Tony Thurmond, California’s outgoing superintendent of public instruction, has created nothing but confusion by interjecting himself into the ongoing fiscal crisis at the Sacramento City Unified School District.
There is no way to make tens of millions of real and permanent cost reductions to the district budget while also extending a generous contract to teachers that sent SCUSD toward insolvency in the first place. Thurmond has perpetuated the illusion of the fiscally impossible. And as a lame duck who will leave office in a matter of months, Thurmond could make a mockery of himself and his office by meddling in the Sac City financial mess.
In a Monday letter to SCUSD, Thurmond upheld, for now, the veto of SCUSD’s two-year contract extension for the Sacramento Teachers Association by Dave Gordon, superintendent of the Sacramento County Office of Education…