The San Marcos City Planning Men's Club

All three male members of the San Marcos Planning Commission whose two-year terms expired in December were reappointed by the mayor and city council in January. The only woman on the seven-member commission, Wendy Matthews, was also reappointed.

There are no term limits for commissioners, allowing for the growth of the good old boys network. Kevin Norris begins his eleventh year on the council, while Bruce Minnery stepped down after eleven and a half years.

Five women were among the twelve new applicants who failed to win a seat on the commission. Filling vacancies with incumbents was a missed opportunity for the city to bring gender balance to the commission.

Here are a few of the qualifications of the women applicants who were passed over.

--A real estate and business attorney

--A marketing and strategic operations manager

--A local business owner

There are also only three women on the fifteen-member San Marcos Creekside Specific Plan Oversight Committee.

Given the scarcity of women on city planning groups, it’s ironic that the five individuals appointing its members, the mayor and city council, outnumber men, three to two.

San Marcos is not alone in North County in its male-dominated city planning. There are no women on the five-member Encinitas commission, one woman on Escondido’s seven-member group, and two of seven commissioners in Vista.

Carlsbad is the lone exception, with four women out of seven.

The San Marcos city website explains, “The planning commission is responsible for evaluating and making determinations on a variety of land use matters for both long-range and short-range planning.”

Given the importance of the city’s land use decisions, adding women would make the commission more representative of the 96,847 residents, the majority of whom are female.

According to the 2018 U.S. Census estimates, the tally of city household ownership shows, while 61% of all city households are owner occupied, 45% of women own the homes they live in, compared to 38% of men.

Research in the business world suggests having more women involved in group planning can improve the value of its decision making.

In a September 21, 2017 article in the business magazine Forbes, (New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work), Erik Larson, the founder and CEO of Cloverpop, a leadership consulting firm, writes, “According to the research, teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time, and decision making improves as team diversity increases. Compared to individual decision makers, all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time, while gender diverse teams do so 73% of the time.”

In my fifteen years as a university administrator, I learned how diversity on campus committees reduces groupthink, where the loudest voices, rather than the best decisions, can carry the day.

The need for more inclusive representation and better decision making suggest it's time for term limits on the San Marcos Planning Commission.

What Patrick Mahomes and I Have in Common

As I watched 24-year-old Kansas City Chief’s quarterback speaking to the press about his team’s miracle come-back to win the Super Bowl last night, hearing commentators remarking on his achievement at such a young age, I was reminded of my own youthful rise.

Unlike Mahomes, of course, I did not have the size or talent to achieve my dream of a career in professional basketball. No matter how many pushups I did daily to get stronger, no matter how many times I hung by my arms from overhead playground bars to make me taller, I could not grow to match my dreams.

As kids, my older brother and I participated in pickup basketball games, where I would be the last one chosen, called “Little Riehl,” after my older brother, “Big Riehl” got the call to join the team.

But what I don’t have in common with Mahome’s athletic ability, I do share with him in achievements at an early age, beginning with skipping the fifth grade. That didn’t turn out well, since I missed everything about fractions.

Being the youngest in each grade through high school had its challenges, including some bullying in my first year in junior high school, where my father had just been appointed principal.

I’ve have been unusually young in every job I took. My first salaried position, upon graduating from college at 21, was as head basketball coach at Sequim High School on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. I was only three or four years older than my players. That was brought to my attention on one occasion when a school janitor where we were scheduled to play an away game, looked at me and said, “I can’t open the door to the gym until your coach arrives.”

When I was appointed Director of admissions at Western Washington University at the tender age of 28, I encountered the same misunderstandings from admissions applicants and their parents visiting campus. When I greeted them in my office they often thanked me for talking to them, but asked if they could speak to the director.

Okay, I’m no Patrick Mahomes, even though I, too, found myself in positions often reserved for older individuals. What separates us is not only his athletic ability. It’s the respect he gets from his older teammates, showing his extraordinary leadership skills.

That’s an achievement I can only envy and admire.

Enrollment Mismanagement Plagues Palomar College

After a campus visit, a state-funded agency, the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistant Team (FCMAT) issued its November 8, 2019 report, describing Palomar College’s financial position and management practices. The news wasn’t good.

