Bob's Big Night

The folks backing school board member Bob Noel’s brainchild, the American Charter High School (ACHS), came out in force Tuesday night, among them former board member Ray Franco, dapper Das Williams from the City Council, Frank Schipper of the eponymous construction firm, a UCSB professor whose name I didn’t catch who also happens to be a Nobel laureate in Physics, and a horde of lesser luminaries. All in all, it was a very impressive and organized bunch, all united in their desire to break the iron grip of educational bureaucracy and create a school that will keep kids interested in learning. Noel’s band arrived on the heels of Op-Ed pieces in the News-Press that claimed that the Board and Superintendent Brian Sarvis stood in opposition, even outright hostility, to the ACHS proposal – a position that none of the other Board members or Dr. Sarvis was willing to own. Twice Sarvis denied ever calling charter schools “economic parasites.”

As one of, if not the prime mover behind the ACHS idea, Bob Noel was expected to be in rare form, and old Bob didn’t disappoint. As a member of Noel’s posse noted, what else is a 77-year-old PhD going to do with his ample free time if not dream up solutions to the many dilemmas facing public education in Santa Barbara? Noel was geared up for combat from the start, jousting with Assistant Superintendent Jan Zettel over various aspects of vocational education, debating fine points of charter law with the District’s legal counsel, and ardently stressing that he, Bob Noel, had no financial interest or official capacity in the ACHS hierarchy, and therefore no conflict of interest as a sitting board member poised to cast a vote. That position appeared to be a helluva stretch, but when it comes to questions of basic ethics, Bob’s a triple-jointed kind of guy.

Like most Board meetings in the wacky world of the Santa Barbara School Districts, this one offered moments of delicious weirdness. I sat up and paid attention when my all-time favorite wing-nut, Kenneth Locke, inter-disciplinary guru of the emerging avant-garde, took the microphone for another installment in his long-running series of three-minute lectures. Somewhere in this great land of ours, the padded cell where Locke once resided stands empty; the walls of that cell are no doubt covered with squiggles, arrows, triangles, rectangles, mathematical formulas, grocery lists, koans and runes. Following Locke as he darts and skips from Aristotle to Jackson Pollock to Arthur Ashe is always a mental trick: “The abstract of the 20th century is that yoga is related to painting and painting is related to tennis, and between painting and tennis is pumpkin pie. Without a paradigm shift, young people will never understand what this means! The only way they can find themselves is through this paradigm shift! What I’m referring to is recycling, like when you take a milk carton and turn it into art, glorious art! In other words, the non-object object, the process by which something becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything!”

Watching the audience watching Locke is half the fun. Mouths fall open, eyes bug out, heads are scratched, earlobes are yanked, some folks cough nervously, some laugh, many whisper “What is that guy saying?” to the person next to them.

Yes, strange weirdness abounds in the Santa Barbara School District. Issues that pass unnoticed in other school districts are subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in SB, along with much hand-wringing and tears. Take Laura Baker for example. Ms. Baker teaches at La Cumbre Junior High and is waging a one-woman crusade to save La Cumbre from an invasion of elementary students from the Santa Barbara Community Academy, who may soon be housed on the La Cumbre campus. Ms. Baker has made dire predictions, sounded warnings, voiced numerous complaints, and advanced visions of mayhem during public comment at something like eighteen consecutive Board meetings. Tuesday night she asserted that the “Eastside” Academy kids would stir up resentment among “Westside” gang-affiliated kids, and who knows what terrible consequences might result from such an ill-conceived co-mingling of students. Ms. Baker would have the Eastside kids move to Cleveland – where they will be among their own kith and kin, safe from the predations of the Westsiders. Rumor has it that Ms. Baker’s true intention is far more personal and pragmatic: she stands to lose her private bathroom if the Academy kids move to La Cumbre.

The ACHS gang trooped to the microphone, one after the other, to express their unqualified support for the new charter school, asserting that it would provide a place for kids who fall through cracks in the pedagogical floorboards, for potential gang-bangers, for misfits with hidden potential, for English learners, for 8th graders reading at 3rd grade level, and for nascent mechanical geniuses under-served by the traditional curriculum. Not only that, the ACHS would flood the local labor pool with highly-skilled, employment-ready kids prepared to earn big wages framing buildings, policing the streets, and extinguishing fires.

After the Nobel Laureate whose name I didn’t catch spoke and was enthusiastically applauded, it was clear that the ACHS was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the plastic ice tray, and Botox and Viagara combined. Former Board member Ray Franco clinched the deal in a ten-minute rant that began in Spanish and concluded in English, describing his own immigrant success story and quoting Thomas Jefferson for good measure. Seven times Franco said, “Finally,” and then took off on another tangent. I looked at Bob Noel as Mr. Franco was speaking and finally understood what people mean when they say, “grinning like a Cheshire cat.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Bob had a hard-on, perhaps the biggest stiffie he's had since he became eligible for Social Security; he was basking in the light of his own brilliance, his soaring intellect, his organizational ability, and his “juice” in the community. To his fellow Board members and Superintendent Sarvis, Bob’s countenance seemed to say, “You can’t stop me, you can’t touch me, I am King of the World! My brainchild will be born and it will thrive!”