_{Thumbnail photo by Monique Camarena}

The longest-serving member on the Del Norte Unified School District Board of Trustees on Thursday dissuaded his colleagues from designating primary points of contact for each campus

But, though Don McArthur, who represents Trustee Area 1, raised concerns about interfering with school management, Trustee Area 5 representative Mike Greer had a different take.

Greer, whose trustee area encompasses only one school, ‘O Me-nok Learning Center in Klamath, said he visits school sites regularly and has established a relationship with teachers and administrators, but he’s clear that he has no authority as an individual.

“The only authority we have is as a group,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re president or clerk or whatever. We have no authority except as a group and that needs to be clear.”

The idea of designating school board members to be primary points of contact for individual school sites has been listed as a future agenda item for some time, DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris said. With some Trustee Areas containing one campus and others housing multiple, Board members had discussed assigning schools to different trustees to establish a clear line of communication for parents, teachers and administrators. But, Harris said, there was a concern that if all five trustees get an email about a particular school site, it could lead to potential Ralph M. Brown Act violations.

There is also a question of who the contact would be for Del Norte High School or Crescent Elk Middle School, which serves students countywide, Harris said.

McArthur, whose trustee area includes parts of Crescent City, has been on the DNUSD School Board since before Harris was hired back in 2015. He said he would attend parent-teacher conferences and be “button-holed” by people who wanted him to fix things.

“I talked to the superintendent and things would happen,” he said. “And all of a sudden I became the go-to person to get things done.”

McArthur said he had found a work order system and introduced it to school district administrators, who then began to institute it. But he realized that individual campuses had a system that worked for them.

“The whole thing is a management issue,” he told his colleagues. “And what I worry about is, in making ourselves a point of contact, we are inserting ourselves into the management prerogatives. This particular group might be able to manage that, but when I started on the Board — I’m going to say this delicately — there were those who did not manage their boundaries well.”

McArthur said he was also concerned about giving people the impression that individual trustees represent individual school sites instead of Del Norte Unified School District as a whole. Once the district starts identifying particular trustee areas with particular schools “we start dividing.”

Board President Charlaine Mazzei, whose Trustee Area 4 district includes Pine Grove Elementary and Redwood schools, agreed.

“Using that language (that) we represent a school, I think leads into that, ‘Well, you’re not advocating for my school,’” she said. “‘You should be putting forward policies that are good for this school because you represent this school, regardless of the impact on the rest of the district.”

Greer, however, argued that when Del Norte County voters could only elect the DNUSD trustee that resided within their individual Trustee Area, those trustees did start representing the students and the schools that are in that area.

DNUSD trustees have been elected by voters living in the trustee area they represent since the Nov. 8, 2022 general election. Before 2022, trustees were required to live within a defined area, but voters countywide were able to vote for them.

“I would think that for, say, Crescent Elk and the high school and even Sunset, that those would be the ones that would not have an assigned person,” Greer said. “Because everybody’s responsible for it.”

Harris suggested listing the schools that lie within an elected official’s Trustee Area under their pictures on the DNUSD website. 

When McArthur objected to that because of the number of schools that are in his trustee area, his colleagues decided to end the discussion entirely. Mazzei said she didn’t want the matter to come before the School Board again.