The report gave the school’s Fiscal Health Risk Analysis a 44.5% rating, indicating its probability of insolvency in the near future. According to FCMAT, in two years the school will have drained all its reserves, forcing it to borrow $6.5 million from an external source to stay solvent.

Here’s but a sample of what FCMAT found.

--The college has not provided clearly written and articulated budget assumptions, supporting revisions, to the board at least quarterly.

--After eight years in the position, the chief business officer has recently been “separated from the office.” An interim appointment has been assigned.

--The managers and staff responsible for the college’s human resources, payroll and budgets do not meet regularly to discuss issues and improve processes. With no formal documentation in meeting minutes to show communication about the personnel budget, one board member says the report reveals the offices are not on speaking terms.

--The college does not have a comprehensive enrollment management plan. Enrollment projections and assumptions are not based on historical data, demographic trend analysis, high school enrollments, and community participation rates. They’re based only on goals developed in master plans using prior year actuals as a baseline.

In a December 18, 2019 San Diego Union Tribune article, Palomar College Puts President on Paid Administrative Leave, Paul Sisson writes: “Craig Thompson, president of the faculty senate, said opening satellite campuses in Fallbrook and Rancho Bernardo simultaneously put too large a drain on resources. Thompson said a decision to increase hiring, which brought 40 additional teachers onto Palomar’s rolls last year, contributed to faculty dissatisfaction with Blake’s leadership.”

Not long after Oside News published my November 16, 2019 article, Palomar College President Not Ready for Prime Time, I discovered The Palomar Files: Candid News about Palomar College, a campus blog with postings from two faculty members: the English Department’s Dr. Rocco Versaci and the Math Department’s Professor Shannon Lienhart.

The credibility of these two can be measured by their combined 50 years of teaching at the college and the stellar ratings they get from their students, which can be found at ratemyprofessors.com.

In his post, Finding the Leak, Dr. Versaci graphed the college’s total revenues and expenditures over the last several years, pointing to 2017-18, the year the college opened its two educational centers in Fallbrook and Rancho Bernardo, when expenditures began to surpass revenues. He writes, "Using these short-term revenues, the district made long-term expenditure decisions based not on data, but on hope. Despite the fact that there was plenty of evidence that the District’s enrollment goals were not being realized, the expenditures continued to increase unabated as though the temporary fixes would continue indefinitely."

In her post, A Half-Truth is Not the Truth, Professor Lienhart writes, “Three months after Palomar College President Joi Blake opened the North and South Education Centers simultaneously, the school issued a news release, declaring, ‘Enrollments are up across Palomar Community College District, as fall semester numbers exceed expectations at Fallbrook’s North Education Center and the South Education Center in Rancho Bernardo.’ 

“The numbers, however, tell a different story. Enrollment was predicted to grow by 7% in the year after centers were opened. But instead of growing enrollment, the college suffered a 1% decrease that year.”

It’s hard to believe Palomar College has no comprehensive enrollment management plan. I don’t know much about school finance, but I learned a lot about enrollment management from my 14 years of experience at Indiana State University and Cal State San Marcos, where responsibility for enrollment planning and management was in my job description. My enrollment management teams included representatives from the faculty, as well as the offices of business and student affairs. My goal was to keep the campus community informed of enrollment projections and our success or failure in meeting our targets.

At its December 17, 2019 meeting, Palomar’s Governing Board received a call from California Community Colleges Chancellor Elois Ortiz Oakley, who informed them that the worst case scenario for dealing with the school’s financial crisis would be for the Community College Board of Governors to assign a special trustee to oversee the college’s operations, replacing Palomar’s board until the college regained solvency.

Would the three of the five board members who’ve supported President Blake’s administration see the irony in that?

Stay tuned.

How California Rates Schools: Color Me Blue

Twenty years ago the California State Legislature passed the Public Schools Accountability Act, leading to the creation of an Academic Performance Index. Each year, every public school was to be assigned an API score, ranging from 200 to 1000, to measure its success. Proficiency in English and Math, based on standardized test scores, were the primary measures of a school’s API.

