Superintendent John Collins sanitizes devastating report about Poway Unified School District

 Poway isn't the only school district where secrecy protects incompetence and bad behavior. All school districts need a heavy dose of sunshine.

Morning Report: Report Sanitized for Poway’s Protection
By Randy Dotinga 
VOSD
Aug 31, 2015

Turns out a tough analysis of dysfunctional management at Poway Unified School District that we got after a public records battle was a lot tougher before we got it.

Superintendent John Collins decided to take a red pen to a $40,000 consultant’s report about district tech problems.

VOSD’s Ashly McGlone uncovered the superintendent’s significant edits, but only after we threatened the district with litigation. As she reports, “words like ‘arrogance’ were replaced with ‘overconfidence.’ ‘Dysfunction’ became ‘issues.’ ‘Extreme and even chaotic’ decision-making became just ‘problematic’ and ‘reckless and wasteful decision-making’ became ‘uncontrolled and inefficient,’ while other descriptors like ‘short-sighted’ and longer passages were scrubbed entirely, district records show.”

The superintendent’s told us this about the report: “The result has helped us to celebrate the outstanding work we do and formulate new goals and organizational structures to continuously improve upon our successes.”

A tech staffer went to a meeting with Collins and said the chief wanted to avoid “calling anybody out for the problems that were discovered.”