Board Member Bought by Billionaires
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I’m Danielle Ford, former school board trustee of CCSD, the 5th largest district in the nation, which includes fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada
This episode contains: the questionable change to board governance a certain Trustee tried to sneak though for approval at a board meeting, I’ll take you through that meeting play by play. Then you’ll learn about that board member’s employment and candidate background. The names of the donors who funded their electron are sure to shock you and leave you with the same questions I had.
You’ll hear about the unethical, and possibly illegal, changes that were done to take away the board’s power, the ethics complaint I filed about it, and I’ll bring you up to speed on the current threat to the Clark County school board and taxpayers, and how you can get involved with fighting back.
We’re really pulling threads and connecting dots here friends, so prepare yourself accordingly.
First for everyone who is following these episodes, who is interested in learning about what’s happening in Clark County and why the school board doesn’t have any power… I have a personal ask of you. Like I’m literally begging you to do this.. please please please pay as much attention as possible to the parts in this episode and the upcoming ones that are about policies and governance.
I know that it can be super boring. There’s a lot of details to sort through and it can be exhausting to try to understand but if you’re someone who didn’t just find this episode by chance, like if you are actively with me on this ride, I need you to do the best you can to become an expert in the history of the Clark county school board’s governance over the last few years. Like I want you to be able to clearly explain it to someone else, and I will do as many episodes or webinars or whatever is needed to get you there.
I know that most of you are ready for the tea, and I promise there is so much to come. I’ll be spilling everything about Jara: his firing and controversial re-hiring, the half a million in annual raises he gave out amongst a dozen of his cabinet members as a bribe, the secret bill jara slipped to the governor to try to take the savings accounts from all school savings acounts and put it in CCSD’s general budget, the important legislative emails which Jara forwarded to the trustees as an FYI but not before he deleted the financial parts he didn’t want us to know about. The time Jara left the office hours early to avoid being served notice of a meeting about his termination, so I had to have him served at his home.
And the board drama that nobody really knows about like: like the deal between Jara and a trustee in which he would punish a teacher that she had beef with in exchange for her vote to renew his contract and give him a raise.
Oh- how our board attorney was removed by her boss, Steve Wolfson the Clark County district attorney, after she was caught on live television high-fiving a a board during a board meeting. The high five was a celebration of chaos erupting when another board member turned her mic on to call another board member a mean name and have it be on the record.
I’ll explain the backstory of why that board member called the other board member a mean name.
But in my defense, she absolutely IS a Phony Baloney!
Alright 5 points if you can guess which board member I called a phoney baloney. Shout the name as loud as you can within the next 5 seconds. Shout it from the rooftops unravelers! and then let me know if you got it right in the youtube comments.
Sorry most of you but it was not Lola Brooks. Although I’m sure her ears are ringing from everyone shouting her name at the same time.
The phony baloney is Evelyn Garcia-Morales. Remember that name because you’ll be hearing it a lot in the future.
So I told you I have lots of tea for you…but that tea will be so much sweeter if you have a full understanding of what happened with the board’s governance. Pleaseeee try to understand it. Ask as many clarifying questions as you need. Alright that is my desperate plea to you.
Now I have another request, just a simple ask- not a desperate plea. And that is if you would like to help support the show you can do so by visiting UnravelingEducation.com/sponsor and making a donation. The show runs on the generosity of viewers and listeners like you. It all helps and is greatly appreciated!
In the last episode we talked about the school boards getting training at Harvard, through a program organized by the Council of Great City Schools.
As you probably recall I was excited for the opportunity to talk to board members in other states, who ended up telling me they heard about our board and that we have no control, the superintendent has it all.
Most of the sessions were great but pieces of the curriculum felt a little brainwashy.
I spent time during social events asking .
Board President Lola Brooks was lingering near me as often as she can and was overhearing what these other board members were telling me.
Jara had a group of friends of superintendents who he knew very well.
There was a mysterious stranger by Jara’s side the whole time. He wasn’t a trustee or a superintendent, and he’s wasn’t on the list of attendees.
A disturbing agenda item was added by Lola Brooks to the upcoming board meeting. I asked Vice President Linda Cavazos about it. She wasn’t pleased either and was going to look into it.
Now we’re all caught up, let’s take a look at that agenda item, shall we?
The item is for the CCSD board of Trustees to switch to “Silverstate Governance”, a brand new model of board governance. There’s no reference material included. Not even a description of what’s being asked. Just an action item for the board to vote to adopt it and be under whatever rules are included in the model. The board hadn’t discussed for even a minute the possibility of changing our governance model from Balanced Governance to anything else.
I had never heard of it so I do a google search, and only 1 thing pops up… I take a video of what I was seeing.
“ok it is July 29th. We just got the draft agenda for the August 8th meeting. We got 4.01 Silverstate Governnace. Never seen this before. Discussion and possible action regarding professional developmental activities from Silverstate Governance. Never heard of them. For members of Cllark County school district board of trustees, is recommended. Lola Brooks is the contact person.
Ok so I thought “Let’s look up this company. Who knows what it even is.” Ok Silverstate governance. Not too impressed with the website. This is a basic WordPress template. You can tell right there. Kinda crappy for what it is. Looks like they have board training, candidate training, additional training, ok. Board training doesn’t really say anything: development, open meeting law, yada yada. Ok let me go check out “Courses” here. Let’s see what kind of courses they have. Oh there’s 1 course. Mandatory training for school board trustees.