The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, passed by Congress, was for all school children to become proficient in English and Math by 2014.

After the failure of both of these well-intentioned efforts, the California State Board of Education has teamed up with the California Department of Education to launch still another plan to measure the quality of public schools.

School ratings have been expanded to include absenteeism/suspension, graduation rate, college/career readiness, and English Learner Progress. The California School Dashboard and System of Support uses a rainbow of colors to show student progress in each of those areas.

The ratings begin at the top with blue, followed by green, yellow, orange, and red. Colors are assigned for the entire school, as well as for each subgroup of students by ethnicity, socioeconomically disadvantaged, disabled, and English learners. A group with fewer than 30 students is colored gray.

In a December 12 article in the San Diego Union Tribune (Annual state ratings assign colors for how schools, student groups performed in several categories), Kristen Taketa writes, “Some critics of the dashboard said it’s harder to compare school performance because there isn’t a single, summative rating. Steve Green, director of assessment, accountability and evaluation in the San Diego county office of education, said the dashboard helps people see an overall picture of a school, just as a doctor looks at more than a patient’s blood pressure when evaluating how healthy they are.”

That got me to thinking about how my primary doctor, might use those same colors, rather than lab reports with strange sounding names, to rate my condition.

Judging from the numbers I’ve seen after past checkups, here’s my own assessment: After years in the orange to yellow zone, my Cholesterol, thanks to Lipitor, has risen to a healthier green. I’ll assign green to my eyesight, too, with the help of reading glasses. I’m most thankful that my weight and blood pressure have both remained in solid blue.

Now, if I could only persuade Kaiser Permanente to give me yearly color-coded reports, I’m sure it would help me feel better about myself and spur me on to even bluer well-being.

And that appears to be the goal of the California Dashboard, to make students and their schools feel better about themselves. But let’s be real. We know the meaning of those colors. They match the A-F grading system. Students know that, too. Let’s take a look at the California Dashboard’s College/Career Readiness category for the San Marcos Unified School District.

There are 21,000 students, from kindergarten through adult, enrolled in San Marcos schools. Thirty-nine percent are classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, either qualifying for free or reduced cost meals, or they have parents or guardians without high school diplomas. The Dashboard has assigned this group to Orange, a grade of “D” for being prepared for college or a career.

Getting away from the single-score API is a good thing. But replacing it with color coding student groups and the school overall hides the reality that student success in the classroom can largely be predicted by groups  what happens to them before they enter the classroom.

Rather than coming up with new ways to judge schools, it’s time to recognize that schools alone will never be able to leave no child behind.  

AMAZON and UPS: A Failed Marriage

It was a dark and stormy night at the Riehl’s a couple of weeks ago, when Karen told me her ancient computer keyboard had been misbehaving. I suspected it only needed dusting, but unable to find our compressed air canister, I ordered a new keyboard from Amazon. It arrived the next day.

A few days later, I ordered a four-pack of Falcon Dust Off Electronics Compressed Gas Dusters. Amazon wouldn’t sell me just one. Buying four online was easier than driving to the nearest CVS store to pick one up.

Judging by how seldom we use them, our four new keyboard dusters will last longer than both of us. I must have inherited my security issues from my father. At my age, Dad wore a belt, plus suspenders.

Two weeks after my order, Amazon notified me that my package could not be delivered. I was told to check with UPS to find out why.

According to the UPS website, the package had been delivered on December 3, at 9:42 AM to “San Marcos,” left at the “front desk,” and “Lanny” signed for it. Deliveries by Amazon have always been placed at our front door, accompanied by a friendly knock.

Our Château Lake San Marcos is a gated community, so I assumed the delivery truck driver left the package with the concierge in the château’s office. But that was not to be. No package there, nobody named Lanny to sign for it. I called UPS but could not reach a live person. A recorded message told me the package had been delivered.

Out of desperation, I called the nearest UPS store. Brianna (not her real name) told me they didn’t get the package and that nobody named Lanny worked there. She suggested I try the city’s other UPS store. There was no package or Lanny there, either, but Savanna (not her real name), gave me a number to call, assuring me they could help.

