For nearly two years, Laguna Beach has been told that governance matters.

Our policies and bylaws matter.

Transparency and process matters.

At least, that was the pitch to help elect Sheri Morgan and Howard Hills. It justified all of their governance committees, policy reviews, legal questions, public criticism of district leadership, and hours of board meetings spent debating how LBUSD should operate.

The promise was simple enough: institutions are stronger when decisions are made through transparent, established processes instead of the preferences of a few people in power.

Then came May 14, 2026, when a new superintendent was appointed. Suddenly, the process has become negotiable.

This is not a story about whether Dr. Don Austin is qualified, and it’s not even really a story about whether the board had the legal authority to appoint him. School boards have broad authority to hire superintendents, and no one needs to pretend otherwise.

The question is not whether the board had power, but how they used it.

For Howard Hills, his governance obsession did not begin when he was sworn in. For more than a decade, he has shown up around LBUSD with questions about leadership, process, board authority, and whether the district was following the rules closely enough. Howard built a public identity around governance language.

Sheri Morgan’s record fits inside the same frame. Her political brand has been transparency, access, and community voice. She has presented herself as someone trying to pull LBUSD out of a closed-door culture and into a more responsive, public-facing one. Whether you agreed with her or not, the pitch was clear: the old way was too insulated, too controlled, too dismissive of the community.

In 2026, that governance language became formal board work. LBUSD approved an Ad Hoc Governance Committee to review the district’s governance processes, including the clarity, organization, and alignment of board bylaws and policies with CSBA models, statutes, and board-adopted norms. Howard led the charge to create this committee because he insisted that governance structure mattered.

LBUSD’s own Board Bylaw 9310 says board policies are adopted to set clear procedural expectations for district governance. It says policies are binding unless they conflict with law or collective bargaining agreements. The district’s policy manual is supposed to be the framework for how the board governs.

But then Board Policy 2120 became inconvenient.

On June 4, 2026, Sheri Morgan defended the superintendent appointment by arguing that the prior superintendent search had not expired. According to her, the district had already conducted an extensive search less than a year earlier, Dr. Austin had stated he was part of that process, and restarting the work would be unnecessary, expensive, and fiscally irresponsible.

“There is no statute of limitations,” Sheri said. “There is no expiration date on that search process from less than one year ago. Restarting that process and redoing that work is not required by law or policy.”

She also said repeating a search that cost more than $50,000 and took four months would be “fiscally irresponsible.”

That is one argument. However, Howard Hills made another.

He did not simply argue that the policy had been satisfied. He actually argued that the policy was not mandatory.

“The bylaw is not mandatory and it’s not compulsive,” Hills said. Then he went further, saying the board could appoint a superintendent “any way the board wants to do it and any time.”

After all the speeches, all the policy debates, all the governance lectures, all the concern about procedure and institutional standards, Howard suddenly announced that the superintendent-search policy was not compulsory and that the board could, essentially, however it wanted, appoint a superintendent.

Funny how flexible governance becomes when it finally applies to them.

If Howard had never spent years questioning governance, if Sheri had never built her case around transparency, if the board had not created a committee around policy alignment and board-adopted norms, this might read like an ordinary disagreement over how much process is enough.

But that is not the record.

The record is a board majority that used process as both sword and shield until the moment process pointed back at them.

Dr. Joan Malczewski put the concern plainly during the June 4, 2026 board meeting. Search processes exist so institutions can protect themselves from the weaknesses of individual decision-making. They protect against bias, generate better information, create buy-in, and, most importantly, protect the institution and the person being hired.

A superintendent search process is not only about finding a good person. It is about creating legitimacy around the choice.

Joan was not informed that Don Austin was a candidate until the May 14, 2026 closed session, when she was met with a motion to hire him. She said she had no prior information that conversations were happening, no knowledge that negotiations were underway, and no role in determining a start date.

This was not a board-led process; it was a majority-led outcome.

There is a difference.

And that brings us to Dee Perry. Most conversations about the current board majority focus on Howard and Sheri, which makes sense. They speak the most, drive the arguments, and attract the heat.

But they cannot govern alone.

The majority is three votes, and their third vote is Dee Perry.

Dee’s role is quieter, but it is not smaller. She often appears surprised, uncomfortable, or only partially informed. She can seem adjacent to the controversy rather than central to it. But when the vote matters, Dee Perry is not a spectator; she seals everyone’s fate.

Howard and Sheri can argue, posture, explain, defend, and accuse. This allows Dee to remain aloof and pretend to be just a passenger along for the ride. And when she says she was “a little bit in the dark,” that does not make the vote easier for us to swallow. It should make it more concerning. If a trustee is unsure, uninformed, or surprised by how a major decision reached the board, that is the moment to slow the process down, not hand it the final vote it needs.

Dee may not be driving the car, but she keeps handing the keys to Howard and Sheri.

The board majority can keep saying this was about stability. They can say it was about saving money and avoiding another long search. They can say Dr. Austin was already vetted, so the policy was not mandatory. They can say the law allowed it.

Maybe some of that is true, but none of it answers the larger questions.

If governance mattered enough to build a political brand around it, why did it stop mattering here?

If policies matter when Howard and Sheri are criticizing district staff, former board members, or prior decisions, why do they become advisory when Howard already has the votes?

If transparency is the standard, why was the public asked to accept the explanation after the decision rather than being included beforehand?

And if Dee really was “a little bit in the dark,” why was she still comfortable becoming the light that turned the whole thing green?

This is about whether the board majority is willing to hold itself to the same governance standard it spent the last two years demanding from everyone else.

So far, the answer looks pretty clear.

Governance matters — until it gets in their way.