Wait- who is this educator and governance expert? Lola Brooks Ok. So let me click on that. Let’s look at this course catalog. Let’s ee. Ok it looks like it’s under construction. The lessons will provide mandatory training. Ok. Course instructor, Lola Brooks. It’s free, oh that’s good. There’s no lessons here now but apparently this instructor wants to add all of these lessons herself and have the school board vote to take this course that was created by Lola Brooks. So hmm this’ll be an interesting meeting.”
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here.
First of all Lola is not an educator, or an expert in governance, or a web designer. So what the hell is she even doing?
Next, for something like this: the changing of our entire governance model and all policies, the full board should have had many conversations in public work sessions where the community could weigh in. That’s a big deal.
At a bare minimum it should have been discussed at a public officers meeting with the board president, vice president and clerk. But no, Lola just took it upon herself to throw changing our entire governance model on the agenda. Like, the audacity, ammiright?
Also why does she care about this? Where did this come from? Does she know something we don’t know?
The meeting’s around the corner and the item is still on the agenda, but Linda was able to convince Lola to change it to information only so we couldn’t approve it like Lola had planned.
Lola hears that I saw her crappy website and that I’m not happy about it. She opens the item with a strange, and weak explanation, and then conversation between the board and superintendent ensues. Let’s watch this meeting together and break it down play by play ok…
Agenda item: Silverstate Governance. So I was recently asked by people how we came to have Balanced Governance. So I started researching how we shifted to Balanced Governance and we actually had a lawsuit in 1996 from the administrator’s union who sued the board for micromanaging the superintendent and overstepping their bounds and operating outside of their governance policies. So that led to the shift to Policy Governance. Couple years ago we shifted to balanced governance. And probably about a year and a half ago I was approached by then-state superintendent Steve Cannavero to talk about a pilot project for Silverstate Governance. And the goal was to create a cohesive governance policy that all school boards operate under. About a month before Dr. Jara came on we had barely started doing Balanced Governance so I said that we were gonna opt out and I wasn’t gonna bring it forward as an item because we had a new superintendent and we were gonna work through this. I also at that time launched an online training site and pitched it to NASB to provide some additional training options for board members, totally unrelated. Most recently, I’ve noticed there was some dissatisfaction from the board about our governance so I decided maybe you would be interested in doing this pilot. It would be a 2-day training and one of the benefits is it’s not just training for us but it provides training for candidates so they’re better prepared to enter into seats. And also training for the community so they understand what the role is for board members.
Ok- so a year and a half before this meeting was Lola’s first month on the school board. She was in her self-described “6 months of not talking during board meetings” so that she could learn the role. So, she wasn’t confident in herself enough to engage in public dialogue and do the job she was elected to do, but she was confident enough to meet with state leaders and push their agendas through without question, days after swearing in. Ok.
Now, Steve Cannevaro. He was the Nevada superintendent of education. That position is appointed by the governor. The governor who appointed him was Brian Sandoval. When I joined the board, there was a new governor, Steve Sisolak, who had appointed a new state superintendent, Jhone Ebert. So I have no experience with the other 2. But Lola certainly does.
Having a State Board of Education and a state superintendent of education is necessary for uniformity of amongst school districts. But if you watched or listened to the History of School Boards episode, then you know the reason for locally elected school boards in each district is to keep the schools governed by their communities and not the state. The founding fathers’ intent was to protect public education from the state’s revolving leaders, their political ideologies, and centralization efforts.
So I was in those initial conversations with Steve Canaverro as board president at the time, and he came to us. So a couple initial thoughts to give everybody a moment to digest. How would this affect the Superintendent’s contract, because his contract is for Balanced Governance? We just started his 2nd year which will start the evaluation process. Would we start over? How would that work? And I’m a little concerned about jumping to a new thing when we haven’t fully implemented or embraced or followed the Balanced Governance as we were trained.
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You know, there has been some dissatisfaction expressed from other board members and if we haven’t implemented it to fidelity now’s a good time to try something else if we don’t think it’s working.
What.. we had concerns with the council of great city schools being involved in our governance policies, and the changes that gave our power to Jara. How exactly is this going to help?
I think.. and I do have the book. The book by Thomas Alsbury and Phil Gore.
Hold on- there’s a book?? Nobody gave me a book or told me there was a book or any curriculum. For 8 months any complaint I had Lola would go “it’s balanced governance. That’s what it is. Blame Balanced Governance. I had to buy the book myself.
We were dissatisfied with the fact that the focus was really on the superintendent to govern more than the trustees. It was not balanced. That’s why it took us 2 years to go through the whole structure of Balanced Governance. But then everything fell off the table I would say about the last year. I would be very concerned about jumping to another governance structure when there could be a way this could be improved. Things just kinda got side swayed here. I don’t know anything about Silverstate Governance. Who are the trainers? And what are their credentials? And how are they trained? I would have some concerns about their credibility. I think we need to step back a minute, catch our breath, review what it is that we like or don’t like about our current governance structure, and let’s do some analysis on this one to see what it may offer that it doesn’t offer.
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Thank you Dr. Young so just a little background. The person doing the training used to be the Deputy State Education Commissioner in Texas. He also implements this training in Texas which has a similar model so when we went to Harvard recently and they talked about the different governance models, some of those states were actually under this model and it’s a state-wide model that every board follows.
What is happening in Texas that’s so great that we should do the same thing? Where’s the logic? Where’s the data? Where’s any information at all?
