Move to Oust 5 on School Board Fails

ORANGE â€”  The long and bitter effort to recall five Orange Unified School District trustees died Wednesday when their critics failed to collect enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot.

The ouster effort was prompted by the demotion of three popular school principals and capped a year of tension and turmoil, including the May dismissal of the district superintendent.

Targeted trustees on Wednesday said the recall attempt’s failure is evidence that the public supports their actions and that perhaps harmony will finally prevail in one of the county’s largest school districts, which serves about 25,000 students.

Recall proponents, however, vowed to keep their eyes on the trustees.

“I still don’t think they are accountable,� said Marvella McAllister, president of Parents for a Responsible School Board. “I don’t think they have the best interests of the children at heart.�

As the 5 p.m. deadline approached for petitions to be delivered to the registrar of voters office, McAllister conceded that they had fallen about 5,000 signatures short of the required 13,180, which is equal to the 15% of registered voters needed to call a recall election.

Trustees Maureen Aschoff, Lila Beavans, John Hurley, Alan E. Irish and Bill Lewis met in front of the county registrar’s office in Santa Ana just after the deadline to express their hope that a less divisive period in the district’s history was dawning.

“Now we can focus a little more on doing a good job for the district,� Lewis said. “We were a little distracted with all this in the past.�

Lewis said he was gratified that his opponents were unable to find enough residents who thought a recall was necessary.

“It shows the whole thing was quite a bit overblown. It was made up out of almost nothing,� he said. “Some people got the idea in their head that we were not doing something right. But it’s not true. . . . This is a very honest, bright board.�

McAllister and other critics complained that in addition to the demotions of the three principals, the district spends too much money on telephone systems and vehicles and not enough on instructional materials and school supplies.

Some have also criticized the way trustees dismissed former Supt. Norman C. Guith. The board spent more than $134,000 to buy out Guith’s contract even though the district faced a $5-million shortfall in its more than $100-million budget.

Irish said Guith was let go because of “differences of opinion� with the board on policy matters. Irish declined to specify why the principals were demoted but said one is now a teacher, another is on a temporary leave of absence and the third has left the district.