View the Resolution stating No Confidence in the Chief Business Officer (CBO) HERE.
List of Concerns regarding the CBO
The current MDUSD Chief Business Officer (CBO) was hired in January of 2020. Before working in MDUSD she was never a CBO. Her employment contract with the District included $14,000 to hire someone to teach her to do her job.
In the time between then and now she has failed to adequately do her job. A list of reasons and examples is below. Her failure to do her job has caused us to lose confidence in her.
Concerns:
The CBO has failed to adequate perform the basic tenets of her job in overseeing an accurate budget for the District.
Two glaring examples of this include:
She has pushed the Board to have a “qualified” budget (which puts Board decision making and our ability to get a raise in jeopardy) instead of an “approved” budget, even though we met all the criteria for an approved budget.
She was $52 million off in calculating the 2020-21 budget on June 23rd of 2020, literally seven days before the end of the budget year when a competent CBO would know almost everything the District had spent its money on for the year
The CBO’s work has been of such poor quality that the District has had to spend money and time and bring in an outside agency to do some clean up work.
The CBO has ignored and undermined efforts to increase District revenue through things like MediCal billing, Federal grants, and improved attendance efforts, and has instead focused way too much time and effort on crafting a narrative about not having enough, and therefore needing to cut services to students.
The CBO has been hostile to parents, educators, and community members when they ask her questions in public meetings.
The CBO has acted unprofessionally in meetings, including showing up unprepared, ignoring the agenda, and filibustering to run out the clock so people won’t have time to ask questions. She even muted someone in a zoom meeting because she didn’t like what he was saying.
The CBO has repeatedly refused to answer questions about basic financial information about the District
The CBO has repeatedly been unable to answer basic questions about District finances.
The CBO has repeatedly show up to meetings unprepared – oftentimes just cutting and pasting general information from other sources, and when asked for specific info about MDUSD she can’t or won’t answer.
One example of this: in September of 2021 MDEA sent 14 questions ten days before a scheduled meeting. At the meeting she couldn’t answer half of them, and mostly had other people from fiscal answer things.
The CBO has put the district in jeopardy by giving the School Board inaccurate or incomplete information.
The CBO has failed to provide information when it was requested by the Board.
The CBO has failed to provide information when it was requested by MDEA and other unions.
The CBO has refused to take responsibility for her failures, often blaming other people.
The CBO has repeatedly failed to respond in a timely manner to professional communications – oftentimes taking more than a week to respond to a simple email.
The CBO has knowingly repeated false or misleading information in numerous public forums (like school board meetings and youtube videos) that seek to paint teachers are too expensive, and the district in a dire financial picture that isn’t true- and she has continued to do it after we have pointed out the true and correct information, and cited our sources, which are often the District’s own documents.
It is for these reasons that we have no confidence in Lisa Marie Gonzales as the MDUSD CBO.