For those of you living within the boundaries of the Grossmont Union High School District, Hoystory encourages you to vote for the following people for the school board:

Richard "Dick" Hoy
Andrew John "Andy" Sundstrom
Ken Sobel

Hoystory readers, being among the most intelligent people on the planet, will recognize that the first endorsee shares a surname with this blog's proprietor. He's my father, the original teacher of U.S. Hoystory at Santana High School for 30+ years, and he deserves your vote.

Politics is all too often about power, and not public service. When it comes to state and national politics, that is to be expected. However, when the accumulation of power is the focus of local, nonpartisan offices that are supposed to be the most responsive to the public will, we have a problem.

Unfortunately, that is what has been going on the past few years in the Grossmont Union High School District and that's why Hoy, Sundstrom and Sobel need to be elected.

Why these three? Because the alternative is just plain ugly.

I mentioned several months ago the resolution of protracted contract talks with the district's teachers, who had been without a contract for more than a year:

Comparing last night's deal with the negotiating positions taken four months ago, which side moved the most?

It's quickly apparent that the District administrators made a huge lurch towards the teachers' numbers. In fact, the gap between what they were offering in December vs. what they offered last night leaves one to assume that the district had either badly misjudged the amount of money they had to spend (a sign of incompetence) or had been negotiating in bad faith (a sign of malice). Of course, there's also the possibility that both those things are true.

And then there is this editorial from the Union-Tribune that ran in June.

Major changes were made last week in the way the Grossmont Union High School District board conducts its business.

A special board meeting was called on barely more than 24 hours' notice. With no mention on the district's Web site, few in the public were aware a meeting was being held. After a motion by trustee Ron Nehring, 57 pages of changes were passed as a package on a 3-2 vote. Trustees Larry Urdahl and Priscilla Schreiber were not permitted to discuss portions they found troubling.

The manner in which this board action was taken is consistent with the autocratic rule of board President Jim Kelly and Superintendent Terry Ryan.

The matter first came up in February. An attorney had rewritten the board's bylaws, but not at the direction of the full board.

Schreiber and Urdahl became concerned over some of the changes they believed would limit board members from investigating district issues or communicating with the public. They were so concerned that they hired private counsel at their own expense to look at the proposed changes.

At the March meeting, Kelly wanted to adopt the changes but suffered a rare defeat as the rest of the board disagreed. Schreiber requested a workshop so that the proposed changes, their intent and possible unintended consequences could be discussed.

Nothing happened until a hastily called special meeting on May 31.

Why the rush? And if the bylaw changes are sound, why the refusal to discuss them?

Kelly and Ryan did not respond to repeated calls to discuss the matter.

The special meeting notification met the bare minimums of state law - 24 hours' notice to accredited media organizations and posting in a public place, in this case the district's bulletin board with copies going to public libraries.

It is no surprise that Grossmont Union met the minimums set by state law. The district hires four separate law firms and uses the Office of County Counsel. The district piled up $558,000 in legal expenses last school year and has a budget of $629,000 for this year.

But there's also a law of common sense. By not even posting notice of the meeting on the district Web site, by not allowing a thorough public discussion, Kelly, Ryan and company have failed that test once again.

Did you know that Jim Kelly has been board president for four years? He likes to tout that fact, but if you are familiar with school boards, water district boards and other small, nonpartisan elected groups, you'd know that being board president for four years is decidedly atypical. In normal circumstances, that largely honorary role rotates among board members.

Jim Kelly is all about accruing power to himself. He is a little man who makes himself feel big and important by running a school board -- at the expense of the schools. His two current enablers, Ron Nehring (if you wonder why the GOP in California is a mess, look no further than Nehring, the state party's vice chairman) and Evelyn Wills are not running for re-election. Instead he has recruited Shari Groce and Robert Shield. I'm sure Groce and Shield are nice people, but by voting for them, you'd just be giving Kelly three votes on the board. Three votes that he needs to continue to stifle public debate and run the district like his own private toy.

Vote for Hoy, Sundstrom and Sobel and bring some sanity and responsibility back to the Grossmont Union High School District.