Commentary: Candidate wrong about State of the Schools breakfast

I am writing in response to the commentary by Steve Smith, a former Daily Pilot columnist and candidate for the school board seat in Costa Mesa’s Area 1 (“Commentary: State of the schools address should be free,” Sept.7).

While Smith approves of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s idea to host a State of the Schools breakfast, he takes exception with the timing and cost of the event.

Planning for this event has taken place over the past year. Staff researched other districts and cities that hold similar events to reach out to their communities, and we have modeled our event on one that has been done in the Tustin Unified School District with great success for the past three years. In fact, Tustin now has a waiting list of community members who want to attend this sold-out event.

Timing was a consideration from the beginning. Our intent is to include members of the greater Newport Beach and Costa Mesa communities so as to provide them with a better understanding of our schools in order to create more partnerships.

With limited capacity but a desire to reach out to our parent community as well, our plan all along has been to produce a video that will be available to everyone on our district website. Smith was informed of this in writing on Aug. 27, before he came up with his novel idea of broadcasting the address live and posting it on the district website. Shame on Smith, and the Daily Pilot as his former employer, for misrepresenting the facts to make it appear that he is a savior of Newport-Mesa parents.

Additionally, the cost of attending the breakfast ($32, representing $1 for each of our 32 schools) is intended to cover the food and help fund the Newport Mesa Schools Foundation. As publicized, including on the breakfast invitation, any profit after expenses will go to the foundation, which provides grants to teachers throughout our district.

While Smith is grasping at issues in an attempt to degrade the current school board and justify his entry into the upcoming school board election, he also takes on the cost of our district’s legal fees. In this instance, it is important to correct either a misquote or misinformation he has attributed to Trustee Katrina Foley, who Smith says put our district legal fees at $2 million per year.

In reality, our legal fees have averaged $690,000 per year over the last five years. While these fees are higher than we would like, the reality is that almost 60% of this yearly amount is spent on special-education litigation, which is the bane of districts throughout the country. Furthermore, in an attempt to continuously lower our legal fees, our special-education department has cut the average by 43% over the past four years.

In the interest of transparency, this is not the first time I have taken exception to the “facts” as Smith portrays them in the Daily Pilot. Newport-Mesa parents would be bettered served if the Daily Pilot fact-checked Smith before publishing his diatribes, and if Smith would stop writing as if his “facts” are truth.

In the words of Thomas Paine, “It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”

KAREN YELSEY is president of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board of education.