Trustee Ford and then Trustee Cepeda
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Thank you Trustee Brooks for that timeline. That was interesting. There were some things in there I wasn’t aware of. I’d like to share a shorter timeline than that. Since I’ve been on the board, which was January, Immediately there was a decision made by Dr. Jara that I felt shouldn’t have been made without board approval. I made that clear in one of the meetings and I think that probably spurred some of the conversations around our governance training that we’re having right now. In April we had a full day retreat, the board, with the executive director of the Council of Great City Schools. In June there was an operational decision that a lot of people felt like the trustees should have had more power around. In July, 5 board members and Jara attended a 4 day long very intense executive training around governance and operations. I met with lots of other board members, superintendents and quite frankly, they were shocked. In fact they said “you’ve policied yourselves into a box”. That was last week. I have a lot of notes about ways that we can modify our policies. Immediately when we got back, I noticed this Silverstate Governance that I had never heard about pop up. When questioning it I found out that the person doing it is in the same association, the Council of Great City Schools, they’re part of it. So I feel like it’s a conflict of interest to have the same association that represents superintendents, that mentors Jara, also having their hand in our governance policies. I do not think we should be working with anyone except experts on Nevada Law and I don’t think we should be the guinea pig for a new governance program. So it’s a no from me.
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Thank you. Just to clarify, this work is actually being done by the Guinn Center and the’re bringing him in. So we didn’t pick him, that was their choice and he was involved in this prior to having anything whatsoever to do with the Council of Great City Schools.
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Is he currently with the Council of Great City Schools?
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Say that again.
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Is he currently involved with the Council?
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He just recently accepted a position with them but he was not prior and they would allow him to do this as a favor because it’s not part of his job.
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Ok well I definitely think that’s a conflict of interest regardless of how it happened.
FYI: The Guinn Center- is where most of the data about education in Nevada comes from. They produce reports that are used to make policy decisions statewide. And tada! Big reveal! The “him” Lola is referring to is the mysterious stranger. His name is AJ Crabill.
And I think that we should be utilizing NASB since we’re a part of the association.
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I’m actually involved in the re-writing of their bylaws right now, and there is no cohesive governance model in the state so there’s no way they could provide you this type of training because everyone is under a different governance model.
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Ok well when I googled Silverstate governance, when I first saw it on the agenda, it was a plain, just popped up, really bad wordpress site. It consisted of a theme and one course that was empty that said “Educator: Lola Brooks”. So that was already sketchy. I think we have other options than that. Of all the options for a school board, that controls the 5th largest district in the nation and a $2.5 billion dollar budget, I don’t think bringing in some random person not familiar with Nevada law, or us, on a shady wordpress site is really the best option. So I’m not sure what the other options are, I asked you that at the last meeting. I also learned from other school board members across the nation that there are specific consultants that come and do that and that are a true 3rd party, and work through modifying the policies and training us, and I got some numbers. I’d like to make a motion to table this decision until we’ve come up with more options.
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Lola- Just to clarify, the website that you saw was a test website that I showed to NASB. If you would like to call Senb Oliver about that. I actually took it down because somebody told me you were confused about it. I didn’t want to confuse you further.
Hold on… let’s get an instant replay of Jara’s face just then. Let’s slow it down. Um somebody please caption this ok? and if you’re listening on an audio platform, watching the YouTube video for this piece only is worth it.
That’s the reason that site existed which is why I told you about that when I went through that whole historical information. I just want to clarify also that Guinn Center is 3rd party and they are not affiliated with the school district. I’m not tied to this idea. If you guys don’t want to do it, that’s perfectly fine. If you just want to follow the policies we’ve already adopted, that’s fine too. So I wouldn’t entertain a vote until everyone has had a chance to speak. Superintendent Jara.
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Dr. Casserly is not my mentor. Dr Casserly is the Executive Director of the Council for Great City Schools.
Whoa whoa whoa… Lie detector says that is a lie. Jara literally told me that in those exact words. “Mike Casserly is my mentor”. Remember Jara’s notebook I told you about in the Diary of a New Trustee episode. But Jara has proven himself 1000 times to be a big fat liar so…
I guess I have a couple thoughts about things that just kind of went down. I do agree that Guinn Center is a 3rd party. I’m thankful for their thoughtfulness and really bi-partisan type of thoughtfulness that goes into their work. So could we as individuals get this training, just to see, just to get some perspective?
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This is just an option that was brought to us and that is at no cost and that the state might transition to already. So we might wind up accepting a different model, adopting it, implementing it, and then having to shift to this anyway because the state shifts to it.
Ok stop.. so Lola clearly has intel that no one else has… why?
And then my last piece was, yes we were at Harvard. We got to meet with a bunch of different school boards. I didn’t hear the piece where we’re boxing ourselves in.
No shit, Cepeda. You were not there.
If anything I heard that there might be some differences in… well I don’t want to say differences, I want to say power struggles between board and superintendent and that happens everywhere.
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Thank you Trustee Cepeda. Trustee Garvey.
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I had a little concern too because of the website being up and then all of a sudden it’s taken down.
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That was just to minimize confusion.
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It seemed too that your involvement was huge. And you did say that it has been going on, the conversation, and that some of the work you’ve been doing for a while.
Yasss Garvey!
Ok just side note: Trustee Garvey used to be a force. She was a bad ass on the board for about 10 years. I don’t know what happened but around this time she kind of stopped caring, I think. I think she was just burnt out, but if Garvey had brought the fire she brought in the past to the last 2 years on the board, we really wouldn’t be in this situation.
Let me just clarify, I went to one training session with Steve Canberra and that was it. And then when I went to meet the new executive director for NASB, I was trying to tell them how they could to a learning management system to kind of supplement the training through NASB, so I used that as just a generic filler and that was the extent of it. I showed them the demo of this website where you could actually take online classes.