Upon calling the number she gave me, I was greeted by an electronic voice, urging me to try for a free Royal Caribbean Cruise vacation by answering a few questions. Taken aback by this UPS gimmick, I did not answer the questions truthfully. What they learned about me is I’m under 25 and don’t like vacations. Not to my surprise, I was congratulated for winning the free cruise, except for a nominal $65 per person boarding fee.

I was then greeted by a human, who gushed, “Welcome to Royal Caribbean Cruises! This is…” It wasn’t a UPS scam after all. I hung up, figuring Savanna had given me a wrong number. At this stage, I was unwilling to concede an error on my part.

Karen suggested I try calling the retirement community next door to see if my package had been dropped off there. But Vanessa (her real name) politely informed me there had been no delivery, no Lanny on their staff.

Alarmed by my heavy breathing and reddening face, Karen told me to abandon my quest, forget about the $16.99 I paid for the canisters, and take to my blog to write about the experience. It would be therapeutic.

But, before following her advice, I took a last look at Amazon’s website, where, under “continue to customer service,” I found, “have us call you right now.” There was a space for me to enter my home phone number. Under it was a button titled, “Call me now to talk to a specialist. We will call you immediately.”

Yeah, right, I scoffed to myself, as I typed in our number and pressed the “Call me now” button. Before I could count to three, (I’m not kidding here), the phone rang with a live person on the other end.

She knew all about my order, including the claim that it had been delivered. After I explained how hard I worked to find the package, she gave me a full refund. She told me, if the package eventually reaches our door, I could keep it with no charge.

And that’s why I do my shopping at Amazon and hope for a UPS divorce.

Ghost Guns, Armed Teachers, and School Shootings: A Deadly Recipe

There was another school shooting last weekend, this time in a grade school parking lot in Union City, California, 30 miles from San Francisco. Two boys, 11 and 14 years old, were shot to death while sitting in a parked van at 1:30 AM on a Saturday morning.

This was not a typical school shooting, of course. It took place after school hours, with the shooter, or shooters, still unknown.

But nine days earlier, a student at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, celebrated his 16^th birthday by assembling his own .45 caliber handgun and shooting five of his classmates. Two died, before he turned the gun on himself.

The common denominators in these tragedies were guns and children dying. I wanted to know more about how a teenager was able to obtain gun parts online, together with do-it-yourself instructions on how to assemble it. Here’s what I found in an Internet search at ghostguns.com.

“Despite popular belief that the Federal Government can restrict all gun ownership, unconstitutional laws like the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 can only regulate the transfer and sale of weapons. And so, making a weapon on your own, without the intention of transferring it or selling it is not prohibited by Federal agencies such as the ATF. ”

Here’s what you can buy on that website, from a variety of do-it-yourself pistol and rifle kits to gun magazines, bulletproof backpacks, and T-shirts:

$997.99 AR15 Build Kit

“At Ghost Guns we took the 16" AR15 lightweight rifle and made it even better to give you an unregistered weapon system that's ready for almost any combat scenario.”

The words “unregistered weapon,” and “ready for almost any combat scenario,” together with the sale of 21-Round Magazines and bulletproof backpacks, suggest the do-it-yourselfer is probably not preparing for target practice, hunting, or self-defense.

The website’s bizarre logo sets the tone for the sale of merchandise designed to kill.

Some say arming teachers will increase school safety by discouraging potential shooters from attacking schools and protecting students in shoot outs.

But that’s not true, according to The Trace, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to shining a light on America’s gun violence crisis, Do Armed Guards Prevent School Shootings? April 6, 2019, by Alex Yablon.

“Active shooters do not favor ‘gun-free’ zones. Louis Klarevas, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, analyzed 111 shooting attacks between 1966 and 2015 for his book Rampage Nation, and found that only 18 took place in areas where firearms were banned. In four high-profile 2018 school shootings, attackers stormed campuses, despite the presence of armed guards. In all four of those cases, guards failed to stop the gunman from killing.”

