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FUESD board closed meetings raise questions

Multiple closed session meetings have been scheduled by the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District the last couple of weeks, but district officials and

board members have been mum about what is being discussed. However those discussions seem to involve an “internal complaint” or lawsuit that centers around Caron Lieber.

At the board’s June 11 special meeting – to discuss litigation – Lieber was asked not to attend. At the meeting, by a 3-1 vote of the remaining board members, Lieber was voted off the board as president. Board members JoAnn Lopez, Susan Liebes and Ricardo Favela voted to replace Lieber with Suzanne Lundin. Lundin voted against the change.

Leiber was selected by the other board members in December to be president. Traditionally, and perhaps legally, the five board members choose their officers to serve for a year. Why make a change now?

No one is talking.

Lieber and Liebes are the senior members of the board, elected in 2018 to serve through 2022. Lundin and Favela were elected in 2020 to serve through 2024. Lopez was selected by the board in October 2020 to fill the vacated seat of Patty De Jong, who resigned after 24 years on the board. Lieber was the sole “no” vote against appointing Lopez, whose district will also be on the ballot in 2022.

Lieber had often wound up being a dissenting voice on the board over the first two years of her term. For example, she was the lone person voting against a salary increase in January 2019 for district administrators including Superintendent Candace Singh. Singh earns more than $350,000 a year, one of the highest salaries in the county for a school superintendent. FUESD is one of the smallest districts in the county with about 5,000 students.

Most public discussion and votes the last two months have been unanimous, but is there lingering dissension? The voting for board assignments in December was contested. Lundin and Favela voted for Lieber to take over as board president, with Lieber prevailing by a 3- 2 vote. Liebes and Lopez opposed, instead voting for Liebes to be president.

Favela nominated Lundin to serve as board vice president, with Lopez nominating Liebes for that position. But Lopez ultimately cast the only vote for Liebes. Liebes chose to join the new majority in selecting Lundin to serve as vice president for 2021.

When the time came to select a board clerk, Lundin nominated Favela, who was elected unanimously.

The board votes on officers each year in December to serve the next year, so it was

expected Lieber, Lundin and Favela would hold their posts for that full period. The

attorney’s department with the State Board of Education has been asked if the board’s action on June 11 can be challenged, but the Village News has not been notified yet with a response.

Will Fritz, a former reporter for the Village News who covered the elementary school board, wrote an article for Voice of San Diego on March 2 that digs deeper into the district’s legal issues – and sheds light on the lawsuit.

Voice of San Diego is an online-only non-profit news organization. It relies on grants and membership for support. The article’s headline was “Big Changes, Tensions Roil Fallbrook Union Elementary School Board.”

“Shortly after Lieber and her allies assumed power, she became the subject of an internal complaint,” Fritz wrote. “School officials have declined to make the complaint public or provide any sense of what it alleges, citing the privacy of the district employee who filed it.”

This report has not been substantiated as district officials are not commenting.

In the VOSD article, Fritz wrote:

“A question has emerged in recent weeks: Should Fallbrook Union Elementary’s board tap outside legal counsel to investigate the complaint against one of its own? Lieber and two other board members have shown their intention to hire outside counsel to ensure the complaint gets fair treatment. It’s clear from the deliberations in open session that the new guard doesn’t trust the district’s current attorney, Dan Shinoff.”

“’The board has the right on its own, not through staff, to hire legal counsel, and direct legal counsel, and that’s what we are looking for in this instance, so under no circumstances would I support having district staff hire counsel in this case,’ Fallbrook Union Elementary board member Lundin – one of the board members aligned with Lieber – said during a special meeting on Jan. 21. ‘They’ve already hired who they think should be counsel. Some of us don’t think it’s impartial.’”

Shinoff, from the San Diego firm Artiano Shinoff, has represented the district in legal issues for decades, including in a costly wrongful termination lawsuit brought by a former district employee who accused administrators of firing her for objecting to an order to purge emails – a case that Fallbrook Union Elementary lost in 2012.