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That was not a demo website. That was a basic wordpress template. There was nothing to show. Drawing it on a piece of paper would’ve looked more professional. Also the new exec director Lola was referring to was Debb Oliver.
How is that demo website connected to the Nevada Department of Education and the Guinn Center? Are they aware of it?
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No. It’s not related to them whatsoever. It’s not even on that domain name either. It’s on a, on a, it’s on like a umm, a domain that I put test sites on. It’s not on a domain related to them.
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There are some cautions that come into my mind when I have the Department of Education and the Guinn Center wanting to train not only existing boards but candidates, especially considering the make-up and the leadership of the State Board of Education and some of that activity in the past.
Trustee Garvey is referring to the fact that the Nevada State Board of Education was changed and is now majorily appointed by the governor and the governors appointed state superintendent.
I also feel like we have not, because of different circumstances, implemented the balanced governance and had time to actually do that work. Hopefully now that things are calming down and we have a plan and are moving forward with that, that can be done. I am not in any way supportive of starting the clock again and going into the same cycle of having a superintendent with no evaluation for years and years.
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Thank you. Just to clarify, they actually already have an evaluation model that’s set up. So they could do that right out the gate. It wouldn’t delay that.
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You mentioned that at this point it’s not that they’re going to make everyone do this. Are you saying that there have been conversations that the State Board of Education is going to mandate that all school districts in the State of Nevada take their governance training?
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I’m not involved in any of those conversations. I know how this works in Texas, it’s statewide implemented and it’s mandatory. So I am not involved in any conversations other than knowing that they’re offering this and how it’s set up in other states.
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I think there are some good things here. Some concerns are having to do with, and I was actually able at the institute that we just went to, to meet the gentleman that was selected to be the trainer. However online I could not really find that much information unless I looked under Lonestar Governance, is that correct? But I think that I also heard you were trying to be proactive. Kind of the same question Trustee Garvey has. Does that mean they are going to mandate this governance like it is in Texas?
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I don’t have any knowledge of that. I know how it’s implemented in another state so if it were to be implemented it would be more problematic in my mind to go through this exercise of having to find another governance model and then coming back and having to do this. It’s just a hunch.
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So we have no information on a timeline on whether the Guinn Center and the state Department of Education are actually going to be doing this? And if they do, what’s the timeline?
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If you guys wanted to continue this and have conversation then I would actually invite the Guinn Center to come in and answer some of these questions because they’re presenting this option. I don’t represent them and I’m not an expert in this. I’m just trying to gauge your interest to see whether or not you would like me to bring them to have a conversation.
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I don’t like the idea of rushing into something else completely new. I have some reservations about that and I’ll stop there.
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You did say, just as a review, that this training would be at no cost. I think the State Department is going to pick this up?
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I just know it’s at no cost. I don’t know how the financials work.
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Could the state at some point require us to move to this like they did in… I know you don’t have the answer, I just want to put it out there since that was one of my questions. I know we’re all thinking that since they’re looking at Texas for a model. So we’re all thinking that in the back of our heads. Is there more information we can get on this? Is there a book, a website, pamphlets?
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I just have this one-pager and I had them write this up because I don’t know that there’s more information. It’s kind of being developed.
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But if the state of Texas is doing it, there’s gotta be something that they’ve done, they’ve developed. They’re training people.
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I’m gonna have Superintendent Jara answer.
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In Texas, it’s called the Texas State Lonestar Training. So basically from my conversations with the state superintendent, they’re just trying to name it Silverstate for the state of Nevada.
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Got it. It sounds like the board would like to get more training in Balanced Governance before we talk about more training.
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My concern with more training is that I don’t know that it’s not going to do any good if there are things in our policy that people fundamentally disagree with then it’s very hard to train them if they don’t have the will to be trained and to operate in that manner. I don’t know how much additional training will do.
Oh there’s Jara’s face again. He once told me he plays poker. I’m guessing not well.
I think at this point that we have a policy and what we need to do is implement it and we need to follow it and we need to be responsible for knowing our governance and actually carrying out the policy, instead of looking for the newest toy down the road. We need to utilize the policy we have. That doesn’t mean that we can’t tweak it, we can’t work on it, we can’t get together and discuss what we think would improve it.
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I think we’re all capable of doing our own training. We just came back from the ABC Institute. They did a wonderful job. They had lots of good information. We had our living group. We probably could teach a lot of this ourselves. I don’t think we need to bring anybody, we just need to look at our information, have a discussion, and implement. Were very bright, capable ladies up here. We have trained out. Now we need to just come to a consensus. Remember my 5 C’s, I won’t go over them. But we need to just get together, collaborate, get our consensus and move on. I mean it’s enough of this. Let’s just decide what we need to do and gain consensus, collaborate, and move on. I think we’re done quite frankly. We’re all tapped out here. Implementation time.
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Ok so I hear you loud and clear. You’re not interested in pursuing it. I will pass that message along.
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There’s a difference between what NASB Nevada can do for you vs what Washington DC chief legal counsel can do in terms of training. As a lawyer I’ll just tell you right now that the case that we worked on, Lopez vs Schwartz allows for taxpayer standing. What that means is that anybody here who pays taxes can sue the board at any time for breach of your fiduciary duty. Now don’t you think you might want to know what your fiduciary duties are and what a breach might be, as you continue to do your work, your public work, when you know that anybody here can say, “Hey, you messed up doing your fiduciary duty. You should’ve done it better.” Having training in fiduciary duties is absolutely essential. I strongly recommend it as a law professor, as someone who is part of advocacy groups trying to make the state better. And I’ll just end by saying I am an advocate of elected boards of trustees because you are smart enough to get the right kind of training and it is your governance by an elected body, that makes the school district better. But it doesn’t work if you don’t understand shared governance, and you don’t understand what your fiduciary duties are. Thank you very much.
