Show some class, Pamela Smith and Bertha Lopez!

I'm sure that neither of the women currently on the Chula Vista Elementary School District board allows herself to be treated as less capable on the job based on the fact that she is female. Yet that's exactly how Pamela Smith and Bertha Lopez treated young teacher Danielle Coziahr because she had a baby. A jury found it to be illegal.

Show some class, ladies.

Apologize and settle the case, instead of appealing it.

Quit being rubber stamps for Pat Judd and Larry Cunningham.

You, too, David Bejarano. Is this what you signed up for when you joined the school board? To waste money on lawyers instead of teachers? Apologize, don't appeal.


FOR THE DETAILS OF the Coziahr v. CVESD lawsuit, click the link "A school district lawsuit (Coziahr v. CVESD) at right.

A plea to Alex Smith: talk to your mom!

See all posts regarding Danielle Cozaihr v. CVESD
Gender discrimination against non-reelected teacher

The following was posted on CVESD report:

A plea to San Francisco 49ers player Alex Smith

Dear Alex:
You are a hero for starting a foundation to help foster kids when they turn eighteen.

I know you could be a hero to kids and adults in Chula Vista Elementary School District where your mom is on the school board.

She's been under the influence of extreme right-wingers Patrick Judd and Larry Cunningham for many years. I don't know why Pamela Smith calls herself a Democrat, because she always votes with Pat and Larry, no matter what.

She should be ashamed of herself for voting to non-reelect teacher Danielle Coziahr. A first-year principal got it into his head that he had a right to fire a teacher for having a young child and then having the nerve to get pregnant--and everyone in the top echelons of the district went along with it--including your mom. Doesn't your mom know that you can't legally agree to something like this? Well, of course she does.

Tonight the rest of the board will vote to appeal the decision made by the jury last Friday.

Please ask your mom to do the right thing, to apologize to Danielle, and to settle the lawsuit instead of appealing it.

Posted by Marie Killelea

Jury to CVESD: Pay Danielle Coziahr $1,012,000

A San Diego jury has a message for CVESD board members Pamela Smith, Cheryl Cox, and Bertha Lopez: your decision to discriminate against Danielle Coziahr in 2006 based on her gender caused $1,012,000 in costs and damages.

These three women apparently didn't lose any sleep over dismissing a teacher who was considered a leader by teachers with much more experience. I listened to testimony with the jury, and the evidence was clear: Coziahr was fired was one reason only, and that was that she was a woman who had a young child and another on the way.

The three women on the Chula Vista Elementary School District board demonstrated again and again that they aren't one bit softer than the hard-nosed duo of Patrick Judd and Larry Cunningham. Pam, Bertha and Cheryl seemed to go along with anything the boys wanted, even if it was illegal, or even criminal.

And the illegality didn't stop when former San Diego police chief David Bejarano took Cheryl Cox's place in January of this year.

The CVESD board needs a complete overhaul. And a reconstituted board would be wise to get rid of Parham & Rajcic law firm, and instead ask lawyers like Danielle Coziahr's attorneys Laura Joan Farris and C. Daniel Carroll for legal advice.

Danielle Coziahr (not Cozaihr) is the one who won!

CORRECTION:
The correct spelling of Danielle Coziahr's name has eluded me on several occasions in this blog. (I apologize to Danielle and family and to confused readers.) I've corrected the spellings in the blog posts, but I left the links as they were.

Danielle Coziahr wins against Chula Vista Elementary School District

A verdict has come in regarding Coziahr v. CVESD.

Mrs. Coziahr has won.

This was a win for education in San Diego County.

Now comes the wait for CVESD to do the right thing. Mrs. Coziahr should be immediately returned to her classroom.

Alex Cortes, Tom Cruz, and Lowell Billings should be fired.

And then the entire board should resign. They should be replaced by people who are not in the pockets of either SDCOE or the teachers union. We need people who put kids first to be in charge of education.

