Opinion: Give the public more time with San Diego Unified School District superintendent finalists

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In 2013, when the San Diego Unified school board secretly appointed Central Elementary School Principal Cindy Marten as district superintendent just after her predecessor announced plans to step down, there was public outrage that trustees didn’t seek community input or have a formal search for candidates before choosing her in closed session. Marten resigned last year to serve as deputy secretary of education in the Biden administration. Since then, the search process for her replacement has been much more open. But the district still apparently wants as little community input as possible.

The two finalists — interim Superintendent Lamont Jackson, a longtime district official, and Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools, a K-12 district with 17,500 students in the Seattle area — were initially going to participate in three public forums this month. But they were canceled because of the Omicron surge in COVID-19 cases. Now the district plans to have just one 90-minute forum on Feb. 26 at Wilson Middle School.

This is a terrible decision that needs to be reversed. At least three forums of at least two hours each should be held. To address pandemic health risks, they can be remote meetings if necessary.

This is a crucial time for city schools because of the pandemic. Figuring out how to reverse the student learning loss caused by long periods without classroom instruction is a must, and San Diegans need to know how Jackson and Enfield propose to use incoming additional state funding — a result of California’s big budget surplus — to address the learning loss. So far, the big way the state has responded to remote learning leading to the number of D and F grades soaring is with a law weakening graduation standards — shades of the “social promotions” to higher grades that many schools used to hand out just for showing up to class.

If you think one 90-minute forum is inadequate to address these difficult issues, send an email to superintendentsearch@sandi.net asking for more. And CC us at yoursay@sduniontribune.com .