And Then There Were Two...An Unruly Perspective on the Nunez Appointment

The announcement of Dr. Esperanza Zendejas’ resignation brought relief to a despondent East Side community this summer. Within a week, anxiety took hold again. A major behind-the-scenes scramble took place as administrators current and former entered the 830 North Capitol office to apply for the interim superintendent position.

Some hadn’t stepped inside the district office in well over a year.

The field of candidates swelled to seven as schools rallied behind a particular favorite. Some Oak Grove teachers hoped for Alan Garafolo, the district’s current Chief of Operations. Some Mt. Pleasant teachers lined up to support Art Darin. Employees throughout the district wondered if Kugler might make a triumphant return. By early August, the field of candidates narrowed to two: Art Darin, the former Chief Academic Officer turned interim-principal of Silver Creek, and Bob Nunez, Chief of Human Resources. Nunez was temporarily appointed to the position in July for legal purposes. The final selection would be made on August 18.

Lots of teachers felt Darin was a shoe-in for the job if merely for the fact that it was Nunez’s name scrawled across the bottom of the infamous pink slips. For certain, two schools and parent groups lobbied on Darin’s behalf. They were surprised to learn that union officials backed Nunez. Little did they know that other employees throughout the district lobbied against Darin. Come August 18, Nunez was appointed on a four to one vote, with Shirakawa dissenting. Why did the guy on paid administrative leave from the Riverside County Office of Education get the nod instead of the put out to pasture CAO?

Team Unruly humbly suggests the reason lies in the semantic difference between a foot soldier and a cleaner.

Most would agree Zendejas’ totalitarian regime drained all trace of integrity out of the administrative officers and soldiers forced to carry out her destructive orders. Team Unruly believes only two administrators bothered to publicly stand up to the autocratic machinations of the diminutive petty tyrant: Oak Grove’s Rich Frias and Piedmont Hill’s former principal Carol Blackerby. Both suffered the consequences that came with refusing to follow Zendejas’ commands. Frias was demoted, Blackerby resigned. Those who compromised their principles for job security fell into two camps: those who carried out an order without question (foot soldiers), and those who knew an order was wrong when they carried it out anyway, and did what they could to mop up the mess in the aftermath (cleaners).

Bill Kugler, for example, was a cleaner. Zendejas would make a questionable public statement at a school site or on one of her media shows, and Kugler would come by a day or two later to calm the waters. When Zendejas told her radio audience that men have two brains but only use the one below their belt, a teacher complained to the district. Kugler showed up a couple of days later to smooth things over. When Zendejas first met the staff at James Lick and said something along the lines of “No wonder your test scores stink, this place is a dump,” it was Kugler and others who worked behind the scenes to repair the damage.

Art Darin had a generally favorable reputation as a school principal. Some saw him as remote, a few felt him disingenuous, but by and large he was a competent school manager and a decent advocate for Mt. Pleasant during the Coto years. But something happened when he took the Chief Academic Officer position. Within months, Darin was conducting meetings with teachers and department chairs, proposing rapid and sweeping curriculum changes in proposals some characterized as “one size fits all.” One of his first duties was to develop a plan in conjunction with the Santa Clara County Office of Education to raise James Lick’s stagnant test scores. That plan called for low-performing students to double up on math and English classes, using all of the ancillary materials as specifically prescribed by the textbook company. The Mercury News would erroneously credit Zendejas and Darin for the merits of the plan a year before test scores showed the plan had no impact on student performance.

The district focus on James Lick overshadowed signs that Darin was happy to play foot soldier. Those moments came in other forms: as the uncomfortable fill-in host of Zendejas’ television show “Super Talk”, through the contradictory statements made in successive meetings that left people starting conversations with the “didn’t he say yesterday” phrase once he left the room, when he unceremoniously helped escort a disgraced Kugler from the district premises.

But the greatest evidence of Darin’s foot soldier tendencies stem from last year’s unresolved questions. Around October of 2004, Darin fell out of favor with Dr. Zendejas, for reasons unknown. Some argue that Darin confronted Zendejas when she abruptly sent all of the Subject Area Coordinators at the district office back into the classroom. Others claim that Darin pilfered money from budgets under his purview into accounts that supported his pet projects, like his plan to implement a James Lick model at all of the district schools. Still others saw the fall as another example of Zendejas pettiness and jealousy—Darin received partial credit for raising test scores alongside Zendejas in a Mercury News editorial. Then there’s that crazy spin statement that came from other district foot soldiers regarding Art Darin and his “appearance of conflict of interest.” (You can read about that irony .

