionally handled at the school-site level was brought to the full board for a vote.

Glass told the board that graduation locations had historically been site decisions and recommended leaving the matter there. Dee Perry also said she wanted it to remain “a site decision,” while arguing that community concerns deserved more attention.

That was a reasonable concern. Families should be heard, and students should be consulted. If the process was too narrow, unclear, or closed prematurely, the board had every right to ask questions and require something better.

It could have directed the administration to explain how the initial decision was reached, gather broader feedback, set clear criteria, and return with a recommendation.

Instead, Dee, along with Sheri Morgan and Howard Hills, voted to move graduation to the Irvine Bowl.

The board did not improve the site-level process—it replaced it.

That is the difference between oversight and management. Oversight would have required a better decision-making process, while management was the board selecting the venue itself.

Once public pressure is sufficient to bring an operational decision to the board, the same reasoning can be applied to transportation, facilities, staffing, discipline, communications, curriculum, or student services. A board does not have to make every decision itself to prove it listens; sometimes, listening should lead to a better process, not a board takeover.

The same preference for a desired outcome over a clear process has appeared in the board’s handling of superintendent appointments.

At the new majority’s first meeting in December 2024, the board voted 3–2 to direct staff to prepare a contract for a specific interim superintendent candidate. That effort fell apart when the candidate declined.

In May 2026, forty-eight hours after approving Glass’s separation, the same three-member majority voted to appoint Dr. Don Austin as the permanent superintendent without presenting a new public search process.

The circumstances were not identical, but the pattern is hard to miss. In both cases, the majority identified the person they wanted and attempted to move directly toward a contract. The December 2024 effort failed because the candidate said no. On May 14, 2026, the candidate said yes.

I have already written in detail about Austin’s appointment and the Orange County District Attorney’s request for answers, so I am not going to rebuild that full timeline here. The point I am making here is simpler: policies, bylaws, notice, consultation, and equal access to information matter most when the people with the votes already know what they want.

Howard Hills offered a very different view at the June 4 meeting, saying the board could appoint a superintendent “any way the board wants to do it and any time.” He was stressing the breadth of the board’s legal authority, and that authority is broad, but authority is only the beginning of the question.

A responsible trustee should also ask whether the process is fair, whether all board members have the same information, whether the public has been given an honest account of what is happening, and whether the decision will still look credible once the immediate excitement has passed.

Having the legal power to do something does not automatically make it wise. Moving quickly does not mean the work was carefully considered, and a policy does not lose its value because following it has become inconvenient.

A district that prides itself on excellence should be looking for the best way to govern, not treating the legal minimum as an impressive achievement. Of course, governance is about much more than the controversies that fill meeting rooms.

California’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) requires districts to assess achievement, attendance, facilities, school climate, family engagement, course access, staffing, special education, mental health, safety, and whether different groups of students are being well served.

Good trustees should be able to ask whether a program is working without trying to redesign it from the dais. They should be able to recognize a disturbing result without turning one number into a districtwide catastrophe, and they should also be willing to look honestly at areas that need attention rather than hide behind LBUSD’s overall reputation.

Being a strong district does not mean every decision is strong or every student is getting what they need.

Labor relations require the same kind of judgment. Support for teachers and classified staff is not measured by appreciation posts or friendly comments during meetings. It shows up in bargaining priorities, workload, staffing, compensation, benefits, communication, and whether the board respects the people who actually do the work.

Trustees need to understand the district’s financial position, retention challenges, staffing needs, and long-term obligations. They should give clear and lawful direction to the bargaining team while avoiding side promises, public freelancing, or informal efforts to influence negotiations outside the established process.

A person can genuinely care about teachers and still be terrible at labor relations. Caring is important, but knowing how the process works is also important.

The board’s relationship with the public requires a similar balance.

A board meeting is not an open-ended town hall. The board has an agenda to complete, decisions to make, and legal requirements to follow, but public comment is still part of the meeting’s real work. It is not a formality everyone has to sit through before the important people begin talking.

The community does not get to direct staff or control every decision. At the same time, these are public schools, and the public has every right to question how they are being governed.

Trustees need ways to hear from people without assuming that the fullest room represents the entire community, but they also need to avoid the opposite mistake of treating criticism as an annoyance or a threat.

