Looking for leaders

Written by Jennifer Wadsworth / Tracy Press
Wednesday, 30 July 2008

A group of teachers is trying to rally challengers to replace longtime Delta College trustees in this fall's election.

A handful of San Joaquin Delta College teachers have formed a group that aims to rally as many people as possible to run against the school’s longtime trustees, some of whom have sat on the board for decades.

Even if a couple trustees go unchallenged, the group wants to hold incumbents to task by hearing why they’re running again, what they hope to accomplish and how they justify past actions.

The teacher-led Delta College Political Action Committee, which coalesced in June, plans to bring new blood to a board long known for its divisiveness and, according to some agencies, incompetence.

"We’re hoping at a minimum to replace two or three people in this election," said Sam Hatch, a Delta English teacher and one of six committee members.

The California Teachers Association-chartered organization was born out of teachers’ frustration with standing trustees, said chairwoman and Delta history teacher Lynn Hawley.

"It just became clear that if we wanted better governance at the school that we’d have to get involved politically," she said Tuesday. As other government agencies have recently determined, she added, "we’re not happy with the board as it stands now."

Delta instructors at a public meeting last month overwhelmingly voted for a resolution of no confidence in the board for many of the same reasons laid out in recent reports from the San Joaquin Civil Grand Jury and the school’s accreditation commission — notably mismanaging bond money and flouting open-meeting laws.

The condemning vote proved a catalyst for Hawley, Hatch and a handful of other teachers to form the committee.

Through the affiliated teachers’ union, the committee plans to get at least $20,000 to pay for mailings, phone banks and other promotions to support the candidates it decides to endorse.

Though the group seeks to mobilize a healthy number of challengers for each seat, Hawley said that doesn’t necessarily mean she or anyone else in her committee refuses to back an incumbent.

They just want them shaken out of their perceived complacency, she said.

Four trustees’ seats are up for election this November, and the newly formed group has kept busy calling folks to recruit them to run against "the Delta establishment," as one member put it.

The filing period ends Aug. 8.

Tracy trustee Greg McCreary is the only incumbent to run unopposed so far.

Thirty-three-year trustee Dan Parises will step down in December. Board president Leo Burke has yet to file for a campaign.

Valley Springs resident and former state architect Steve Castellanos will run unchallenged for Parises’ seat, unless another candidate registers before the mid-August deadline.

Castellanos is so far one of the few candidates the committee has contacted. He said they asked him mostly about the mishandled Measure L bond, which voters approved in 2006 to pay for new construction and a few satellite campuses around the county.

Trustee Anthony Bugarin will run for re-election against Stockton businesswoman C. Jennet Stebbins.

Teacher and businesswoman Mary Ann Cox and warehouse worker/real estate agent/student Motecuzoma Sanchez, both of Stockton, will run for Burke’s seat.

During the last election, in 2006, when Manteca-Escalon Trustee Ted Simas and Lodi’s Maria Elena Serna ran for re-election, Serna ran against a cable news executive and Simas against a farmer.

Otherwise, challengers have historically been relatively few and far between, according to records from the San Joaquin Registrar of Voters.

In 2004, all four incumbents up for re-election ran unopposed and were appointed to office in lieu of a vote.

McCreary said he hopes the best for the newly formed committee, though he said no one from the committee has contacted him yet and that he knows next to nothing about it.

"But it’s good to get people involved," he said. "I wish they would’ve been around three or four years ago."

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