Yee-Haw -- Bill Rojas Hits the Road

Chief's tactics have left S.F. schools reeling

San Francisco—It’s hard to come up with the appropriate words to describe the reaction to Bill Rojas’ apparent decision to leave for Dallas, shortly after creating one of the biggest budget crises in the history of the San Francisco school district.

But since he’s going to Texas, that state’s time-honored salute seems fitting.

Yee-haw.

Rojas has proved once again that the right combination of ambition, ego, arrogance, wile, recklessness and a proven track record in fiscal mismanagement can land you an executive job almost anywhere in America. So let’s just hope that the fine educators in Dallas don’t look any harder at Rojas’ misadventures here and try to trade him back for a second-round pick and a personnel manager to be named later.

His supporters, who have written me eloquent defenses of the great man, will no doubt believe that Rojas is leaving because the city didn’t properly appreciate the vision he brought to urban education. Too bad that vision is actually high myopia, with its focus on teachers and parents blurred, but always with a clear view of lucrative job opportunities.

You may recall that Rojas tried to bolt to New York just a year into his job, and it’s too bad he didn’t get it, because it would have saved the city a lot of grief, good will and money. Rojas’ record is mixed at best — making some advances in bilingual education, improving outreach to minority students and raising test scores slightly, although not enough to earn him high marks.

Yet his great love of reconstituting schools, by which he made his reputation, was hardly more than a grand experiment that offered little in the way of positive results. It did anger thousands of others along the way, but when you consider that Rojas once likened teachers to ATM machines, it seems fair to say he wasn’t counting too much on the need to curry favor with little cogs like parents and students.

“He may have destroyed the greatest gift left from his predecessor, and that was a school community with a common purpose based on trust,” said board member Jill Wynns, one of the few voices of reason on a body that has shown blind allegiance to almost all of Rojas’ reckless maneuvers. “What’s happened recently has hurt our fiscal credibility, in that people, including the state’s lawmakers, think we don’t know how to manage money. That’s not the kind of reputation a school district needs.”

But Rojas got what he needed, and it seems a good match, since Dallas is one of the few communities in the United States that could embrace another runaway egotist like Jerry Jones. And like Jones, Rojas believes in the beauty of corporate sponsorship, coming out in favor of such winning educational formulas as letting children play in giant Coke bottles.

So before he signs his next compensation package, let me give him the credit he deserves for leaving the city school district in such fine financial shape.

You’ve got to admire a man who would slash millions from a budget, axing summer school teachers and college credit courses with equal aplomb, and then tell everyone that there’s no budget shortfall at all. That takes skill, and when it comes to drive-by budgeting, Wild Bill has few peers.

As he showed last month in Sacramento, he also excels in the field of public relations, managing in a few short days to anger the governor’s staff and the entire Assembly, and possibly ruining forever the school district’s relationship with the state of California. It took a lot of work, but Rojas was up to the task.

And it’s a good thing there’s a lot of real estate in the Lone Star state, because Mr. Rojas is nothing if not a whiz when it comes to purchasing property. For his finest work may be his ability to grab money from parts of a budget without anybody knowing about it — certainly not his own school board, and definitely not the parents and teachers and schoolchildren who are left to wonder why the district can’t provide basic supplies like paper and pencils but can purchase $8 million buildings that aren’t needed.

That’s multitasking at its finest. That’s fiscal magic. That’s Bill Rojas.

Still, without question, Rojas’ greatest accomplishment in San Francisco was his ability to convince a school board of his leadership and sound judgment while the district was sailing through the Apocalypse. School board president Juanita Owens is still defending the great visionary, even as he bails out on the school district while it is suffering through a fiscal crisis created almost entirely by Rojas’ inability to do basic math.

Maybe in Texas, where they admire all things big — hair, teeth, steaks, hats, cars — Rojas will finally find a home, a place large enough to accommodate all his big ideas.

My favorite part of Rojas’ state-skipping antics is that even as he is leaving San Francisco schools in terrible fiscal shape, his own bosses at the school board are going to have to wait to hear his explanation for jumping ship. Wynns and Dan Kelly tried to call an emergency meeting of the school board for last night, but Owens, after talking to Rojas, agreed to let Bill wait to tell his story at the regularly scheduled school board hearing Tuesday night — in closed session.

And why not, since Rojas has been putting together stealth budgets that Owens and the majority of the school board have approved without question. What could he possibly say, other than the job was there, they wanted me, and I’m really sorry about all the mess?

So maybe it’s a good thing he was such a believer in reconstitution. Because chances are, long after he’s gone, the city’s voters will be reconstituting the school board for allowing Rojas to practice his peculiar form of shotgun management.

That’s the kind of style they like in Texas. It may take a while before they discover he’s just shooting blanks.

You can reach Ken Garcia at (415) 777-7152, fax him at (415) 896-1107, or send him an e-mail note at [email protected].



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