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PROLOGUE

Last Saturday District Deeds posted COMMUNITY FORUM ALERT – MONDAY, JULY 26, 2021! Topic: Lincoln High School

Here is the flyer we posted from the organizations supporting the “Community Forum”:

On that flyer you will notice that the meeting is advertised as an opportunity for the community to “Voice Your Concerns“.  We assumed that all the fine community organizations that are listed on the flyer believed, and the flyer implies, that this would be an opportunity for community members to speak directly (re: Voice) to the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and Lincoln Site leadership about their “concerns”.

Also in our post we urged our readers to attend:

We strongly urge all of our readers concerned with Lincoln High School to attend!

Since we have been concerned about Lincoln High School since the improper removal of Principal Esther Omogbehin in 2014 in our post titled Lincoln and SCPA…The “Smoking Gun”?, we decided to attend the forum to “Voice our Concerns” and also listen to other community attendees voice their concerns.

The following is our eyewitness report on what actually occurred at the Lincoln High School Community Forum last night.

Lincoln Community Forum Eyewitness Report

We arrived early at approximately 5:30 pm in order to be sure to get a good seat.  We  entered the George Stevens Senior Center and sat down in a mostly empty meeting room.  As we waited for the forum to begin we noticed a number of local press reporters including the reporter from the San Diego Union Tribune (UT) and local TV Station KUSI, both very positive to SDUSD news outlets.  The SDUSD Propaganda Team of Andrew “Body Wash Up On Shore” Sharp and former UT Reporter Maureen Magee also arrived.

Having been to hundreds of SDUSD meetings over the last 15+ years, we realized that with local press cronies and the district propaganda team in attendance, there was a huge possibility that this supposed “Community Forum” was just a ruse.  All signs pointed to it actually being an orchestrated SDUSD propaganda event.  In other words, the REAL purpose of the event was NOT to hear from the Community about Lincoln.

It was to hear from the district about Lincoln propaganda.

It was to take the bad press heat off the obvious SDUSD Senior Management disaster and dysfunction at Lincoln High School and the Lincoln Cluster.

This tactic has been used before, usually in the protected confines of the Lincoln High campus.  Remember this propaganda photo op in the Voice of San Diego on the first day of school in 2014?

We used that propaganda photo a month later in WHISTLEBLOWER – Lincoln High School – “Hornet Insider” – Butcher Knife Reported!

How about the same type of propaganda in 2017 we profiled in Lincoln High Students Peaceful “Walk Out” Proves What The San Diego Unified School District Trustees “Need To Understand”: #martensgottago

Our suspicions were confirmed as the meeting took shape.

Although the meeting was to begin at 6:00 pm, that didn’t happen.  While waiting for the meeting to start, approximately 70 attendees milled around the meeting room greeting each other, 90% of whom were SDUSD employees.  The attendees included Lincoln Staff, Cluster Teachers and Coaches along with numerous central office administration employees including Interim Superintendent Lamont Jackson.

While waiting, a pleasant lady who we soon learned was a newly appointed Lincoln Staff Member and a panelist, came up to us and offered a one page document that was to be discussed during the “forum”.

Here is the NEW document:

As you can see, this is a strategy document that lays out the Pathways via Project Based Learning (PBL) plan/vision for 2021/2022 and beyond at Lincoln High School.  We expressed some dismay when we learned that there was no “Cal Soap” type interventions or remedial plan for new 9th graders that have Math and English skills of a 6th grader.  The new plan just included the Pathways/PBL edu-speak that allows the Site and District level leadership to avoid all transparency and accountability.

Around 6:20 the meeting finally began and the full “Community Voice” scam was unveiled.

The meeting moderator was obviously recruited and assigned by the SDUSD, probably Barrera himself.  In fact, after the meeting he was seen bro hugging/back slapping Interim Superintendent Lamont Jackson.

The panelists took their seat on the dais and SURPRISE…5 out of the panelists were SDUSD employees.  They included:

  • Trustee Tricky Dick Barrera
  • Trustee “Fly by the Seat of our Pants” Payne
  • The newly appointed Lincoln High School Staff member who handed us the one page document
  • The newly appointed Lincoln Vice Principal
  • The current, incumbent Lincoln Principal
  • City Councilmember Monica Montgomery-Steppe

The moderator identified himself and gave the attendees the rules of the propaganda dog and pony show.  A few of the instructions are as follows:

  • Be civil in your communication with each other.
  • The panelists will have 2 minutes each to answer the questions.
  • Attendees must write their questions on a piece of paper so the crony moderator could ask the questions to the panelists.

In this “forum” there was to be no direct communication of the attendees to the panelists.

The stage was set for the Dog and Pony extravaganza!

