It’s never easy to predict when a community will begin to disintegrate, but when it happens the signs are always very plain.

Here in the valley, those signs are painfully obvious in the community of parents, teachers, students and overseers at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School. And the precipitating act seems to have been the abrupt action by a willful, and possibly spiteful, superintendent to throw overboard a popular and respected principal, and the surprisingly obsequious behavior by the school board when it granted the dismissal its stamp of approval.

 

We don’t really know what the issues were between Principal Norm Clevenger and Superintendent Fred Van Leuven, but it is clear that there were personal differences. Whatever those differences were, they’ve somehow managed to do their jobs since last summer without a terribly public tussle. During that time, by all reports, Clevenger has earned the respect and admiration of teachers and parents alike, and apparently from the school’s students as well.

 

Van Leuven is a lame duck – he’s set to leave the district in June, the same month when Clevenger’s contract as principal was set to expire. The way these things work, however, the school board was obligated to inform Clevenger within the next three weeks or so if it intended to decline to renew that contract, giving him an opportunity to win back a shot at another year in the job.

As is happened, Van Leuven’s replacement was named last week, and almost immediately Van Leuven placed Clevenger on involuntary leave, taking from him his keys to the school, his district credit cards and his computer access. That’s the way one treats an employee suspected of criminal behavior, not someone with whom you have disagreements about goals, styles or methods.

 

Yet, so far as we know, there is no hint of impropriety on Clevenger’s part. There appears to be no completed or ongoing investigation. There are no known complaints. Indeed, his teachers were so stunned and outraged that they began immediately to organize a campaign to put pressure on the board to repudiate Van Leuven’s ham-fisted management style. The teachers’ apparently universal and unreserved support of their principal could put them at risk of retaliation, yet they gave it anyway.

At a hearing staged within days, the school board was confronted by parents who alternately pleaded and demanded that the dismissal be rescinded. Clevenger, who sought a delay in the proceedings to consult with an attorney only to be told by Van Leuven that he didn’t need one even though his livelihood and reputation were at stake, found himself cut off at the knees by a procedural maneuver that shut out public comment and observation and took the argument behind impenetrable closed doors and into a secret Star Chamber meeting. The decision was unanimous: off with his head! There was no explanation as to what cause the board had to terminate a principal in the middle of the semester.

 

Nor was there an explanation of why the school board, positioned between an obviously surprised and disapproving public and a departing superintendent, would so quickly and completely bend its knee in Van Leuven’s direction and ignore the expressed will of the people in whose names they govern the school.

Pressed for an explanation of the dismissal, Van Leuven said he couldn’t discuss it: it is a personnel matter. From what is known, it seems more likely that it’s a personal matter. That’s troubling.

 

Lack of sunlight means that the public, the school’s teachers and parents and students, all of whom have a lot riding on what happens at that school, must cross its fingers and trust that, whatever secret things were said and done behind those closed doors, they resulted in a decision made by five people acting out of personal good will and a devotion to high integrity. The trouble with that is this: everybody is being told that, as surprising as these things are, they should trust those who did them to be looking out for the community’s best interests.

It was Ronald Reagan, who once lived right up the road, who put it best: trust, but verify. Where is the verification in this case?

 

That’ll be 2 cents, please.