Nine months ago on New Years Day, Sunday, January 1, 2023, District Deeds made the 2023 “HAT Trick” New Years Resolution for holding the San Diego Unified School District to the reasonable, justifiable, and critical standard of Honesty, Accountability and Transparency:

Since that time we have provided our readers the HAT Trick Handbook for Uniform Complaints and spent Summer, 2023 breaking down the three components with documented proof of horrible SDUSD performance.

Last Sunday, to begin the new 2023/2024 school year, we decided to apply those District Deeds HAT Trick principles to the newest SDUSD Board of Education Trustees and they failed horribly.  Here is a portion of what we said regarding their claim of “no cost learning ” in the SDUSD:

Since they both claim there is “no-cost learning” in the SDUSD, how do do Hazan and Petterson think that the $11.5 billion bond borrowing is being paid for if it is “no cost”?

Where do they think the salaries of the  “compassionate educators and health professionals” comes from?

And here is our conclusion:

Per Plausible Reason #1, being completely unaware of how the SDUSD is funded after a year on the job completely disqualifies them for the Trustee position and they should immediately resign or be removed from office.

Per Plausible Reason #2., being willfully ignorant and/or spouting lies to SDUSD Stakeholders via a commentary to mislead and divert attention away from chronic poor educational performance completely disqualifies them for the Trustee position and they should immediately resign or be removed from office.

Lying to SDUSD Stakeholders is a complete violation of the “Ethics” component of their SDUSD oath of office and the “Honesty” component of the 2023 District Deeds HAT Trick resolution.

District Deeds Bottom Line: Both plausible reasons could be true and both are ultimately damning to the reputations and the viability of both Hazan and Petterson to complete their terms in office.

This week we explore the “Accountability” component of the HAT Trick and apply it to the annual loss of enrollment propaganda spewed by the SDUSD and regurgitated, with very minimal investigative journalism techniques, by the local press to SDUSD Stakeholders.

To define and expose this anti-accountability regurgitation we will be tying together three articles from the local press in reverse (newest to oldest) chronological order that clearly verifies this SDUSD Pre-K scam.  Two are from the San Diego Union Tribune (SDUT) and the other one is from the Voice of San Diego (VOSD).

Article #1

SDUT – 9/21/2023: 

San Diego Unified enrollment is still dropping — just not as steeply — as transitional kindergarten expands

KEY QUOTE

  “This is a district bleeding out…” – SDUSD Trustee Petterson

DISTRICT DEEDS ANALYSIS

If even a Trustee newbie/Barrera sycophant like Petterson can publicly recognize the horrible status of SDUSD enrollment, why was the SDUT unable to connect the dots?

“Just not as steeply” in the headline?!?

The minimal “proof” the SDUT used to back up their inaccurate characterization was DIRECTLY FROM THE SDUSD!

Here is the quote from the article:

Three weeks into the new school year, San Diego Unified has enrolled 96,500 students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade, district officials said during an enrollment presentation at last week’s school board meeting. That’s down 550 students from last year and down 6,500 students from the fall of 2019 — a 6 percent decline.

THAT, the 3rd paragraph of the story, is where the SDUT “investigative journalism” stopped.

SDUT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM LESSON #1:   INVESTIGATE!

For accurate data evaluation reasons, the first simple thing that any analysis must do is eliminate any category that does not apply to the analysis.

SDUSD K-12 have well defined education laws and performance standards mandated by the SDUSD, the State of California and the Federal Government.

The new “Pre-K grade level” has NONE of those and should not be allowed in the same enrollment formula analysis as K-12 that actually do have those rules and measurements.

An investigative journalist would realize and publish the fact that the new “Pre-K grade level” being used to cover up SDUSD enrollment decline is just a new SDUSD propaganda eduspeak term for something that pre-dates the launch of California public schools in 1849.

That old term is called “babysitting”.

A newer term is called “pre-school”

Here are the facts:

SDUSD Pre-K/Babysitting has no publicly defined District/School/Teacher/Child performance measurements, attendance, or any other form of HAT Trick Accountability except the following phrase from the SDUSD UTK page:

“Exposed to academic fundamentals” and “peer interaction”.

Really?!?

• No mandated data or definition of why, what and how those undefined “academic fundamentals” are measured daily/weekly/monthly/annually.
• No mandated attendance/absenteeism reporting.
• No clearly defined and verified performance measurements that holds the SDUSD accountable.

In other words taxpayer funded (not free) Day Care that ARE NOT part of REAL SDUSD enrollment!

The SDUT also referred to getting the information “during an enrollment presentation at last week’s school board meeting”.

We found that presentation on the SDUSD website and pulled the following incomplete chart spoon fed to the SDUT and regurgitated to its readers:

Do you notice anything missing?

As you can see, the chart provided by the SDUSD DOES NOT include the enrollment number WITHOUT UTK.

Here is that chart updated with the real SDUSD enrollment numbers (in the blue area) that the SDUSD intentionally excluded:

DD NOTE:  Please click on the chart to see an expanded, easier to read version.