The truth lies somewhere in that muddled mess. The Unruly Advocate has learned that one general criticism surrounding Darin’s CAO performance was his tendency to micromanage, a fault that kept a number of important bills and official documents from getting processed in a timely manner. Darin, who had been dealing with a family emergency off and on in the summer of 2004, failed to delegate the work. Part of the blame arguably rests with Zendejas’ cabinet management structure. At some point in the early fall Zendejas discovered that work she believed had been processed in the spring still sat in Darin’s in-basket. Worried about the affect on her own credibility, Zendejas looked for a way to demote Darin.

A solution came in November, when Andrew Hill’s principal was forced to take a medical leave of absence. However, the path taken raised another unresolved question posed by the staffs at both Andrew Hill and Silver Creek: why did two administrative shifts take place to cover one leave of absence. Dr. Ana Lomas, the former principal of Silver Creek, was sent to Andrew Hill on an interim basis. Darin was sent to Silver Creek, for “a certain project that he felt could be better handled at Silver Creek.” That’s the official line given to teachers at both sites. There are, however, two possible alternative reasons: either Lomas caused irreperable morale problems at Silver Creek, or Darin soured his relationship with the Andrew Hill staff and didn’t want to face the consequences of past actions.

Team Unruly has learned that Darin played some sort of role in working to dismantle the district’s Valdes Math Institute, a venerable institution housed at and started by a former Andrew Hill math teacher. Some at Hill also believe evidence suggests Darin was looking to move their IB program to another district school. Whatever the case, it is obvious someone chose to prevent Darin’s appointment to Hill.

It wasn’t just Hill’s staff, however, that suffered from Darin’s short-sightedness. Some teachers at Evergreen Valley High School, for example, blamed Darin for complications arising from their hastily thrown together biotechnology program.

Darin’s strength as a site principal served him well at Silver Creek, earning support from their Parent Teacher Organization in his bid for the interim position. He also garnered support from Mt. Pleasant. But his problematic past as the Chief Academic Officer appears to have tipped the scales against him in the final vote.

While Darin served out his exile at Silver Creek, Nunez was carrying out Zendejas’ orders too, especially when he was told to announce another administrative change at any given school site. And he seemed to offer no public argument when it came to preparing 965 pink slips, another couple of hundred notices of accusation, and 965 more letters to rescind the original layoff notices. Unruly’s faithful readers also know all about the big skeleton in Nunez’s closet: paid administrative leave from Riverside six months after executing a similar style of layoff with childcare workers (read our story . And as Nunez readily admits, he did not always make the human connection he could have in 04-05. Just ask the staffs from the different schools who suffered a mid-year administrative change how well he was received at their meetings.

You might be surprised to know that Nunez, when compared to Darin, was more of a cleaner than a foot soldier. Reports of Nunez sightings at nearly every East Side Starbucks last year were comic. Often he was purchasing an espresso or a frappuchino for some disgruntled employee or specific group he knew had been wronged by a misguided policy decision or abject incompetence. One correspondent to the advocate swears he saw Nunez driving a school bus out of a Starbucks parking lot.

At the very least, Nunez played nice with the right people. He did manage to amicably resolve the attempt to eliminate a student advisor from each campus. It was a behind the scenes agreement, and he kept his word. A similar resolution of long standing issues took place with the classified union. With a lot of effort, coffee, and sweet and lo, Nunez spent some of his time trying to mend the fences Zendejas tore down.

Except when he was making photocopies of notices of accusation.

The average district employee remains cautious in supporting Nunez. Most see him as having been hand chosen by Zendejas for a purpose. In one sense, those skeptics are right. Bob Nunez was directing human resources for the Riverside County Office of Education when a certain lame cactus spent a year destroying Desert Sands Unified, a district within Riverside’s borders. What kind of relationship did they have back then? Are they cut from the same cloth? It’s hard to say. Nunez does have a more approachable, personable style than his predecessor. Maybe she pegged him for the human resources job last year because she knew he’d help her prepare a mass layoff. Most likely her over-developed paranoia led her to convince herself that she could only trust people without loyalties to former superintendent Joe Coto. Or maybe, just maybe Nunez was well aware from past experience how Zendejas’ tenure in East Side would inevitably end, giving him the foresight to move north in the hopes of an even better job in the aftermath. Only Nunez knows the answer to these questions.

So far, Nunez is trying. True, he might just be trying to remove the interim prefix from his official title, but that means he will be even more attentive to school needs—at least for the rest of this year. Maybe he’ll be able to repair relationships between management and employees. Maybe he’ll be able to fix long-standing problems plaguing the district for decades. Maybe the mess, however, is much larger than any of us realize, and no amount of good will or venti cups will quickly set things right. Whatever the case, we’ll be here to celebrate his triumphs, condemn his mistakes, and keep him on the path of righteousness. Let the cleaning officially begin (the lattes are on Bob).