The bad news is that Pamela Dempsey is scheduled to bring her severely compromised brand of lawyering back to court next week in a trial involving Mountain Empire School District, where CVESD board member Patrick Judd is superintendent.

The Danielle Coziahr case has gone to the jury

Attorneys Laura Joan Farris (left) and Daniel Carroll yesterday finished the trial of Coziahr v. Chula Vista Elementary School District, and the case has gone to the jury.

The jury has one easy job and one hard job: first, to decide if the district violated the law, and second, to decide how much the district should pay Danielle Coziahr.

Education suffers when leaders like Danielle Coziahr are dismissed at the whim of inexperienced first-year principals,while the district board and administrators ignore what is going on in schools.

When problems surface, the CVESD board and its go-between, Tom Cruz, just tell the lawyers to spend whatever it takes to keep tax dollars out of the hands of teachers, and channel those dollars into the hands of lawyers.

Is Pamela Dempsey the new Daniel Shinoff?

Attorney Pamela Dempsey sat for a week and a half in the San Diego Hall of Justice recently, getting paid by the taxpayers for sitting and listening to a powerful indictment of illegal actions committed by her client, Chula Vista Elementary School District.

Dempsey didn't have much to say. She isn't stupid. Her body language revealed how well she knew that her client was obviously in the wrong. After the first couple of days, she and Assistant Superintendent Tom Cruz stopped the traditional practice of standing and facing the jury for the entire time that the jury was walking in or out of the courtroom. Sure, they stood, but they tended to look away, or talk to each other. On December 4, 2007, I saw Dempsey turn toward the jury and immediately bend over coughing. This is a good sign, I think. It shows she knows the difference between right and wrong.

Why didn't she insist that the district settle this case? Because she gets paid to sit in court. Also, the CVESD board, which shows no signs of having a conscience, would probably just get another attorney.

The individuals mentioned above, however, are just bit players in a show written and directed by San Diego County Office of Education-Joint Powers Authority and other public entity groups who work with Keenan and Associates insurance brokers to use taxpayer dollars to support and cover up illegal behavior by school boards and administrators.

Lowell Billings delegates

Chula Vista Elementary School District Superintendent Lowell Billings testified today in the Danielle Coziahr case, and made one thing perfectly clear: he does not now have, nor has he ever had, the slightest clue about what went on at Silverwing Elementary in 2005-2006. His mission at Silverwing was simply to keep the principal happy.

Billings says, "I delegate." To whom? To Assistant Superintendent Tom Cruz.

Tom Cruz delegates, too. He also took the stand today, and made clear that no matter who first-year principal Alex Cortes wanted to fire, Cruz would not investigate. He would simply have the person dismissed.

Apparently a first-year principal was running the human resources department at CVED in '05-'06, and the human resources department dictated to Billings, who dictated to the board.

Clearly, there is no oversight by the district of CVESD schools, except to change principals if student test scores aren't high enough. What made Lowell Billings and Tom Cruz think that Alex Cortes was qualified to be a principal? Apparently he convinced them that he wouldn't let niceties such as human decency or the law stand in his way. They loved him immediately, and seem to have never questioned his judgment after the hiring interview.

Billings is apparently just a figurehead, and quite satisfied with his own performance, it appears.

Billings seems to think his job begins and ends with going around and being seen and making sing-song speeches about his "hands-on" approach. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to remember what he himself has seen. On the stand, he admitted he'd never even looked at Danielle Coziahr's personnel file, but he took responsibility for the decision to non-reelect Mrs. Coziahr.

Alex Cortes takes the stand

In the Coziahr trial on Thursday, November 29, 2007, the Chula Vista Elementary School District proved that the Lowell Billings-Tom Cruz administration is working hard to continue the illegal practices of their immediate predecessors.

It seems they want to usurp the primary claim to fame of the Libia Gil-Richard Werlin administration: brazen violations of the law. And the Parham & Rajcic law firm remains stalwartly supportive of this type of behavior.

