The Olive Grove Charter School Board met during its regular meeting on Oct. 1, a clear and hot day at its new site in Orcutt. During that meeting the board also bid adieu to three board members and two former teachers. It was not a happy parting.
The small charter school, which the Sun has covered since February, is now up and running. It had survived near-closure, successfully petitioning the state board to stay open, and it pulled together the basics of a functioning program in the space of just a few weeks.
At the recent board meeting, not quite a month after re-opening, that victory was overshadowed by raised voices, palpable frustration, and a sense of deep internal disarray. Teachers Joe McCollum and Mike Rasey had been laid off on Sept. 28 and 29, respectively. At the board meeting, they claimed they had lost their jobs not because of budget concerns but as retaliation.
Rasey, who’d been with the school for almost a decade, spoke first. Talking quickly and with audible frustration, he told the board he wanted to “expose the current dysfunctional director and school board to the public.”
Layoffs of key teachers and classified staff, he said, were not fiduciary. They were intended to silence disagreement. Taken together, he went on, they were “a huge loss of talented people I do not think that Olive Grove can recover from.”
McCollum testified after Rasey, echoing much of what had already been said. He alleged that bullying was “alive and well at Olive Grove Charter School” and that he and others had been let go for speaking out.
“Isn’t it interesting that the two teachers who speak out loudly against what [Director Laura Mudge] is doing are fired?” he asked. “That reeks of retaliation.”
McCollum and Rasey raised objections about the budget, saying that new hires of teachers and classified staff with substantial salaries were unsustainable. They contended that those teachers were hired and signed to contract before board approval. And they said that the school was failing to communicate the ongoing process of accreditation to students and parents.
Because they raised those concerns, McCollum and Rasey claim, they lost their jobs. Maria Domingues, the school registrar and operations manager, had also clashed with Mudge; as of press time, she was in the process of being let go.
Mudge disputes the claims of retaliation and silencing. She said that Olive Grove was put in a bind when it started the school year with fewer students than initially expected.
“We thought we had to do something to keep our budget in line,” she said. “All staff were told that cuts in salaries and staffing had to be made.” Olive Grove is an at-will employer, and the staff there are not unionized.
Certain new teachers were starting at high salaries, she said, but with reason: to maintain a certain cost ratio, to motivate with higher pay, and to ensure that salaries at Olive Grove were competitive with Santa Maria Joint Union High School District.
Moreover, she said, communicating the accreditation process to parents was the responsibility of the teachers, as directed by the administration.
The staffing turmoil was mirrored by a spate of resignations from the Olive Grove School Board. On Aug. 31, Olive Grove School Board President Rick Rochelle resigned after a decade with the program and four decades in the Los Olivos School District.
He said he and fellow board member Karl Hatch “started seeing things that we didn’t think were appropriate, and there were more things that needed to be done, and the direction was not the direction we envisioned.”
“I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, and we didn’t see being able to work with [Mudge],” he added.
Hatch also stepped down. His letter of resignation cites ongoing health problems, and he added that “the job has been very stressful which is not good for my health.”
He also cited the contentious staffing turnover at Olive Grove, saying it had “tarnished the reputation of the school and made it difficult to work on the important thing [running the school].”
Another member of the board, John Glines, tendered his resignation without showing up for the meeting. He was stepping down after his well-documented criminal history had come to light.
He pled no contest to three felony counts of grand theft and one felony count of forging multiple checks in April of 2012. Court documents say Glines grifted more than $350,000 from Stewart Johnson Pumps, a business in Santa Maria that he previously had co-owned.
To hold meetings, the Olive Grove School Board needs three members. The resignations left them with two. So they brought on Mark Kozel, a member of the regional PTA association with experience at local high schools and Allan Hancock College. Kozel called the contentious layoffs “growing pains” and assured the board there was, in fact, light at the end of the tunnel.
Staff Writer Sean McNulty can be reached at [email protected].
