Sophia deDomenico, business owner and community volunteer, sophia4trustee.com
Over the past 4 years, the incumbents have made a mess of our district, and they cannot get us out of it. We need a change. We need people who are fair and balanced. People who will listen to all sides of an argument, discuss topics, and come up with creative solutions to best serve our students. Our community deserves truth and transparency. Our students deserve board members who care enough to inform their families about their education and give them a voice.
I have the solutions, the know-how and the grit to get things done. I am a longtime dynamic leader who has led hundreds of teams of individuals with differing perspectives to success in common goals, both personally and professionally. I know how to listen, collaborate and communicate decisions back to stakeholders. My background shows that I have the skills to do this role well. I am also the only candidate with young children. The success of our district is crucial to their generation; thus I am additionally invested.
All of the issues [facing schools and board members] are symptoms of one overarching problem: we have a top-down leadership problem. The morale of our district is low, and divisiveness is at an all-time high. The district has lost touch with its core constituency: families. Instead of communicating and collaborating with our students’ most crucial educational ally, the current board has chosen to cut out and ignore their voice.
Subsequently, one of our biggest problems is that our enrollment is in measurable decline. Parents are simply withdrawing their students from the district. We have to build trust with our community again. If elected, I will solve this by being transparent with the decisions we make as a board. We can easily give parents a voice by instituting town halls at school sites. We need to hear what families have to say if we are going to make the best decisions for our students. We can also inform them of any potentially controversial material that is taught to their students. It’s not difficult. A simple email home with a link will suffice in most scenarios that warrant any additional conversation.
The second-biggest issue we face is the need to support our educators as they help our students close learning gaps left by campus closures during the pandemic. We have excellent teachers and staff in this district. They are working their hardest to bring our students up to speed, but we must extend them more support. The current board has chosen to ignore many of the recommendations our teachers have made. The board has also added extra responsibilities to their jobs. Instead of focusing on core academics like math, English, literature, science and the arts, we have reassigned crucial educational minutes to other things.
I have been shocked by the amount of teachers I have met on the campaign that have retired early from our district because, in their words, they couldn’t take the district’s demands anymore. This is unacceptable in my opinion. A new perspective on the school board can change all of this. We can listen to our teachers and implement their suggestions. We can cut out additional district-level management to assign more funds towards student support staff that actually interact with students each day. We can remove encumbrances from our students’ day, so they keep focused on core subjects. If elected, I plan to do all of this and more.
The current board has failed to address these main issues because they all think in the same way. They have allowed their political ideology to hijack what should be a completely non-partisan position. Right now, our board votes 5-0 to pass every agenda item without discussion, question or objection. They cite this is because a lot of decisions are made in closed-door, private sessions, according to district superintendent Mark McLaughlin’s latest email.
If this is indeed correct, then they are also violating the law. The Brown Act states that the school board is a publicly held position funded by tax dollars; thus, all decisions must be made in view of the public eye. In my view, there is not much that this current board has done well.
I have all the ingredients to be an effective trustee. I’m a first-generation Hispanic American. I was born to a father who came to this country as a teenager who could not speak a word of English. His father took a job as a janitor at a local school to make ends meet. Thirty percent of our student population is in this exact scenario. I have a child with some special needs who I had to advocate for in this school district. Many of our neurodiverse students need more advocacy and a trustee empathetic to their success.
I am a former foster parent. I know what it’s like to walk beside kids through difficult scenarios. I am adept at collaborating with their families. I am a business owner. I know how to find creative solutions and allocate resources effectively. I am lastly a Conejo Valley Unified School District graduate. I know how good this district used to be and how amazing it can be under the right leadership.
All leadership begins and ends with the school board trustees. We can get our schools back on track through voting for new candidates this November.
To: Sophia de Domenico: Candidates did not get to present their positions Tuesday 10-18-22 to provide us with ‘accurate information.’ We can’t afford to let ‘passions’ and ‘years’ of experience do more damage to our students and our community. Critical Race Theory and Critical Gender Theory are theories of the intellectual few, not the experience of millions of ordinary people living through decades living and learning by trail and error how to raise children. This is why our Constitution was written for the governance of and by the people and not for the ‘few’ that want to tell us how to live. There is not a chance that candidates in opposition will “find ways to balance for what is best for our kids and our community”; this has been done over centuries by millions of ordinary people living, succeeding and failing at times to get it right. We don’t need ‘unconstrained’ – ‘anoited visionaries’ to tell us we must replace our empirical evidence with a theoretical ideology that has done too much damage to our world already. We need you, Karen Meyer and Joelle Mancuso to fill the three open seats on the CVUSD Board of Trustees; we must have “Checks and Balances” on our school board. Let us hear from you loud and clear!
Total agreement here!!!