This shouldn't be a surprise, since the board is basically the same: Judd, Smith, Lopez, Cunningham, and a replacement for Cheryl Cox (David Bejarano) who fits the CVESD board member mold perfectly.

As I predicted, there is virtually no paper trial in the Coziahr case, except documents that are missing. In my case, Gina Boyd claimed she either lost or threw away important records. Richard Werlin never explained why he produced no notes. But in the Coziahr case, the explanation for missing documents is very clear: principal Alex Cortes says he threw his notes away.

Danielle Coziahr was buried under a monstrous pyramid of incompetence, dishonesty and illegality. To some extent, I feel that Alex Cortes was also buried under that pyramid. Listening to the testimony, I became convinced that Cortes must have been instructed by Lowell Billings and Tom Cruz to find at least one of his eight probationary teachers to offer up for non-reelection. I suspect that Cortes received many pats on the back for offering up two teachers for non-reelection.

The manner in which Cortes avoided Mrs. Coziahr from the first day of school seemed to me an indication that he picked her on the first day, when she had her son with her. After that he didn't want to see her as a human being, so he never treated her like a human being. He didn't pay any attention to her teaching. It was of no importance to him that she was a leader in language arts according to the other teachers. He accused her of being inadequate in language arts, and stuck to his decision come hell or high water. He also moved kids with problems into her class, and moved high-functioning students out.

Of course the class was harmed by this. This was a class that should have been given to the most experienced teacher, not the least experienced. But kids aren't very high on the CVESD list of priorities, apparently.

When Mrs. Coziahr got pregnant halfway through the year, her fate was sealed. The district doesn't approve of maternity leave. Of course, they would prefer that the parents of the students get maternity leave, since improved maternal health and mother-child bonding will help the kids develop better. But logical consistency is not a trait of decision-makers at CVESD.

Shame on Lowell Billings, Tom Cruz, and Chula Vista Educators presidents Gina Boyd, Jim Groth and Peggie Myers. These individuals have re-created the worst abuses of the Libia Gil-Richard Werlin years, acting as lap dogs for corrupt board members Pamela Smith, Bertha Lopez, Patrick Judd, Larry Cunningham, and Cheryl Cox/ David Bejarano.

The law exists for a good reason. Things would be a lot better if these powerful individuals had more respect for the law and less attachment to their own arbitrary power.

CVESD's mistake: equating Silverwing teachers with Castle Park Elementary teachers

A Tale of Two Lawsuits

LARKINS V. CVESD
(Castle Park Elementary 2001-2005) See photo above, with teachers Peggie Myers and Karen Snyder standing together, and the famous Robin Donlan seated

COZIAHR V. CVESD
(Silverwing Elementary 2006-2007)

After its bad experience with dishonest teachers who banded together at Castle Park Elementary, Chula Vista Elementary School District's Lowell Billings and Tom Cruz were less open than they should have been to a petition from fourteen honest teachers at Silverwing Elementary.

The teachers union, Chula Vista Educators, had worked closely with the district to make sure that teachers at Castle Park Elementary covered up illegal actions and committed perjury during depositions in the Maura Larkins case. After the union and the district committed these crimes together, there was a close bond between union leaders and CVESD administrators. That bond continues. The core agreement of the bond between CVE and CVESD seems to be "Politics trumps legality every time."

If Danielle Coziahr, whose case against CVESD is in court right now, had spent her time promoting the union instead of making lesson plans and collaborating with other teachers, the union would have fought hard for her job.

The union would have fought as hard as it did for Robin Donlan and current CVE president Peggie Myers, two of the Castle Park Elementary troublemakers. When the district decided it wanted some law and order to return to Castle Park, it transferred Donlan, Myers and three other teachers. The union wouldn't have it. CVE past presidents Gina Boyd and Jim Groth made a huge stink. They were determined that teachers who committed crimes and teachers who covered them up should not suffer the indignity of transfer to another school.