Public opinion is information, and it belongs in the decision alongside law, data, professional expertise, student needs, and financial realities. The board then has to explain what it decided and why, especially when the answer is not what the loudest group wanted.

None of this works well without the right temperament.

Trustees will disagree. That is normal and often healthy. The issue is whether they can disagree without making every conflict personal, ask hard questions without humiliating staff, and accept a vote without spending the next several months trying to undermine the result. They also need to resist the urge to turn every complaint they agree with into a direct assignment for the superintendent.

Winning an election also does not make someone an instant expert in finance, instruction, law, facilities, transportation, labor, special education, and every other corner of district operations. There is nothing wrong with admitting you need to learn something before deciding it.

Humility is not a side benefit of this job; it is part of being competent at it.

Other districts offer useful examples. Ohio’s Cleveland Metropolitan uses goals and guardrails to distinguish between the outcomes the board monitors and the operational boundaries staff must follow. Washington’s Issaquah uses written expectations and public monitoring reports. Virginia’s Fairfax County has invested in explanations that help the public understand complicated decisions.

None of this is revolutionary; it is simply more organized than waiting for a controversy and then deciding where the boundary should have been.

LBUSD already has some of the right pieces. The district uses public bargaining proposals, fiscal disclosures, hearings, and ratification procedures.

Those processes can feel slow and tedious when everything is moving smoothly. Their purpose becomes much easier to appreciate the moment someone wants to bypass them.

This is the foundation I plan to use when evaluating future board candidates.

Can the person explain the difference between governance and management without giving a vague answer about “leadership”? What would they do after losing a vote? When should the board defer to professional staff? How should the board respond when the loudest public demand conflicts with legal obligations, budget realities, student needs, or a staff recommendation? Do they believe adopted policies still apply when those policies slow the outcome they prefer?

Those answers will tell us far more than another campaign statement about transparency, excellence, or putting students first. Nearly every candidate will claim those values. The revealing part is what they do when those values pull in different directions.

Some warning signs are easier to spot.

A candidate talks much more about what the board is legally allowed to do than about when restraint is appropriate. Policies and bylaws suddenly become flexible whenever they interfere with a preferred outcome. The candidate promises to fix operational problems without showing any understanding of the board’s actual role. The superintendent is discussed as though each trustee personally supervises the position.

Other warning signs are quieter. A candidate uses the word transparency constantly but cannot explain confidentiality or public-meeting law. One isolated data point becomes the entire story of the district. Uncomfortable information is dismissed because LBUSD remains strong overall.

I will be listening closely to how candidates talk about staff. Praise is easy, but respect shows up in how someone discusses workload, morale, bargaining, professional expertise, and the limits of their own authority.

Poor governance has a very good publicist: role confusion becomes responsiveness, an incomplete process becomes efficiency, and meeting the legal minimum becomes transparency. The label changes, but the underlying habit remains the same: use the power first and explain it later.

My children are at the beginning of their time in this district, so I am less interested in who wins a board argument this month than in whether LBUSD remains stable, trusted, and well run for the next decade.

I am looking for trustees who understand the law and use their authority responsibly. I want people who value public input without allowing whoever fills the room to govern by volume, who provide serious oversight without directing day-to-day operations, and whose support for staff lasts through bargaining season.

I also want transparency before decisions are made, not only after the result has been announced.

Before deciding whom to support, I want to know whether candidates understand the responsibilities of the role and have the judgment to exercise them well.

Laguna Beach will be better served by a board that can work collectively, respect professional roles, follow its own processes, and keep the district’s long-term health in view.

A Public Record for Laguna Schools provides independent, community-focused coverage of LBUSD to help make district decisions, public records, board actions, and issues easier to follow. If you value this work, becoming a paid subscriber or patron helps make it sustainable by covering the research, writing, and platform costs that keep this information accessible to everyone. I am deeply grateful to anyone who reads, shares, subscribes, or supports this work in any way.

Article Sources:

• California Education Code: 35010, 35035, 35160, and 35161
• California School Boards Association: Board Roles and Responsibilities
• LBUSD Board Meetings and Public Records
• Governance examples:
  • Cleveland’s Goals and Guardrails
  • Issaquah’s Governance Policies
  • Fairfax County’s Governance Manual.