In summary:
The other trustees were just as perplexed by this and found it ridiculous that Lola brought this forward with zero details or any prior discussion. Every single member expressed their opposition.
The consensus was our governance isn’t perfect but we never really did Balanced Governance correctly so let’s work on improving it instead of starting over.
This conversation is important for a few reasons.
- None of the board members wanted this but it was the 3 who had been on the board for almost 11 years telling Lola “no” that made her back off with her tail between her legs. When these 3 members were termed out about a year later, Lola got complete control, stopped asking for permission for anything, and became an absolute monster, especially in the closed sessions that the public doesn’t see
- I wanted to show that the board had been told by a law professor this long ago that if the board of trustees is not executing their fiduciary duties, that tax payers could sue them. Lola Brooks chose to ignore anything she didn’t like to hear and took many extreme, unethical, and most-likely illegal actions over the next few years. It gets so much worse. In full transparency: I have a lot of reasons for wanting everyone to understand what happened with the governance stuff, and one of those reasons is that a class action lawsuit on behalf of Clark County tax payers may be in Lola Brooks’ future
This meeting spurred many questions for me and provided me a list of people to look into, starting with Lola Brooks herself.
So I spent some time researching her…
Here are the relevant facts that I know about Lola Brooks leading up to this point in 2019.
-She had a rough upbringing. That’s public knowledge, there’s some articles about it. She dropped out of high school, wanted to prove herself, went to college for psychology and social work.
-She had been working for United Way, was a Bernie Sanders supporter and proud socialist, when she signed up to run
My belief is that Lola’s decision to run for the school board was her own and that she had good intentions.
-The incumbent who Lola sought to replace was Patrice Tew. She was controversial because she was extremely conservative, very religious LDS, and anti-sex ed, and what not.
-Lola Brooks makes it through the primary election using mostly online marketing. Lola’s not terrible at tech, but not great either. She’s good with a spreadsheets and some basic social media but that’s basically it. She identifies as like a tech wizard, though.
So because Lola used social media at all in 2016 when it was still new for elections, she gained this public image of being like the young, tech savvy, innovative, progressive candidate, running against the super religious, conservative incumbant. It was easy for political groups and voters to choose a side.
-Carolyn Edwards, the trustee whom I replaced 2 years later, throws her support to Lola and begins making the rounds and introducing her to people.
-Lola then gets offered a job at a for-profit charter school making more than double what she was making at United Way. The charter school is Beacon Academy. It’s a virtual school for high schoolers who are at risk of not graduating. They leave CCSD to enroll there and the amount of money the state allocates per student gets taken from the public school and given to that virtual school which does not have to pay for things like busses, cafeterias, football fields, security guards, or any of the things that schools have.
I mean- I completely support having flexible alternate options for students. Like more of that please, but I bet CCSD could create something similar which would improve CCSD’s funding and number of graduates, if they wanted to.
The fact of the matter is that Lola’s bosses, and Lola, benefit financially when CCSD students fail. Lola has a vested interest in high schoolers not graduating from the school district that she’s a trustee of.
-Next Lola Brooks receives large campaign donations from billionaires for the general election. Thousands of dollars from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire tech investor and founder of Linked In, as well as thousands from his wife Michelle Yee, and thousands from Sheryl Sandburg, former COO of Facebook. All 3 of these donors are investors in Rocketship Education, a national network of virtual charter schools.
-Lola also receives endorsements, marketing, and people power from Carolyn’s connections.
-Lola wins the general election and swears in.
-Teachers and parents seem to like her. She was basically the sweetheart of the board for a couple years, by far the youngest board member.
-Behind closed doors Lola is meeting with then-state superintendent Steve Cannavaro and members of the Nevada State Board. She’s tasked with getting the board to approve a new governance model in the future.
-She proudly doesn’t say a word for 6 months on the board, except to support everything Carolyn says and does, including voting for Jesus Jara to be superintendent 2018.
-It’s election season again. Irene Cepeda and myself win our elections and join the board. Lola is no longer the youngest or the techiest member of the board.
-Carolyn continues advising Lola, and according to several of my sources, she still is.
-Lola gets voted president, despite only being on the board 2 years.
-She shoots her shot at getting revenge on Dr Linda Young. I mess that up for her by using an explicative and cutting that item short.
-Lola’s being heavily advised by her mentors and supporters. She begins giving the board’s power to superintendent Jara and doing everything she can to silence the trustees.
Meanwhile, I don’t really know why she’s doing these things but I know it’s bad, and I’m battling her non-stop.
Which brings us to where we are in the story. Late 2019.
I start to google the names in Lolas’s campaign reports. I learn that there is a network of business titans who have investments in charter school chains, national student testing companies, new teacher recruitment organizations, software and data companies, and much more. They’re making money both by operating charter schools in which they can pocket 15% of the per pupil funding per student, and also make interest on their investments and write it all off on their taxes.
Then they turn around sell their products and services to superintendents of the same public school districts that their charter schools are taking students and money from.
These billionaires donate to school board candidates whom will support their business agendas. They usually don’t even know who the candidate is. Lola responded to someone on social media at one point that she doesn’t personally know those donors. But they don’t need a relationship with the school board member who’s win they funded, as long as they have the ear of someone else who advises that board member.
