Five members of the Centinela Valley Union High School District Board of Education and Superintendent Jose Fernandez perched like royals on thrones in front of 300 audience members at the Mar. 11 board of education meeting. In the audience, a group of students held up posters of Fernandez with the phrase, “dictator,” but it was clear Fernandez’s power was beginning to dissipate.
“All you care about is this…money!” cried Lawndale resident Jay Gould, as he threw a fistful of dollar bills toward the stage, as seen in a video the Daily Breeze posted online. Gould’s display of anger caused an eruption of applause from the audience. As numerous community members stood to chastise the board, the crumpled bills lay strewn across the stage for hours. The bills represented mere pocket change for Fernandez who amassed more than $663, 000 in compensation last year. Fernandez has a base salary of $271,000 in addition to benefits summing nearly $400,000, according to the Los Angeles County Office of Education. The district also provided Fernandez with a $910,000 loan to buy a house in the wealthy Ladera Heights neighborhood. Four out of the five current board members voted to approve the superintendent’s contract in 2009. The fifth member, Lorena Gonzales had not yet joined the board, but all five voted to extend Fernandez’s contract in 2012. This compensation, teachers emphasized, should be taken in context of the environs. The Centinela Valley district is a working-class neighborhood where the median household income ranges from $36,660 to $86,364, according to the U.S. Census. The district is comprised of three high schools and a continuation high school, totaling 6,600 students. In comparison, Superintendent John Deasy, who oversees half a million students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, earned just under $395,000 last year. “When I initially heard about Fernandez’s salary I was completely flabbergasted, dumbfounded and appalled to think that he made almost $700,000,” said Ryder Rusert, an English teacher at Lawndale High School. On Apr. 9 the board that backed Fernandez since 2008 placed him on paid leave after a unanimous vote in a three-hour closed-door session. The school district, the District Attorney and the FBI have all launched independent investigations of Fernandez’s salary. Fernandez’s attorney, Spencer Covert, could not be reached for comment regarding Fernandez’s salary. Fernandez Undermines Teachers While the investigation will focus on Fernandez’s compensation package, Centinela Valley teachers interviewed for this article said corruption in the district extends to Fernandez’s treatment of teachers. The educators said that Fernandez laid-off or transferred teachers who disagreed with the superintendent. Rusert, who considers himself outspoken, said he remained tight-lipped until he received tenure, especially during a period of massive layoffs in 2008 when 80 teachers were let go. “I didn’t want to rustle any feathers then, because I knew the ramifications,” Rusert said. Rusert said teachers who were more vocal about Fernandez’s salary, like Betty Setterlund, a Hawthorne High School physical education instructor and former president of the Centinela Valley Secondary Teachers Association, were often penalized. Setterlund said that during her tenure as teachers association president, Fernandez laid off 10 teachers in her department in an effort to retaliate against her actions. Setterlund requested to be interviewed on her cell phone rather than a school line, because she suspects the superintendent taps school phone lines. “From day one, as soon as I saw his contract I wrote a one-page paper and started passing that around to teachers, to the school board and to the community saying this is outrageous,” Setterlund said, “and he was furious with me.” Jack Foreman, a Hawthorne High School guidance counselor and president of the teachers association, has advocated for teachers like Setterlund since being elected in 2011. “Fernandez would cut entire programs if he didn’t like you,” Foreman said. “For example the P.E. department [at Hawthorne], certain counseling programs saw cuts and even whole departments like home economics.” While Setterlund said that Fernandez never gave teachers a clear explanation about why they were laid-off, it was clear that he punished teachers who threatened his authority. Setterlund said that former director of human resources Vanessa Martinez was able to verify this information because Martinez heard Fernandez’s discussions about firing certain teachers. Despite the hardship of dealing with Fernandez, Setterlund said leaving is not a viable option because job security is her primary concern, and starting in a new district comes with risks. “Honestly there’s not a lot of jobs out there for me. I’d be worried about loosing seniority, and with layoffs if I switched districts I would not be permanent,” Setterlund said. “I’d be one of the first on the layoff list.” Another teacher that experienced unjust treatment was Tali Sherman, a former English teacher and marine science academy coordinator at Lawndale High School, who said she was very vocal about her disapproval of Fernandez. In June 2011 then-principal Damon Dragos delivered a notice to Sherman while she was in front of a class full of students, saying she would be transferred to Hawthorne High School despite its violation of her contract. “I was in shock, anger and confusion. Students started asking questions when they saw teachers tearing up, so they started texting each other and walked out of class because they were as upset,” Sherman said. Students Get Involved According to Foreman, teachers’ association president, students are the ones who ended up suffering from Fernandez’s decisions because he prevents teachers from serving students in the best way possible. Although contractually, Foreman was permitted 40 percent release time for his role as union president, Fernandez filed a lawsuit against Foreman challenging that release time. As a result, Foreman said he finds himself trying to be in multiple places at once: on the phone with a parent, rushing to a union meeting or helping a student plan his or her schedule. Often, he said, he has to miss appointments or leave students waiting. “My life is so crazy, I have to tend to 500 students, worry about their credits and if they are going to graduate, and union president is my second responsibility,” Foreman said. “[Fernandez] did that just to mess with us and try to cripple the union.” Lawndale High School English teacher Maura Tremblay has incorporated recent events in the district into her classroom. “The one good thing is seeing our students interested in what is going on, and it’s becoming a teachable moment in the classroom,” Tremblay said. “It’s been really powerful teaching what it means to have integrity.” Students like Lawndale High School senior Richard Vargas spoke about Fernandez’s negative impact on students’ education at the Mar. 11 board of education meeting. Vargas spoke about his school’s understaffed music department that consistently has broken equipment. Working With Fernandez As teachers’ association president, Foreman has tried to forge a working relationship with the superintendent. Foreman said he believed this type of relationship would be more likely to promote progress. “We have to manage him and say, ‘No this doesn’t make sense,’ you have to talk to him reasonably and say, ‘Is that going to help our graduation rate if you cut these counselors? Look what’s going to happen,’” Foreman said. “Many times we could put the screws on and he would back off.” However, Foreman said this caused tension within the association. Many teachers did not want to align themselves with the administration at any cost. “As the union leadership, we deliberately cultivated a relationship not to be kissing asses, but to at least have what we call a working relationship so we can call up and say, ‘This lady has been laid off, we know there is a need for her, when is she coming back?’” Foreman said. Two Steps Forward, One Step Back For now, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Bob Cox will serve as interim superintendent. Cox said he is striving to be more transparent in the board’s decisions. His board is holding question and answer sessions at all of the schools during the teachers’ lunch breaks. “Our goal is to try to turn things around and show that business is not as usual, and that certain things will not be repeated because it’s not the same old Centinela,” Cox said. However, Setterlund said that Cox was equally accountable for the corruption. She said that he was responsible to replying to teachers’ grievances, which she submitted on multiple occasions. Grievances are formal complaints submitted to the district regarding contractual violations. “Bob Cox was always Fernandez’s muscle. If we filed a grievance, principals would say they didn’t have the authority to resolve the issue, and then Bob Cox would write you a letter saying your ‘claims were unfounded and without merit’ and just made you feel horrible, like no one would listen or care,” Setterlund said. As for Fernandez’s future in the district, teachers are confident that he will not return to Centinela Valley. “I know the union president is ecstatic that the chances of [Fernandez] returning are slim. I think it’s safe to say if the FBI finds out he’s been doing things illegally, the chances of him obtaining an educational job in this country again, well the odds are stacked against him,” Rusert said.