Op ed by Haney Hong
Published December 24, 2019 in The San Diego Union Tribune
District leadership shortchanging students
Local happenings impact San Diego the most. It’s why former House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to say that all politics is local.
While we are all at the moment distracted by the impeachment of a president, reports of financial mismanagement and potential fraud by Sweetwater Union High School District are the real crime. This bureaucratic stickup has left a whole generation of South County high schoolers shortchanged.
Sure, impeachment will spin up a lot of heated emotions at family dinners in San Diego. But our lives here will go on.
Abraham Lincoln was right, though, that how things work in one generation in the classroom is an indication of how things will work in the next generation of government.
And so, we can expect the leadership failures at Sweetwater to impact San Diego — and especially South County — for many years to come.
It’s shocking that we can impeach a president and fire secretaries of the Navy, but we can’t get quickly the kind of leadership changes that would better serve kids in the second largest high school district in the state. Sweetwater has thumbed its nose at the county Office of Education, which provides financial oversight for all 43 K-12 districts in the region. And this district’s leaders has lost their appeal to the State Board of Education to override the corrective actions directed at them. They are being investigated for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meanwhile, they continue to drag their feet in getting their fiscal house in order. And yet, their leaders are still there.
It’s time for change. A large cohort of kids in our region are being seriously underserved by this district’s bad leadership and thus irreparably harmed at this critical point in their lives. And if we can’t change the leaders, perhaps it’s time to consider out-of-the-box solutions. It’s time to ask ourselves: Should we split up Sweetwater Union and give the high schools individually to the South County primary school districts?
The mismanagement by the Sweetwater Union High School District we’ve seen this year has hit us in ways that national level drama cannot. I’d wager that Sweetwater is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems at many school districts in our region.
So never mind the national soap opera playing out on the Potomac. The local drama in our schools will have a much greater impact on us here in San Diego County — and for generations to come.