I told you all this is a gigantic tangled web and I meant it. We’re going to really unravel the charter school stuff and the billionaire donors in upcoming episodes. I will be bringing researchers on as guests so if you have any questions specific to those 2 topics, you can leave the question in the YouTube comments or send an email through the website at UnravelingEducation.com and let me know what questions I should ask.
Regarding the charter school stuff… I personally have some mixed opinions but I’m talking facts right now. There are all different types of charter schools. Some have beautiful safe building with caring staff and some operate out of shopping malls. Some charters do great work, and some are failing. Some are progressive and inclusive, while others happily discriminate.
Bottom line is charter schools are unregulated and unaccountable to tax payers even though they take tax payer money. They take funding and resources away from public schools. This only helps the massive agenda to turn all failing public schools into charter schools and keep making the rich people richer.
Remember in Diary of a New School Board Trustee when I told you that it was obvious that Lola had it out for Dr Young. And I didn’t know the details but I said this is clearly a dick measuring contest?
The very respectable and accomplished Dr Linda Young who was a teacher and principal, is a fierce social justice advocate, and has been a trustee for 11 years. Lola Brooks who has no experience in education and in her 1st term was trying to get the board to approve policy changes Lola wrote that would limit Dr Young’s role in committees.
Well, I learned that at Lola’s very first board meeting, Dr Young turned on her mic and announced that she wants the record to reflect that Lola Brooks is employed by a charter school and it is a conflict of interest for her to be a sitting trustee for a public school district.
So that cleared up for me why Lola had a vendetta against her. I could see Lola taking that very personally and harboring resentment for years while she planned her revenge. By the way, Dr Linda Young was correct about that.
Regardless of opinions about charter schools, they take public funds but operate privately and without public accountability. Charter schools and public schools have separate school boards for a reason.
So… I’m trying to tell this story as linearly as possible but I’m going to hop a little through the next few years to bring you up to speed with what the current governance of the Clark County School board is…
As I learned more and more about governance, I decided my only goal was going to be to not let the model that Jara and Lola wanted to get approved, even if our current governance policies weren’t great. I knew that if this model got approved it would take away any remaining traces of power we had left. I was hoping that eventually, we’d be able to flip the board and be in that majority vote to make substantial changes, but until then I’d try my best to hold it down.
I set up google alerts for lots of people and organizations of interest.
The person lighting up my notifications the most by far was AJ Crabill/Lonestar Governance/Silverstate governance/Student Outcomes Focused Governance/that dumbass quote. …we’ll go into that later.
I’ve been watching his activity in several states and I was monitoring Lola Brooks too but most of the alerts were about another Lola Brooks who is a fine jewelry artist. It’s been years now that I’ve followed her career, through write-ups about her shows and exhibits, and all the interviews she’s done, new items in her store. From afar I’ve watched this woman flourish and grow as a designer and I am just so damn proud of her.
Now back to our Lola Brooks… her activity was around working with AJ and becoming a mentor to newly elected unsuspecting trustees of other Nevada school districts. So these 2 have basically been besties this whole time but act in public like they’re not communicating non-stop.
What I’m about to share with you I will go into details about in a future episode. It took me months to get public emails from CCSD and figure out how all of this went down, but here is the gist…
The board that you’re familiar with up until this point, which included the 3 trustees with over a decade of experience and who were comfortable telling Lola no to things, struggled to modify the governance policies.
It would be literally hours of debating 1 paragraph, and it was mostly Lola who would argue, gaslight, and stall. We ended up hiring the creator and trainer of balanced governance in 2020.
The story of how we got him to work with us is actually kind of funny and I don’t think anyone even knows it but me. It has to do with me trying to figure out the superintendent’s evaluation process and that’s a whole other episode, so I’ll save the story for that.
So late 2020 the board was working together surprisingly cohesively to bring our policies back to balanced in a way that gave the board it’s authority back and set protocols for superintendent accountability. We finished that work in December 2020.
The long-standing trustees, Young, Garvey and Wright, were happy to know they were setting the new board up for success as they were terming out. I was even excited and hopeful in our ability to govern for the first time in 2 years. 3 brand new trustees, Lisa Guzman, Katie Williams, and Evelyn Garcia-Morales were about to join the board and our new policies were set to be approved early in 2021 after they swore in.
My excitement and hope was short-lived though because I discovered in January that the policies were now very different than what we’d finalized in December.
I had no idea what happened. Lola refused to answer any of my questions. I even put the policies we finished and the new policies side by site and into a presentation during a work session. Nobody would answer me and most of the board members and our attorney treated me like I was crazy.
I was very upset about this. I obviously knew Lola was responsible, because Lola, but I didn’t know how. I requested all the emails related to our governance. CCSD/Jara sent me the wrong information, then incomplete information, then the emails without any attachments.
By the time I received everything months had passed and they finally delivered them to me in the most unorganized possible way, along with 1000 other pages of emails that I did not request, but obviously still read through.
It was enlightening to see some of these conversations. Here’s one of my favorites from Trustee Deanna Wright to our trainer in regards to me speaking about Jara’s leadership during covid
Trust that we will go through the emails later because it’s important to see exactly how they were able to get away with this, but I’ll try to explain in a nutshell..
Lola spent her winter break of 2020 editing those balanced governance policies that the board worked on for months and that cost the taxpayers a ton of money to produce.
She re-wrote them and organized the verbiage in a way that a person who wasn’t looking closely would never have noticed. The differences were extreme.
About 90% of the language was edited.
