During a regular Board of Education meeting this Tuesday at Pico Rivera’s City Hall, parents, teachers, students and community members voiced their concerns about the magnet school that the Board plans on opening at the closed elementary school, Selby Grove.

Despite the Board having voted on Resolution No.44-2013/2014, the decision to create a magnet school with an International Baccalaureate Diploma and Performing Arts focus, almost two years ago and hosted three public forums prior to the board meeting, this issue dominated the public comments section of the meeting’s agenda.

All but one of the speakers talked about the magnet school.

The odd one out was a representative of Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, who advertised an art competition the State is having and commended the district on being the first in the county to implement the ethnic studies program.

The eleven speakers that followed spoke about the decision to have the magnet school away from El Rancho High School, the estimated funds that the Board expects the project to cost and the possible effect on teachers salary raises that the Board had promised in the past. Students that attended the meeting said they were concerned with the magnet school’s potentially unintended consequence of taking away instructors that teach advanced placement programs at ER.

A common trend among the complaints was the lack of transparency the Board had with the community in the decision making process. Speakers claimed that they were notified last minute or not at all for the Feb. 22 special meeting to appoint a principal for the magnet school.

The minutes on the resolution, from its conception to the recent appointment of the magnet school’s principal, were provided to a community member upon request to Superintendent Martin Galindo’s secretary. Those records show that the Magnet High School Advisory Committee, “charged to advise, give input, assist in designing and monitoring the progress of the planning process” in accordance to the June 7, 2014 resolution, did not follow procedure and record the location of the meeting or take attendance on the following dates: Dec. 16, 2014, Jan. 29, Feb.25 and March 25, 2015.

Furthermore, the advisory committee meeting on Dec. 2, 2015 did not record  the minutes and no meeting was held on the scheduled date of April 30, 2015.

Due to the minutes not being published to the public, the community doesn’t know what the advisory committee discussed or proposed during the year-long period they met and to further complicate matters, the committee never published their conclusive recommendations or findings.

The Board maintains that since the committee meetings were ad hoc they didn’t need to conduct them in a formal fashion. Yet several speakers claimed that, since the establishment of the advisory committee was in the resolution and the effects that their findings may have on the magnet school project, the board may have violated the Brown Act. This grievance with the board is a byproduct of their alleged lack of transparency.

These dates and information, that the community requested at previous meetings, was presented by a member of the community and when the Board was asked to explain this issue, they neglected to give a response during their time to address the speakers’ concerns.

During the regular board meeting on Feb. 16, all three district teachers unions attended to express their concerns about the magnet school. Feeling their questions were not addressed, the president of the El Rancho Federation of Teachers, Margaret Martinez-Engle, spoke at this week’s meeting “to once again restate our disappointment at your (the School Board) decision to move forward with the opening of a magnet high school at the Selby Grove facility. Our concerns, as we have said before, are numerous and (have) not as of yet been fully addressed. You, however, seem confident in your decision. It is our hope, for the sake of the students of this district, for your employees, this venture isn’t a complete failure as it is feared by many.”

Martinez-Engle went on to voice the union’s concern with the assurances the Board has made in the past that the magnet school will not negatively affect their promised salary increase and the lack of conclusive data that proves this to be true.

The lack of published data and research was another precedent among the speakers. Along with the unpublished findings of the Advisory Committee, the community members questioned how the data from the claimed success of the Burke Steam Academy correlates with the Board’s decision to create a magnet school in the first place.

Another concurring grievance was the request to see what research shows that the magnet school will fix the district’s enrollment issue and how the Board arrived at the estimated cost of $500,000 to renovate Selby Grove.

Community members also expressed their concerns about the possibility of the magnet school’s failure to achieve the predicted 125 freshmen enrollment in the first year, which is estimated to cost $1.3 to $1.6 million. The Board was asked if they had a contingency plan if the school fails to get the targeted enrollment, another issue that was not addressed later in the meeting.

Board members Dr. Aurora R. Villon and Jose Lara co-wrote the magnet school resolution and voted on it along with Rachel Canchola back in June 2014. Board members Gabriel Orosco and Dr. Teresa L. Merino were not members at the time of the resolution vote but Orosco voted in favor of the principal appointment to the magnet school while Merino abstained.

The magnet school is scheduled to open in the fall of 2016.