Shinoff will not be involved in this new dispute. At the board’s June 7 meeting, a consent item was pulled off the agenda, at Lieber’s request, to continue until July the approval of contracts with two legal firms, Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost and Adams Silva &a McNally, also both based in Carlsbad. Both are known for representing school districts.

Liebes was the only board member voting against continuing the consent item to its only scheduled meeting in this month, on July 19.

Lundin sat as board president for the first time at the June 21 regular meeting. During the “reports from the board” segment, Lieber expressed her displeasure of being removed as president at the June 11 closed session when she was not present.

“I would like to be given a chance to respond,” she said.

There was no response from other board members and everyone seemed cordial during the meeting, with unanimous votes on everything other than near the close. That’s when it was time for another closed session described as a “conference with legal counsel – potential litigation.”

Board member Ricardo Favela said he was exhausted from a weekend of multiple youth softball games and that he wasn’t feeling well. He asked about the meeting being tabled.

Lundin said she was reluctant to postpone the meeting because she didn’t have time to read the tremendous amount of documentation presented to the board.

Lopez said that instead of hearing presentations, they could discuss “the latest proposal.”

However, there were no details about what that might be.

Lieber joined Lundin and Favela in voting to table the closed session. Liebes and Lopez voted against tabling the session

Fritz gave examples in his VOSD story of Lieber’s dissenting votes on other matters. He also wrote that Lundin and Favela have both indicated that they’re much more receptive to Lieber’s positions. Favela was one of the community members who drew the district trustee map that the board follows for elections.

“Lieber went from perennial dissenter to board president,” Fritz wrote.

“Given all this history, the complaint filed against Lieber and the dispute over hiring outside counsel appears to mark a continuation – and certainly an escalation – of previous scuffles,” Fritz continued.

The journalist said the complaint was never supposed to be public knowledge. It was only revealed after what appeared to be an inadvertent slip of the tongue from a fellow board member at its Jan. 16 meeting.

The board voted 3-2 in closed session to appoint an attorney other than Shinoff but did not determine which law firm would take up the task.

Less than a week later, the board was back to vote on hiring a law firm. During open session discussion on that issue, Lopez, while insisting that Lieber should recuse herself, let slip the actual reason for the contract, Fritz said.

Fritz quoted Lopez saying, “We have a board member who has a complaint – actually we have a board [member] that has a complaint against them – that could potentially have an impact on one specific person and to me if we’re hiring someone to represent this board, but also potentially representing Mrs. Lieber, that’s a clear conflict of interest for her to have impact on who and where we hire somebody.”

The VOSD article continued: “Lieber, believing that Lopez was misunderstanding the issue, told her: ‘We have an employee of the district making the accusation against a member of the board.’” “Lopez responded that she was clear on the facts.”

“’You’re the person being accused,’ Lopez said. ‘So for you to be involved in the decision-making process of who we may hire to protect all of us, is a conflict of interest in my opinion.’”

“Lundin insisted that the board had every right to hire its own lawyer and that the process should move forward.” And Lieber refused to excuse herself.

The VOSD article also detailed allegations by Lopez and Liebes that the other three board members colluded in private and violated the state’s open meeting law prior to discussion about voting on Jan. 16 to hire outside counsel.

So while the board seems to be on good terms with each other the last couple of months and meetings are mostly “fine and dandy,” you can see there is contention. You can only wonder what happens behind closed doors.

CORRECTION: In the June 24 Village News story about the school board replacing Lieber, the article incorrectly stated that Suzanne Lundin hesitated to agree to table the closed session referenced in the article because “two groups of legal counsel were in attendance to make presentations to the board.”

Lundin contacted the Village News, saying, “In fact, I couldn’t have said that because I had no knowledge that there were two groups of legal counsel who were going to attend the Closed Session. I’ve reviewed the video recording of the meeting and no one on the Board referenced two groups of legal counsel.”

Village News regrets the error.

 

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