She was smart about it, I’ll give her that. She ended up saying that she didn’t edit anything, she just copied and pasted it into the standard governance template with the board’s letter head and formatting.
But when comparing the old versions, the new december versions, and lolas versions next to each other, you can see exactly what she did.
Lola resurrected parts from the policies we were trying to change for years that didn’t make the cut into the new policies, into her version. She copied some of the new december version and then edited it how she saw fit and put it in the Lola version.
And she just completely left out chunks of the december version that she didn’t like. And she made sure to start and end the paragraphs the same so when skimming it looks right. And she made sure that they were roughly the same amount of characters as the new december ones, the ones that tax payers paid for, so that it appears to include the same information, just in a different layout, font and color.
For instance the board meeting procedure policies we were supposed to approve included things like “trustee action items” and “trustee discussion items”, which are at the core of a board doing its job. In her version all it says is “business items” which is left up to the superintendent to determine.
Because she did this, the board does not have any allotted time for the trustees to request or discuss anything. We did before this. It wasn’t perfect, but there was time allotted for the trustees to speak.
She even changed the superintendent evaluation method. Are you ready for this… are you sitting down… She completely removed the mid-year evaluation, and even edited the little infographic about it. And that’s why Jara hasn’t had a mid-year evaluation since 2020.
Now Lola is tricky, but she’s not this good at being tricky. I’m certain she had a lot of help. It’s actually pretty impressive. I don’t know for sure who helped her, but the new Lola policies sure do resemble Silverstate Governnance, also known as Student Outcomes Focused Governance.
Lola then emailed her new versions in on New Years Eve, minutes before the outgoing trustees’ terms expired and they were no longer looped in.
Additionally, she had served as president for 2 years and knew she wouldn’t be elected president again, so when these changes she made came to the board it would have the new presidents name, which ended up being Linda Cavazos, making it appear to the public as though Linda brought these forward.
Pro tip: Do not try to get something like this past a person with ADHD. We pick up on patterns and spot differences without trying. Additionally, we are relentless. It will not end well for you.
When I finally sorted the 1800 pages of emails and figured out what Lola did, I stepped off the dais during a meeting in which the new policies were being discussed and gave public comment asking the board to review my evidence before moving forward in anyway. The majority chose to ignore me completely and move on. Obviously I knew they would do that.
I refused to be involved so I waited in the back until final public comment in which I spoke again, telling the board that because they refused to even look at my evidence and hold Brooks accountable I was going to pass my evidence to the Nevada ethics commission. I passed out copies of my complaint and evidence to the board members and members of the audience.
I was already in communication with the ethics director for a few months regarding an ethics complaint I had filed against Superintendent Jara for meddling in school board elections. Obviously that will be covered in an upcoming episode.
So I called him with a heads up about this one. I told him that I had publicized a complaint clearly marked as a draft, knowing that once it’s officially filed I can’t legally speak about it. I learned that the hard way when I filed against Jara.
Here’s what my ethics complaint said based on the evidence I found in my public records request:
“I allege Trustee Lola Brooks violated NRS Chapter 281A in several ways abusing her position as President of the Clark County School Board including;
– Altering board policies, thus creating policies that favor her needs, the needs of the current superintendent Jesus Jara, and/or co-conspirators outside of CCSD.
– Being dishonest, and lying to other board members to further her goals and/or goals of co-conspirators.
– Use of strong-arm or intimidation tactics.
– Development of schemes to circumvent procedure. Abusing the role of board president to direct staff members independently without the approval of the full board.
– Purposely stalling the creation and adoption of policies, thus appearing dysfunctional to ensure an imbalance of power exists, and preventing the board of Trustees from providing proper oversight.
From my investigation, I believe there is enough evidence to support that Trustee Brooks violated several sections of NRS 281A.
There is also more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that Trustee Brooks is engaging in willful blindness to advance a scheme to appease the superintendent. Doing so insures Trustee Brooks security at her current position as a Data Analyst at a private, for-profit charter school. These actions keep her in good-standing with many groups who are in competition with the Clark County School District, at the expense of the taxpayer.
Another theory I have come to believe is that Trustee Brooks does not want the board to succeed with Balanced Governance, because she has been recruited to help bring Silverstate Governance into Nevada. The persons involved with Silverstate Governance, and those that would benefit from the board approving Silverstate governance are the same groups that she is affiliated with.
The same individuals are connected nationally to the superintendent training program Chiefs for Change and the superintendent search firm, Ray and associates, which places superintendents in large districts. This is the same service that introduced CCSD to Jesus Jara. They are the same people connected to donors that buy out school board elections, and are affiliated to names shown in Lola Brooks’ campaign finance reports. These organizations have been engaging in the business of privatizing school districts and steering contracts.”
After officially filing my complaint, I ask the ethics commission director: “If this is true, if what I’m saying is proven true, like, that’s really bad right?” He tells me he can’t give legal advice but yes, if the ethics panel determines there was wrongdoing, that would be something worth pursuing legally.
He calls me a couple weeks later and tells me my ethics complaint passed jurisdiction meaning the panel felt it was worthy of an investigation. He tells me I’ll by contacted by an investigator to go over everything and direct them to some witnesses. I’m like YES Lola might go down for this. She might have to answer for this. And if she does, it could bring the whole web down with her.
I never received that call. Instead I received notice via email that my complaint was dropped because of insufficient evidence, despite my thorough explanation and the 1800 pages of documents I submitted.
Included in that email was a 40 page response by Lola, in which she deflected the entire issue and instead submitted screenshots of my criticisms of her and Jara on social media. And it is as hilarious as it is infuriating. I’m going to show you the entire thing in an upcoming episode. It is so damn funny, and infuriating.
