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Emotions ran high during an already tense Sunol school board meeting this month after the board decided not to remove a member of the Citizens Bond Oversight Committee who sent what many residents called a racist email to another Sunol resident.
Debbie Ferrari sent an email to Anna Wang, a Sunol resident and associate dean for public service and public interest law at the Stanford Law School, on Feb. 4 after Ferrari saw Wang publish a letter to the editor in The Sunolian. In the letter, Wang expressed her support for the campaign to recall Trustees Ryan Jergensen and Linda Hurley and called for the two to resign immediately.
Ferrari, however, has been very vocally against the recall ever since the topic first came up and has defended the two Sunol Glen Unified School District trustees at almost every board meeting over the past few months.
In Ferrari’s email, which was posted in a special issue of The Sunolian, her main argument was that she could not understand why Wang would support the recall and told Wang, “Most people I know of Chinese descent are much more compassionate and they understand that this is about control, control like they have seen in China.”
That comment was what led Wang to file a complaint with the district, saying that Ferrari should be removed from the CBOC.
“Debbie sent an insulting and racist message to my work email account. This was not an isolated incident,” Wang told the trustees during the March 12 meeting. “Debbie has repeatedly made several aggressive, confrontational and rude comments that demonstrate extremely poor judgment, an inability to civilly discuss a disagreement with others and a refusal to offer basic courtesy to a fellow community member. This is the opposite of how someone appointed to serve on the CBOC should represent Sunol.”
Ferrari, who was allowed to speak longer than the three minutes provided to the rest of the community during public comments because Jergensen invited her as a speaker on the item, admitted she did go overboard with the email. She even apologized to Wang during the meeting — after several people in the crowd urged her to — and said that she had also apologized to Wang before.
“I shouldn’t have sent the email and if I did send it, I should have just explained my opinion in a polite way,” Ferrari said. “I shouldn’t have lumped a certain descent or ethnicity all into one group. So that was something I shouldn’t have done.”
However, she also said that getting attacked by the community and getting labeled as a racist was a political move from the pro-recall group and that anyone who knows her knows that she has many Chinese friends, respects all ethnicities and is far from being racist.
“I think they’re just doing it as a way to try to crush me. Anybody who knows me knows that I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” Ferrari said. “There is a type of hate speech going around in this town and that type of hate speech is when you call others racist, when you call others a bigot … there has been a huge amount of vitriol coming out of the pro-recall community.”
A few other community members also spoke out in support of Ferrari saying that she is not racist and that she should not be removed from the CBOC.
Stephanie Szto, a Sunol resident who is of Chinese descent, said that as Ferrari’s friend she has never heard her say anything racist and does not understand why the community is going after Ferrari, who Szto said is just trying to ensure bond dollars are spent appropriately. She said that Ferrari is a good person and that she doesn’t understand why the committee doesn’t want someone who is opposed to the recall.
“Stop this political prosecution and actually get the work done,” Szto said.
However, the number of people who spoke out against Ferrari’s email and called for her to be removed from the committee heavily outweighed those who wanted Ferrari to stay.
Former school board trustees Vic Cloutier and Denise Kent Romo said Ferrari was being discriminatory against Wang, and Cloutier went as far as giving the board specific reasons why the board needed to remove Ferrari.
“One, you have irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence of racist behavior; two, you will soon listen to the impact of that email, and its intended target and the threat therein; and three, you have precedents, multiple school boards have actually removed CBOC members for misconduct. I counted at least 15 cases,” Cloutier said.
Hurley demanded evidence to which Cloutier threw papers of the lists of school boards that removed CBOC members.
“Failure to remove that individual today is a failure of governance, failure to remove her is a failure to repudiate racism,” Cloutier said. “Failure to remove her sends the message that this board tolerates racism, and is complicit.”
At the end of the discussion, the board did not vote on removing Ferrari from the committee as each of the three trustees had completely different opinions on what to do.
Trustee Peter “Ted” Romo was the only one who motioned to remove Ferrari from the committee, citing CBOC bylaws that explain why the board could remove Ferrari.
“By making a racist statement, she placed her personal interest in scoring points in the back and forth around the recall efforts ahead of the interests of the Sunol Glen district,” Romo said. “The ethics policy attached to the CBOC bylaws makes clear that ‘a committee member shall place the interests of the district above any personal or business interests of the member.’ “
“Section 5.6 of the CBOC bylaws provide that ‘board may remove any committee member for cause which includes failure to comply with the committee ethics policy,’ ” Romo added. “On this basis, an individual member of the CBOC making a racist statement to a member of the Sunol community, even if the statement is not made in the course of CBOC work, directly brings ill repute on the district and the CBOC and accordingly is not placing the interest of the district above such individuals personal interests.”
Hurley, who interrupted and shouted over the other trustees several times during the discussion saying they were “out of line” for even bringing this item up, made the argument that the board and administration did not have any lawful rights to remove a member from the CBOC and that the district should not be getting involved in the committee.
“There is no (educational) code, there is no provision to remove anybody off the CBOC,” Hurley said.
But after continuously interrupting and talking over others on the dais — so much so that Jergensen told Hurley to take it down a notch — Superintendent Molleen Barnes weighed in and said that the board does have jurisdiction to remove a member.
Jergensen’s approach to dealing with the issue was more down the middle. After Romo’s motion failed, Jergensen said that per the board’s policies, any complaint has to go through administration, which can then bring it up to the board for a decision.
He said that after talking to the district’s attorney, who told him that ethics and board bylaws don’t specifically talk about the situation at hand, he wanted to bring the complaint and possibility of removing Ferrari from the committee back to the attorney, research the issue a bit more to see what can be done legally and come back at a later time for a final decision.
“I spoke with our attorney about this. There are procedures and policies and there are ways to talk with people, there are ways to try to resolve conflict,” Jergensen said. “If a mob brings pitchforks and wants someone kicked out, you can do that. Or you can research it further … We do have the ability to change the bylaws for the bond oversight committee.”
He also offered reassurance to the community that not taking any action did not mean that anyone on the board was racist.
“I hear the complaints, I read the emails from three members of our community and sure, it is worth looking into,” Jergensen said. “It is worth standing against racism and hate. That is what we do.”
The board tolerating Debbie’s out of control actions shines a light on why there is a recall.