And here is a spreadsheet we created with those numbers while deleting the untrackable performance UTK:

  “a 6 percent decline”?!?

“just not as steeply”?!?

Our spreadsheet excluding the nontrackable Pre-K performance illustrates a 9.3 decline in SDUSD K-12 enrollment since 2019/2020.  Is that “not as steeply”?

It is NOT a difficult task to uncover the SDUSD corruption in the school board meeting presentation, especially given the next two articles

Article #2

VOSD – 12/20/2022: 

UTK Brought a Surge of New Students to San Diego Unified. That’s Hidden that Enrollment Is Still Falling in Just About Every Other Grade.

KEY QUOTE:

These SDUSD enrollment numbers reflecting a “6 percent decline” are totally debunked by this Voice of San Diego (VOSD) article.

The VOSD article came out in December, 2022.

The SDUT article came out 9 months later in SEPTEMBER, 2023!

From the Political Dictionary

We are not sure why the “investigative journalists” at the SDUT did not reference the information in this article and call out the SDUSD for sandbagging the enrollment numbers.

Here is a part of that VOSD article and chart:

And our enrollment spreadsheet posted today isn’t the first time the faux enrollment calculations were exposed.   Here is what VOSD Article 2 also says:

But the rapidly declining enrollment numbers and frantic actions by the SDUSD to cover it up is actually WORSE than the SDUT, the VOSD or any SDUSD Stakeholder may think.  Here is a SDUT article from 2019 that shows the real life damage and destruction caused by the corrupt SDUSD frantically trying to stop the SDUSD from “bleeding out”.

Article #3

SDUT – 4/29/2019: 

As enrollment shrinks, San Diego Unified weighs family choice against neighborhood school needs

KEY QUOTE:

AND

AND

We have no idea why the SDUT did not include this in Article 1.  Maybe it is the slow conversion from investigative reporting to passive journalism and multiple owners over that nearly 5 year period.

Although this these articles address the reduction of “choice seats to families” it never  touches on another issue that severely limits school choice to the neediest families in the worst SDUSD schools…

Busing.

Our July, 2019 post covered that “choice” subject:

As we have written about busing numerous times on District Deeds, the position of the San Diego Unified School District is clear.

Jam the “Quality School In Every Neighborhood” motto down the throats of every economically disadvantaged family by eliminating bus routes and dramatically reducing the busing budget to force them to go to local poor performing neighborhood schools.

Having the corrupt, incompetent SDUSD leadership reduce “choice” seats and slowing eliminate busing reminds us of another part of the United States in 1976 that thought trapping students at their sub par neighborhood schools was a good idea.

Here is a picture of the Boston busing desegregation protests featured in an NPR article titled “Life After Iconic 1976 Photo: The American Flag’s Role In Racial Protest”

“San Diego Unified leaders say they need to limit those choices”?!?

Really????

Welcome to West Boston.

DISTRICT DEEDS TRANSLATION: 

The SDUSD has decided that the best possible way to keep students from leaving the SDUSD is to TRAP THEM at their neighborhood school because of the “need to limit those choices to stabilize enrollment across district schools and prevent certain neighborhood schools from losing too many students”

The “2030 Vision” on the SDUSD website contains the following graphic:

Limiting Choice “seats” and slowly eliminating busing completely negates ALL of those supposed “Values” and exposes the total lack of SDUSD Senior Leadership accountability to the neediest Students and Families being forced to attend a horrible neighborhood “community school” no matter how unsafe and dysfunctional.

Being trapped in a school that you cannot leave also sounds familiar courtesy of the 5-0 Democrat SDUSD Board of Education…

Welcome to the SDUSD Gulag in West Boston!

==============================================

District Deeds “Speak Your Truth” Information

On August 27, 2023 we launched a new initiative in our post titled “2023/2024 – District Deeds 10th School Year…NEW “Speak Your Truth” Posting Opportunity for ALL SDUSD Stakeholders!!!” where we asked for the real life experiences of San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Parents, Teachers, Students, Staff and Taxpayers.

Here is the “Speak Your Truth” initiative definition from that post:

“Speak Your Truth” CONTINUES to inspire honesty and bravery with SDUSD Teachers, Staff, Parents and Students and given us additional insight into the deep fear of SDUSD retribution by employees in the toxic SDUSD work environment.

THANK YOU to ALL the brave SDUSD Stakeholders who continue to share their stories with us and provide deep insights into the ongoing SDUSD dysfunctional work and education environment.

---

Now for our Quote of the Week dedicated to the corrupt and incompetent SDUSD Senior Leadership and Board of Education:

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

---

IF

• You have an important story regarding San Diego Unified School District corruption or misdeeds, please e-mail your information to us at districtdeeds@gmail.com
• You have strong feelings about our posts, please enter those statements in the “comments” box below.
• Your family has been injured by the San Diego Unified School District, go to the District Deeds Complaint Forms page to find instructions to fight for your Civil Rights!
• You want to be sure you don’t miss an issue of District Deeds, enter your email next to the “FOLLOW” button below and you will get an email automatically when an article is published on District Deeds.