Local activist Kate Smith and the Santa Barbara School District have never been on good terms, but the past week has been particularly turbulent.
Yet, all the events of this week portray a pattern with Smith and the district that seems to repeat itself every few years.
A week ago, the Santa Barbara County Elections Office disqualified Smith as a Santa Barbara school board candidate because she lives outside the district’s boundaries.
Since then, Smith, who can be a loquacious and persistent presence, has received a letter from Superintendent Brian Sarvis warning her to stop interrupting the work of office employees at the downtown district headquarters.
She has also received another letter from Sarvis rebutting her claim that the Elections Office was wrong about her home address being outside the district.
And finally, on Tuesday night, Smith’s tendency to stand behind the podium and speak to the board on as many as 10 separate items in a night prompted a board discussion about whether it can rein in a single member of the public without punishing everyone else.
On Tuesday, the board learned it can take some hard-line measures that would curtail everyone’s right to speak, such as shortening the length of comment time to two minutes from the current three. But the board instead decided to try be more diligent about pounding the gavel when a speaker’s soliloquy strays from the topic at hand.
For her part, Smith says she is fighting to “expose corruption,” and will not allow herself to be silenced.
On Tuesday night, following the board discussion on public-speaking privileges, she approached the podium — for the fifth time during the meeting.
“I’m going to guess you had this on the agenda to talk about me,” she said. “So, I want you to know: I’m not here to make friends. … I’m here to expose corruption. I don’t care if you don’t like me, and don’t want me to speak. I’m here to reform education. I don’t care that you scorn me, humiliate me, vilify me, dismiss me. I am passionate about democratic education. I am a patriot, and I love my country.”
Smith has also been butting heads with the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. During Tuesday’s meeting, she was escorted out of the building after uttering a profanity at the podium.
But the school district and Smith have a long, acrimonious history.
It started about 10 years ago, when she was arrested four times for repeatedly violating a restraining order requiring her to stay 100 yards away from Roosevelt School. Smith claimed her daughter was the victim of emotional abuse and mistreatment by Roosevelt special education staff, according to a 1998 newspaper article.
She later filed a complaint with the state Special Education hearing office, charging that the district was providing inadequate special-education services for her daughter. The district appealed in federal court, then wound up settling the case for $400,000. Smith, who drew money from a trust, received the $400,000, but said that the money covered only half of her attorneys fees. The restraining order against her was later expunged.
Also in 1998, Smith was disqualified as a school board candidate on the same grounds as the current situation: Her address in the 3400 block of Gibraltar Road in the mountainous frontcountry of Los Padres National Forest was outside of the district’s boundaries. (This year she was disqualified for listing the same address.)
At the time, Smith tried to argue that because the district allowed her daughter to attend Santa Barbara schools from that address, she was eligible to run for the board. The Elections Office rejected that argument. That year, elections officials caught the discrepancy in mid-August.
This time around, the illegal filing was caught late in the game, on Oct. 20. As a result, the Elections Office — which learned of the situation from a Noozhawk article — was obligated to spend about $25,000 mailing letters to 50,000 vote-by-mail residents informing them that Smith is not a viable candidate. It is also allowing anyone who has already cast a ballot for Smith to vote again for the Santa Barbara school board race, which now has five candidates for three seats.
In addition, on Election Day, every voter in the district — that is, from Montecito to Goleta — will receive, along with a ballot, a memo explaining that Smith is not a viable candidate.
Last week, Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters Billie Alvarez acknowledged that the Elections Office bears some responsibility for the oversight, but said her office does not have the resources to catch every irregularity that comes along.
“I’m not at all trying to say we’re lily white,” she said, “but we’re not an investigative agency. …. We’re here to administer the election, not to see if somebody is lying.”
Smith also has produced a somewhat cryptic, one-sentence memo from 1998, apparently written to Alvarez by the Santa Barbara School Districts’ then-director of student services Diana Rigby, stating that Smith’s Gibraltar Road address is within the district boundaries.
Both Alvarez and Sarvis say they do not know why that letter was written, and do not have it on file.
Meanwhile, Sarvis’ letter to Smith warning her to stop interrupting the work of office employees also wasn’t the first of its kind.
In it, Sarvis quoted a 2004 letter to Smith from Superintendent Debbie Flores, his predecessor: “Your visits have been unannounced, have no clear purpose, are very distracting to the employees in the various offices, and consume an inordinate amount of staff time.”
Sarvis added: “I am particularly concerned about your frequent disruptions, flooding the staff with questions, demanding that staff meet your deadlines, and your yelling for district staff to meet with you.”
And in yet another example déjà vu, Smith prompted a board discussion on what to do about abusers of public-speaking privileges four years ago. The board decided to adopt a policy that allows speakers who stray off point to be gaveled down.
On Tuesday night, the district’s frustration with Smith seemed to manifest itself in the verbal explanation of the board’s options by the district’s legal counsel, Craig Price.
While describing to the board the option to shorten time limits for public speakers, he said: “It is unfortunate when one has to go to that length in order to curb someone’s appetite for infringing on the rights of so many people in the community.”
But the discussion left Smith undeterred.
Smith has accused schools of inappropriately plucking Latino students with learning disabilities out of the regular school system, and placing them into what she calls “jail schools,” such as El Puente Community School, which serves mostly expelled students. She often refers to this phenomenon as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
On Tuesday, she said she plans to file a “petition for declarative relief to the judge.”
“They will never be able to do this to me again — to abuse their power,” she said. “And I will run for the board in two years.”
Click here for then-student services director Diana Rigby’s 1998 residency letter.
Click here for the Elections Office’s 1999 Gibraltar Road residency memo.
Click here for the Elections Office’s Oct. 20 notice of removal.
Click here for Superintendent Brian Sarvis’ letter of Oct. 23.
Click here for Superintendent Brian Sarvis’ letter of Oct. 24.
Noozhawk staff writer Rob Kuznia can be reached at rkuznia@noozhawk.com.