The Danielle Coziahr case was very different. Of course, the district was completely dishonest when it said that instructional techniques were Danielle Coziahr's problem. The problem was that she had one young child, and was expecting another. She had "childcare issues." That's why she was chosen for non-reelection. She was marked for serious consideration on the day that her new principal met her. And her fate was sealed when that principal found out she was pregnant.

Alex Cortes takes the stand

This post has been moved to December 1, 2007 in this blog.

Why isn't Alex Cortes at school today? He has legal issues.

Alex Cortes and Tom Cruz of Chula Vista Elementary School District aren't helping kids today.

They have legal issues.

They've had legal issues ever since they fired a teacher for being pregnant. We all know what pregnancy results in: childcare issues.

And childcare issues are not acceptable at Silverwing Elementary School.

CORRECTION:
AS OF NOVEMBER 29, 2007 I HAVE CHANGED MY THINKING REGARDING ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT TOM CRUZ AND SILVERWING PRINCIPAL ALEX CORTES.

I NOW BELIEVE THAT HOSTILITY TOWARD WOMEN WHO HAVE "CHILDCARE ISSUES" WAS VERY MUCH THE ATTITUDE OF TOM CRUZ AND LOWELL BILLINGS, BEFORE ALEX CORTES EVER CAME TO CVESD. MAYBE CORTES' HOSTILITY TO FEMALE TEACHERS WITH YOUNG CHILDREN WAS THE PRECISE REASON HE WAS HIRED!

HERE IS MY ORIGINAL POST:

And childcare issues are not acceptable at Silverwing Elementary School.

At least, that's what Alex Cortes thinks, and who is Tom Cruz to argue with him? He's the assistant superintendent for human resources, you say? Well, he apparently got the job by not doing much arguing. Mr. Cruz would have done the kids at Silverwing Elementary School a big favor if he had nixed Cortes' bad idea in the first place. But Cruz seems to be quite buddy-buddy with lawyer Pamela Dempsey. During court breaks, they whisper and laugh. Maybe Cruz wanted to give Dempsey some work.

HERE IS WHAT I THINK NOW:

I think Alex Cortes was doing exactly what Tom Cruz, Lowell Billings and the board wanted him to do. Of course, I also believe that Alex Cortes is pretty heartless. He dehumanized Danielle Coziahr the minute he saw the baby in her arms. He was a good soldier for people who don't give a hoot about the law or the wellbeing of employees of CVESD--unless, of course, they have a political motivation to do so.

Thank you to those who informed me that it's Alex Cortes, not Alex Cortez. I've corrected my earlier mistakes.

My day in court

Remember the joke about the principal who never bothered to observe the teacher in the classroom? Wait--that wasn't a joke, that was my life. It describes most principals I've known.

It seems that Danielle Coziahr's second principal was typical in this respect. What sets him apart is his attitude toward women with babies. He seems to have erected a glass ceiling above Coziahr the first time he met her, when she had her baby in one arm and her other arm extended to shake Alex Cortes' hand. He stepped back and observed her with disdain before finally shaking her extended hand.

As I listened to Danielle's testimony today, I was embarrassed for Assistant Superintendent Tom Cruz, sitting there in the courtroom with his Parham & Rajcic attorney, Pamela Dempsey. I feel that Mr. Cruz is basically a decent guy, with one weakness; he carries water for the wrong people. [NOTE: I WAS FORCED TO REVISE MY OPINION OF MR. CRUZ AS I LISTENED TO LATER TESTIMONY IN THIS CASE. I THINK HE IS A LEADER, NOT JUST A FOLLOWER, REGARDING DISTRICT WRONGDOING. OF COURSE, LEADERS WOULD HAVE NO POWER IF IT WEREN'T FOR ALL THEIR WILLING FOLLOWERS, SO PERHAPS FOLLOWERS ARE JUST AS RESPONSIBLE FOR WRONGDOING AS ARE THOSE WHO GIVE THE ORDERS.]

I hope that CTA is paying Coziahr's lawyers. They certainly ought to.

Tomorrow Alex Cortes tells his side of the story. That should be interesting.