School board blues

• Karla Wenzel has hopes for the new board, but the chairwoman leaves disillusioned and worn down

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, May 20, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The feces in the mail may have made the decision for her.

They came to Karla Wenzel’s home in a large white envelope Ñ anonymously, of course.

The package arrived a couple of months ago during the heated contract negotiations between the Portland Public Schools and its teachers union.

“They said I was dishing it out, so I should take it,” Wenzel, the Portland school board chairwoman, says of the note accompanying the tin of excrement inside the envelope. The note referred to the contract negotiations.

Combined with the school board-related graffiti that had been spray-painted on her driveway a few weeks before, and with what Wenzel believes was an intentional poisoning of her family’s dog shortly after that, the incident solidified the decision she’d been leaning toward. The nonpracticing lawyer and stay-at-home mom would leave the school board after one four-year term.

“I was afraid to let my kids play in the front yard of my house Ñ because of the anger level directed at me as a volunteer member of the Portland school board,” Wenzel says, her voice rising as she sits in a coffee shop a few blocks away from her 7-year-old daughter’s elementary school.

“I think that’s what really (led) to not running Ñ how personal it got.”

By 8 this evening, four new members Ñ a new majority Ñ will have been elected to the Portland school board.

They will join a board that has been lambasted routinely during the last couple of years. Lambasted for how it managed a superintendent, then for the money it spent to get rid of him, then for how it botched the search to replace him. Lambasted for increasingly rancorous relations with the school district’s employees’ unions. Lambasted for poorly managing dwindling district resources and, in general, for what critics say has been muddled and ineffectual leadership of the state’s largest school system.

And while most of the criticism has been directed at the board in general, a few Ñ especially teachers union leaders Ñ also have criticized Wenzel, saying she’s short with those who disagree with her.

Wenzel says she leaves the board disagreeing with a lot of its critics on a lot of issues. But she and the critics seem to agree on a couple of things.

It’s ugly out there in the world that surrounds the Portland school board.

And it’s way past time for a change.

“I started (four years ago) buoyed with all kinds of optimism and hopefulness,” Wenzel says. “That with just the right amount of smarts and work and perseverance, tackling the critical issues É we could really make a difference.”

Four years later, “the cynicism, the negativity, the assuming the worst about you personally and about the job that you’re doing É it just wears you down.

“It’s just time to leave when it so much affects your basic personality and core beliefs about human nature, and the ability to make a difference.”

Uncontrollable circumstances

Wenzel decided to leave the board before her fellow board members did. But in the end, all four board members whose terms were up this year decided not to run again.

Few board watchers were surprised Ñ after the controversies of the last few years.

Still, even the most vociferous critics of the school board agree that at least some criticism was misplaced. The board had little control over the district’s biggest problem: the repeated budget crises of the last few years forced by limited state money available for K-12 education.

While district employee health care costs are increasing at double-digit rates and state-promised employee retirement benefits are increasing even more, the district’s general fund budget will end up being $360 million this year,

$3 million less than last year.

Even with the budget issues, Wenzel says, the 52,000-student school district has made progress during the last few years.

When she ran for the board in 1999, many people were criticizing district officials for being unable to explain their budget numbers, what money was being spent where, Wenzel says. The “transparency in the budget” has improved drastically, she says, in large part because of the work of Jim Scherzinger, the former chief financial officer who now is superintendent, .

Meanwhile, the superintendent and school board now outline possible budget changes in repeated public forums in much more detail than they used to, Wenzel says.

And the district’s student test scores have continued to improve.

“There’s been progress on things that matter,” Wenzel says, adding that the district achieves much “that doesn’t really come to people’s attention.”

Still, she can seem as frustrated with the last four years Ñ and sometimes with the performance of the school board Ñ as any of the board’s critics.

The board spent more than $100,000 last year on a national search to find a replacement for former Superintendent Ben Canada, and it eventually announced four finalists for the job. But each of them withdrew from consideration after highly public visits to Portland Ñ visits in which the school board revealed the candidates as finalists but then made them wait for a job offer while the board brought other candidates to town.

After all four finalists withdrew, the board suspended its search, naming the homegrown Scherzinger as superintendent.

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