To top it all off, the following sheets of paper were passed around to the attendees on which to write their questions to the panel:

Ironically the Christmas sheets of paper were to foretell the Community Forum “Christmas in July” theme.  Deceiving community attendees into the meeting under the guise of an open interactive town hall type “forum” and instead delivering blue sky propaganda soon turned into an unscheduled and unanticipated “Present” for all community attendees.

The Moderator stated that they would start off the forum with 3 questions.  No source of the questions was shared but it was obvious that the tailored inquiries were just soft ball questions set up for Barrera, Payne and the other three SDUSD Employees on the panel to hit out of the propaganda park.

For the next hour, Tricky Dick, Payne and the SDUSD employees pontificated on the new faux Pathways/PBL “Vision” for the coming school year at Lincoln High School.  Except for the four or five minutes Councilmember Montgomery-Steppe  was able to interject the reality of issues at Lincoln, it was a fantasy hour filled with useless SDUSD manufactured propaganda that doesn’t have a chance of becoming reality.

At approximately 7:20 pm. the moderator declared that instead of offering the 3rd propaganda question from the District, he would instead begin asking panelists the community questions from the Christmas papers.

Instead of asking the actual community questions, the moderator decided it was best to ad-lib and combine multiple community questions into one.  He mangled three of the questions into one unintelligible question that Barrera adroitly turned into how parents should behave:

  • Parents don’t send your kids to charters, give your local SDUSD school a chance. He then cited some unsubstantiated study that “proved” kids going to successful charter schools would get the same grades and education as going to failing SDUSD schools. The BIG Tricky Dick lie.
  • Parents should take an interest in their kids like he did until high school when he confessed he personally had no idea how to figure out high school math.
  • Parents should celebrate their SDUSD schools apparently despite the abject failure of Lincoln Cluster Elementary and Middle Schools to teach students math and reading according to State test results.

At that point, after having their questions about parent mistrust and resentment of Lincoln High School performance combined into one mangled question from the moderator and then have Barrera turn the question into a “how to parent” sermon, the community had enough.

The audience had the “Present” of statements and questions from a couple of attendees directly to Barrera

Lincoln parents, Shamiko Harris and Tonja Daniels spoke loudly from the back of the room with a demand that ALL SDUSD Stakeholders have asked Barrera since he was elected :

Answer the question Barrera!

and

Barrera should be fired!

Mr. Harris followed up with two questions:

Are you going to answer the questions Barrera?

and

When is Lincoln going to start respecting Black Fathers?

As a member of the audience, District Deeds started loudly repeating the same things at Barrera while he sat a few feet away from us, stone-faced and humiliated in front of the crowd:

Are you going to answer the questions Barrera?

Barrera did not answer the Mr. Harris, Ms. Daniels, the community or our questions.

Instead the humiliated Barrera quickly escaped with the other 4 female SDUSD Employees out the back door of the meeting room avoiding all attendees, even his uber friendly local reporters that subsequently produced Pro-SDUSD/Lincoln propaganda variations of the meeting in their medium.

The only person left on the dais was City Councilmember Monica Montgomery-Steppe.

District Deeds approached the Moderator after Barrera left and asked him one simple question:

Why did you not follow up with Barrera and ask him the questions that Mr. Harris and Ms. Daniels had both written and verbalized to Barrera?

The moderator answer:

I did not know the context.

The moderator, who is apparently well regarded by the SDUSD (surprise!) could not understand the context of:

When is Lincoln going to start respecting Black Fathers?

or

Are you going to answer the questions Barrera?

If he did not know the context of those simple questions then we have one more question for him in absentia:

Why were you the Moderator?

WOW!

The forum that was supposed to last until 8:00 pm shut it down by 7:30 with ZERO questions from the community answered by Barrera or the Panel.

Perfect Grinch all take and no give, as usual, from Barrera and his SDUSD sycophants.

Since the meeting we have had the opportunity to review the news stories about this forum produced by the local media.  We are intentionally not providing the links to them because the Barrera sycophant reporters were either incapable or unwilling to expose the propaganda spewed at the meeting and instead, in some cases, vilified the community and actually positively promoted the Barrera “Lincoln Vision” propaganda fantasy.

In closing…

We are very proud of the Lincoln Cluster parents and community members, especially Mr. Harris and Ms. Daniels, for their courage in the face of SDUSD employees attempts to restrict their right to, as the Community Forum flyer said, “Voice Your Concerns”.

We are very encouraged that Barrera the coward showed the Lincoln Cluster Community and all SDUSD Stakeholders his fear in the face of strong, honest community advocacy,

We are very reassured that the cowardly Barrera panel performance destroys his self created myth “I’m a community organizer, I get that.”.  and what he, and now the SDUSD community, actually gets is that he is a “community destroyer” who attempts to find the best way to subvert the will of the community for his own financial and political gain.

And THAT is the best Christmas in July Present ever!

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