Controversy Over Principal : School Board Member Condemned by 3 Colleagues

In a rare public display of acrimony, city schools Supt. Thomas Payzant and three Board of Education members Tuesday condemned colleague Larry Lester for “undermining” the school board by asking teachers at Serra Junior-Senior High School to vote on whether they had lost confidence in Principal Marie Thornton.

Board members Susan Davis, Kay Davis and Dorothy Smith, in a statement released at their regular meeting Tuesday, said that “Mr. Lester’s intrusion into this process undermines the ability of the board as a whole to maintain a trusting and working relationship with on-site management.”

“It was totally counterproductive to trying to build confidence in our site leadership,” Kay Davis said later. “It was totally inappropriate behavior, and I don’t want to be associated with it.”

In a separate statement, Payzant said Lester’s request for a secret ballot at a Feb. 20 staff meeting “seriously undermines the trust and credibility of the relationship between the board and its employees.”

Lester released his own memorandum to the board members, saying he acted to obtain “an accurate assessment of staff sentiment at Serra,” which was “absolutely necessary given the inaccurate representations about that sentiment being discussed in public.” He said the inaccurate information has “undermined the community’s confidence in your process (and) deprived you of the information required to make a responsible decision.”

The criticism of Lester comes amid an escalating battle over Thornton’s leadership of the Tierrasanta school. A group of parents and teachers has been calling for Thornton’s ouster since December, saying that she has destroyed morale and arbitrarily transferred students and altered successful programs.

Thornton has denied the charges. She was supported on Tuesday by a group of people led by a former school board member, the Rev. George Walker Smith, who submitted petitions backing Thorton that they said contained 2,000 signatures.

“This woman has had nothing but excellent and outstanding (evaluations),” Smith said. “The teachers didn’t like (her leadership), so let them transfer out.”

Payzant promised at the meeting to retain Thornton as principal of the 2,472-student school until the end of the school year, when he will consider her assignment for next year, along with those of all other administrators.

He also suspended for at least six weeks the work of an evaluation team (headed by consultant Norm Chambers) assigned to the school in December, and asked school district employees and community members to “refrain from activities that will further polarize people and heighten conflict at the school.”

Lester said he intervened in the situation after attending a Feb. 18 meeting of about 150 community and staff members, many of whom charged that Chambers’ assessment of the school’s problems was inaccurate.

“They said, ‘My negative comments aren’t there. My positive comments are there verbatim,’ ” said Lester, who gave the results of the staff vote to board members in a closed session Feb. 25 but refused Tuesday to reveal his findings.

But his written memo to the board said that “this information is widely at variance with some information supplied to us on earlier occasions. It is, in my opinion, impossible that this variance in conclusions could appear by chance.”

Board member John Witt, who said he supported most of his colleagues’ five-paragraph statement about the conflict at Serra, disagreed with the single paragraph criticizing Lester’s actions.