Like I provided actual documentation and asked for an explanation for Lola sending in her own versions on New Years Eve? and then Lola responded with everything besides an explanation. One of them, top of my head is like “Trustee Ford’s behavior and unwillingness to cooperate speaks for itself. Here’s evidence of her refusing to work with the board and instead leaving the meeting to eat donuts in the back.” That’s the kind of nonsense that warranted my complaint being dismissed, without Lola ever having to answer the question, and without me being able to rebuttal her nonsense and ask them to focus on the actual complaint.
For instance I would’ve said, “Yeah I put on the record I would not be part of approving these unlawful policies. I left the meeting, listened to it in the conference room, had donuts delivered for the support staff, and then posted a picture of said donuts and an explanation for me leaving the meeting on social media for my constituents.
But I never got that chance.
I had been thinking like “WTF even happened? And trying to process it. I decided to call and ask the ethics director, hoping he’d share more info than my response included. I called the number I always had but a woman answered. I’m taken a little aback… “Umm hi, is David Hall there?’ She informs me that he no longer works there.
For a while there David had become kinds like my random ethics therapist. I’d call every so often just to check in on my complaint and then bring up whatever shady stuff Jara and Lola had done recently, like “Would you be mad if you were a trustee and the superintendent punished you for posting about him on social media by kicking you off of the committees you were on?” “Umm hi, Just checking in and you will not believe what Lola did now. Yes, I know you can’t offer legal advice. Ok this is so wild…” And then one day he was just… gone.
Flash forward a couple weeks… the board and Jara are in a closed session that’s about to end and a public board meeting is about to begin and Jara throws in, “Oh! one last thing… I wanted to let the board know that I hired someone to act as the district’s Chief negotiator and assistant general counsel. He’ll report directly to me. His name is David Hall, he used to be the director of the nevada ethics commission.”
You know when you get news and then blood rushes to your head and the room like shrinks into itself. Yeah, I know what that’s like too.
I had never even met him David Hall in person and from then on he was at every board meeting and closed session. Neither of us ever spoke a single word to each other. He is currently still working under the superintendent as one of the main school district attorneys.
Here’s the current governance happs with The Clark County School Board. The board recently, in 2024, adopted Student Outcomes Focused Governance, also known as Silverstate Governance and hired AJ Crabill as their trainer. The next episode is all about AJ Crabill and explains how he is the puppet to anti-public education billionaires.
The board actually paid him an additional $20,000 because his stipulation is that if the board doesn’t vote unanimously to hire him, then it’s an extra $20k.
So board members who don’t want the training either have publicly vote for it anyway or throw away $20,000 of tax payer funds. I wonder if he brags about how many boards hire him “unanimously”?
2 board members voted against it, Linda Cavazos and Brenda Zamora. Essentially because they voted in the way they were elected to, it cost the district half of a teacher’s salary.
Now the super current happs with the Clark County School District, as in now, as in the first week of February 2024, are that a board meeting was announced which includes Superintendent Jara wanting to resign but demanding that the board first changes the terms in his employment agreement to pay him a year’s salary, which is 400,000, if he were ever to resign.
It also includes the hiring of superintendent Jara’s appointed deputy, brenda Larson Mitchell as permanent superintendent. Brenda Larson Mitchel is currenly enrolled in a national superintendent training program which was recently launched by the Council of Great City schools. It is called the Michael Casserly Institute for Aspiring Superintendents. She is in the inaugural cohort.
It is unheard of for a school board to hire a new superintendent without any hiring process or community input, but that might happen at their work session this week.
It’s important to note that right after Jara submitted his resignation, the public learned that the department of education is looking into a bunch of trips that Jara sent staff on to “recruit new teachers” in tropical locations over holiday weekends, which produced no results, no teachers were hired, oh and he used federal funds that were designated to support learning loss related to school shutdowns. Also, per Jara’s contract, he can not get any payout if he’s under investigation. Which is a pretty good reason to rush this and attempt to extort the taxpayers one last time.
Let me be as clear as possible ok: the Clark County School Board of which some board members elections were funded by a handful of corporate billionaires, is giving lots of your tax dollars to AJ Crabill, who works for the same handful of billionaires, to train the board members you elected to hand over the authority you gave them with your vote to superintendents like Jesus Jara and Brenda Larson Mitchell, who get trained and advised by these same billionaires on how to operate the school district and what to purchase. Your tax dollars are being used to silence you, and your entire community, so that nobody can question any spending of the $5 Billion annual budget that the board is fiduciarily responsible for.
Ok that was not clear at all but it’s the best I can do because it’s honestly too much. But that is what is happening right now. I would say “Everyone needs to be concerned” or “everyone should use their voice” but we are way past that. Instead I’ll say, “Everyone prepare to fight back because shit’s about to go down.”
In fact if you are a clark county tax payer and are interested in joining a class action lawsuit against the board of trustees for not performing their fiduciary duties, and/or want the get involved in electing pro-public education trustees and flipping the board in the 2024 election cycle, visit UnravelingEducation.com/fightback and enter your deets. We’ll be in touch.
Next time on Unraveling Education: you’ll learn all about the mysterious stranger who has been identified as AJ Crabill. Well, his original name is Aerick Leonard West. He changed it before he was officially hired by the Council of Great City Schools to infiltrate school boards and replace elected trustees with appointed ones, but we’ll get into all that. It’s a jam-packed episode and many more names and connections will be revealed, including who funds the Council of Great City Schools.
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