As for protecting students in the classroom, according to Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, a nonpartisan group dedicated to fighting the epidemic of gun violence, “Arming teachers wouldn’t decrease risk to students—it would increase their risk. Our comprehensive analysis finds there have been more than 80 publicly-reported incidents of mishandled guns at schools in the last five years, including a teacher’s loaded gun falling from his waistband during a cartwheel, and a teacher unintentionally firing a gun in class during a safety demonstration.”

In addition to learning how to handle and shoot a gun safely, teachers would need to be trained on how to stop an attacker, when to get involved or not, and how to deal with crowded rooms and buildings.

Texas State University’s ALERRT Center boasts of providing the best research-based active shooter response training in the nation. Its Active Shooter Incident Management Course requires 24 hours of training over three, 8-hour, days. Just as police officers do, they’d need refresher training periodically over the years. As a former high school English teacher, I can understand why teachers, engaged with helping students, grading papers, and preparing lesson plans, would not want the added responsibility.

If teachers with guns won’t work, check out this article about those who use them by George S. Everly, Jr.: "Profiling" School Shooters: Can we tell who will be the next to kill?” (Psychology Today, Mar 29, 2018)

1. The vast majority were male.

2. Nine out of ten were current or recent students at the school.

3. Anger and revenge were the common themes. Three out of four felt bullied or harassed

    by other students.

4. They tended to be socially awkward, with few (if any) friends.

5. They expressed fascination with violence, morbid media, or death.

6. The media contagion effect (copycat killings) may serve as an especially powerful

     motivator.

7. They tend to express their frustrations and anger using art and/or social media posts.

Maybe we can reduce the number of school shootings by stopping the sales of ghost guns, not by giving teachers guns, but by arming them with the sensitivity, skills and resources to identify and find help for their troubled students.

Papa Doug vs. the Enemy of the People

I shook my head in disbelief three years ago, when I learned Douglas Manchester had been offered the position of ambassador to the Bahamas. President Trump made the announcement the day after he was sworn in.

I worked, briefly, for Papa Doug, his preferred moniker, seven years ago, after the real estate magnate bought San Diego’s North County Times.

After having witnessed his disaster as a newspaper publisher, I was delighted to see this week’s CBS News investigation, explaining how this country’s diplomatic corps escaped the embarrassment of an Ambassador Papa Doug.

After Manchester donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, his ambassadorship languished in the Senate for two and a half years. When Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel asked him for another $500,000, as a donation to help the RNC meet its fundraising goal, Manchester offered, instead, a good faith $100,000 donation from his wife, with a promise of more to come after he was confirmed.

That was a bridge too far for Papa Doug. The Republican National Committee told CBS News, "Mr. Manchester's decision to link future contributions to an official action was totally inappropriate." They said they cut ties with Manchester and returned the money his family donated this year.

Following my retirement from Cal State San Marcos in 2003, I began writing letters to the editor, leading to an invitation to write a biweekly opinion column on subjects of my choosing, so long as they were on local issues. The opinion page editor gave me free reign for my opinions, many of which were highly critical of the city’s elected officials.

Nine years later, shortly after purchasing the San Diego Union Tribune, Papa Doug bought the North County Times. It was bad news for this writer.

Here’s what I said about that in my October 17, 2012 blog:

The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper

Manchester has not been hesitant to declare his goal as a newspaper owner is not to produce quality journalism as a service to the public. It’s to promote a conservative agenda and be a booster of business and pro sports in San Diego County.

Editor of the North County Times, Kent Davy, told a KPBS interviewer his mission for the NCT was to be a mirror of the community. Manchester’s mission for the U-T San Diego North County Page Insert is to be a mirror of himself.

The day Editor Davy refused to publish that, I stopped writing for the North County Times. He explained it was a threat to NCT staff writers, fearing more layoffs from the newspaper’s change of ownership. I didn’t blame him for trying to protect his writers, but it didn’t stop Papa Doug from killing North County’s only daily print newspaper.

Fortunately for me, I found other outlets, thanks to Anna Daniels of the San Diego Free Press, Steve Marcotte, editor of OsideNews.com, and the good folks at OBrag.org and EscondidoGrapevine.com.

As a proud co-conspirator with Trump’s “enemies of the people,” I just can't stop blogging.