Candidate for
Trustee; Capistrano Unified School District; Trustee Area 3

A key element of my platform is ensuring that CUSD spends out tax dollars equitably throughout CUSD, and stop taking money from one community to spend in another community. For instance, recent audits by the City Councils of Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita have established a long standing pattern of education money flowing out of these cities into other CUSD cities, while many of the school facilities in Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita suffered from overcrowding and lack of maintenance for far too long. Similarly, Mello Roos funds that could have been spent on new school facilities in Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and San Clemente were instead spent on the obscene large and underutilized Administration Building, that white elephant overlooking the 5 freeway in San Juan Capistrano, while the school facilities where those Mello Roos dollars were collected are suffering. My opponent enabled these practices with a series of `yes' votes, without ever dissenting.

To correct the inequitable treatment of the past, the CUSD Board of Trustees needs to focus itself and the Administration on the following priorities and must ensure that the Superintendent and Administrative Staff faithfully follow and implement these policies:

1. Keep and implement the smallest class sizes possible. Keep the Class Size Reduction program in place for grades K- 3. Implement the smallest class sizes possible in the older graders, with an emphasis on the smallest class sizes possible in the earliest grades (especially in grades 4 - 6) so students get more personal attention in their formative years.

2. Instead of creating barriers to parental involvement with draconian background checks, CUSD needs to encourage and maximize parental involvement in our schools.

3. CUSD must stop balancing its budget on the backs of the children in grades 4 + 12 and their parents. In 4 out of the last 5 years, the old guard Board of Trustees increased class sizes in grades 4 -12, reducing the number of teachers needed, while at the same time giving huge salary increases to the superintendent and top level administrators. This is wrong and it must stop.

4. Learning is enhanced when school facilities are right sized, well designed and properly maintained. CUSD needs to engage in long term comprehensive and well coordinated strategic planning that takes into account the cyclical nature of the economy and state funding, instead of short term plans which are implemented on short notice under duress in reaction to external factors.

5. As part of its long term planning effort, CUSD must insist that the master developers of new communities that want to join CUSD, such as Rancho Mission Viejo either commit actively engage in early forward planning with the school district or look elsewhere. CUSD must make it clear to developers of new communities that we expect they will commit advance team planning for the right number of schools, in the right locations, on sites that are large and roomy with ample athletic fields and playground space, with attractive well designed brick and mortar buildings that will not have to be supplemented with short life span portable buildings after being only a few years old, and with efficient traffic and parking patterns, that are located community centers to allow and encourage students and their families to walk and bike to and from school. In other words, unlike most of the new communities developed over the last 15 years which joined CUSD without proper planning and, CUSD must insist developers start working in partnership with CUSD so new communities are built around excellent school sites, from elementary schools up to high schools. The past long standing CUSD practice of accepting badly located and undersized school sites that were the "leftovers" from the master planning process, has resulted in dozens and dozens of badly located and undersized schools, surrounded by ingress and egress traffic patterns, with woefully insufficient parking, needs to end.

CUSD has already started a forward looking comprehensive and long terms planning process under the leadership of the reform trustees now leading the CUSD Board. The CUSD is due to soon receive a long needed and long awaited district-wide facilities needs assessment, which will for the first time allow the Board members to see all the of the school district facility needs throughout the district and prioritize how to spend our scarce tax dollars in the most prudent manner to ensure fair and equal treatment to all schools in CUSD -- as opposed to the past practice of funding trustee's and Administrators' pet projects and taking care of everything else on an ad hoc shoot from the hip `band-aid' approach, running from putting out one fire after another without proper advance planning and budgeting.

Please vote for me and I will join help lead CUSD forward while making sure every school site is treated equally, and that no one school site is treated more equally than others due to shadow politics and favoritism. For more information, please visit http://www.cusdrecall.com or you can contact me at mike@cusd.us. Thank you for taking the time to make an educated vote for our public schools. + Mike Winsten