Tucson Weekly: Board Certified (March 11

TUSD's Top Pols Keep Superintendent George Garcia Rolling In The Green
By Chris Limberis
IF FOR SOME reason you haven't met George F. Garcia, the superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, four members of his Board have given you more time to get to know him.
Three more years, in fact.
Garcia, who arrived in Tucson in 1991 after a strictly mediocre performance in Kansas City, maneuvered newly empowered Board President Mary Belle McCorkle and her protégé Carolyn Kemmeries as well as multi-term members Joel Tracy Ireland and James Noel Christ to extend his contract last month through 2001.
Currents Rosalie Lopez, who like Kemmeries joined the Board in January after winning a spot in the November 3 election, dissented, saying simply that she did not have adequate time to evaluate Garcia.
Garcia's four supporters were hardly daunted by Lopez's reluctance. And her vote created no lingering acrimony. Indeed, on the very next agenda item--appointment of several school administrators--Lopez quickly delivered the motion to name each of Garcia's recommendations.
The ill-timed extension followed an equally hasty action in December to give Garcia a $3,006 raise made retroactive to July 1. Christ, Ireland and McCorkle approved the increase, jacking up Garcia's annual base salary to $123,232, over the objections of lame ducks Gloria Copeland and Brenda Even.
The latest raise--in a year that TUSD is ordering spending cuts because of a looming deficit that could reach $3 million--and contract extension came after a secret evaluation that is allowed by state law. Information from such executive sessions is confidential. But sources close to Copeland say Garcia was not given good marks.
That's a worry for Garcia's sponsors, particularly for Christ, a teacher who works for Garcia's wife. A new evaluation was postponed March 2 for one week because the Board needed more time to tell its neogtiators how to cut a new deal with TUSD teachers and other union employees. That's the same night McCorkle tried to slam in a bizarre set of rules governing how Board members--politicians--should speak and act. Several in the audience wondered out loud if the new rules would apply to McCorkle's frequent scowls and her insincere attempts at accommodation.
Garcia clearly wants the new rules to restrict his bosses from doing their jobs and to give himself extra protection.
At 56, Garcia is soft-spoken and outwardly polite, even dignified. He's been uncharacteristically forceful recently, but on just two issues: his own wallet and the fetters he wants slapped onto potential Board critics, of which there is but one--Lopez.
In his nearly eight years as the boss of the state's second-largest school district, Garcia has been infuriatingly silent on major issues confronting students, parents, taxpayers and employees. He couldn't even make a recommendation, let alone take a stand, on an area in which he supposedly had expertise--Mexican-American studies. Imagine Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry not having a recommendation for the Board of Supervisors on a road or bridge.
His timidity and reliance on poor advice from TUSD's legal department, headed by Jane Butler, also helped create the big and nasty messes TUSD finds itself in regarding Tucson High Magnet School Principal Cecilia Mendoza. District lawyers and other officials falsely accused Mendoza of breaking state law when she allowed $870 in soda-machine revenues to be used for a mailing to Tucson High parents. Mendoza's lawyers last week filed a $300,000 claim against TUSD for defamation. And then there's the multiple claims arising out of the sexual harassment complaints against Ed Arriaga, a longtime TUSD administrator who finally departed last year.
Garcia, it seemed, enjoyed merely being along for the ride. But who's driving now?
WHEN GARCIA WON a two-year contract extension last month, it was Christ who carried the water. It was Christ's only clear action. At the same meeting, he wandered off the dais and missed a vote on TUSD's new student code that will govern behavior and dress for 64,000 students. Christ's ability to spew a motion for Garcia while missing the student-code vote is worthy of examination for two reasons:
First, Christ is on the payroll as an English teacher at Sunnyside High School. For McCorkle, Christ and other TUSD Board members who consistently claim they must set examples for students and others, it was an interesting lesson. Christ's Sunnyside students therefore should be able to wander and miss at least one major assignment per class.
Second, Christ's top boss at Sunnyside is that southside district's superintendent, Mary Garcia--George Garcia's 59-year-old wife. Christ's wife and sister also are on the Sunnyside payroll. And Christ, Sunnyside sources say, repeatedly is searching for a promotion to a possible assistant principal's job.
Here's the costly story of TUSD's contract with Garcia.
• TUSD taxpayers were soaked $110,000 a year ago when Ireland, Even and then TUSD Board members Sylvia Campoy, Bob Miranda and Robert Strauss signed him in May 1991.
According to the contract, Garcia also got a $625 per month ($7,500 per year) allowance for transportation. That's a nice sum for a Cadillac lease.
Garcia also was handed medical and hospital insurance for himself and his wife at an undisclosed price, plus $4,752 a year for additional benefits, $6,500 in moving expenses, 30 paid vacation days a year, and 10 working days a year off to "engage in outside consulting, lecturing, writing, speaking or other professional outside activities."
• December 1992: The first of five extensions prolonged Garcia's stay at TUSD through 1995. Then a lame duck, the unpredictable Strauss provided the third signature.
• January 1994: Ireland, joined by his buddy and wood-shop partner Christ, Even, McCorkle and Miranda, signed off on an amendment that altered the monthly $625 allowance. It became more nebulous: "to help defray costs associated with his duties."
• June 1994: Garcia gets an extension to June 30, 1997. It's approved by the full Ireland-led Board of Christ, Even, McCorkle and Miranda.
• July 1994: The full Board jacks up Garcia's pay by $2,750 and also gives him a $1,000 annual stipend, which the Board forces TUSD taxpayers to give each administrator who holds a doctorate in education.
• July 1995: Garcia gets a slim $1,128 raise. The contract amendment is signed, oddly, by only two members--Even and McCorkle.
• December 1995: Garcia's contract is extended through 1998. Copeland and Even withhold their signatures from this amendment.
• August 1996: With Christ rotating as the Board president, Garcia grabs a $2,847 raise. Copeland and Even again withhold their signatures. This is the same year that the Board, under Christ's leadership, hands taxpayers TUSD's highest property tax rate, a wild 9.47 cents per $100 of assessed value.
• July 1997: Now with Ireland at the helm, Christ and McCorkle join him to give Garcia another extension, this one to June 30, 2000. Copeland and Even steer clear.
• October 1997: Ireland continues his rare split with allies Copeland and Even to vote with Christ and McCorkle, an education consultant who is a former administrator in both TUSD and Sunnyside, to give Garcia a $3,501 raise.
• December 1998: Garcia's same troika votes to give him another $3,006 a year.
• February 1999: Adding Kemmeries, also a former TUSD administrator, to his list of fans, Garcia extends his TUSD life to 2001.
In all, taxpayers have provided Garcia with a 12 percent increase in pay since he arrived. Excluding medical and hospitalization, Garcia directly costs TUSD taxpayers $143,984 a year.
HIS STEADY ATTENTION to details--of his checkbook and job security--are rivaled perhaps only by Bob Smith, the superintendent of the troubled Amphitheater School District.
The sole applicant in 1996, Smith has received $7,175 in raises to his original $87,000 annual salary. He also received an $8,200 annual expense account, a $6,400 yearly car allowance, and a sweet, six-week vacation plan that gives him a cash payout of $389 a day for up to four weeks. Smith, the darling of Amphi's intransigent majority, also received a $4,000 bonus two years ago. His big raise, for $5,000, which came near midnight at a lengthy Amphi meeting in December 1997, was approved along with a contract extension through 2002.

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