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Don Gosney
Don Gosney was a candidate for an at-large seat on the West Contra Costa Unified School District school board in California. Gosney was defeated in the at-large general election on November 8, 2016.
Gosney participated in Ballotpedia's 2016 school board candidate survey. Click here to read his responses.
In addition to choosing two new board members, citizens of the West Contra Costa Unified School District voted on whether the district should extend its funding measure for eight more years. The candidates running in this race discussed the measure in a candidate forum on September 29, 2016. Those in favor of passing the measure said it was necessary after a forensic financial audit revealed the district had misspent construction bond funds, leaving little funding left to complete renovations. Those opposed to extending the measure suggested the district instead look to private funding sources.
The controversy surrounding the district's misspent bond funds led to the resignation of former superintendent Bruce Harter and the hiring of new superintendent Matthew Duffy. In an effort to regain community members' trust, board member Valerie Cuevas proposed limiting campaign contributions to $1,000 for school board elections. Cuevas said such limits would help the voters have faith in the district again, but other board members and school board candidates disagreed.
The district was also involved in other funding conflicts. In June 2016, the district had to amend its spending plan for state funds after a complaint filed with the California Department of Education revealed $4.3 million had been omitted from a fund earmarked for services for high need students. In March 2016, the district settled a lawsuit with the California Charter Schools Association that alleged the district had not shared previous bond money with its charter school students.
Biography
Gosney is the co-director of the Ivy League Connection. He is also the owner and operator of Fine Flicks by Don Gosney. He previous worked as a pipefitter general foreman and served as president of the Steamfitters Local 342.[1]
Elections
2016
Two of the five seats on the West Contra Costa Unified School District Board of Education were up for at-large general election on November 8, 2016. No incumbents filed to run for re-election, guaranteeing two new members joined the board. Former candidates Mister Phillips, Antonio Álvarez Medrano, and Ayana Kirkland Young and newcomers Don Gosney, Tom Panas, Miriam "Stephanie" Sequeira, and Carlos Taboada ran for the seats.[2] Phillips and Panas were elected to the board.[3]
Results
| West Contra Costa Unified School District, At-large General Election, 4-year terms, 2016 |
||
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote % | Votes |
 Mister Phillips |
22.63% | 28,018 |
| Tom Panas |
18.57% | 22,990 |
| Miriam Sequeira | 15.98% | 19,777 |
| Ayana Kirkland Young | 12.55% | 15,529 |
| Antonio Álvarez Medrano | 12.08% | 14,954 |
| Carlos Taboada | 11.05% | 13,683 |
| Don Gosney | 6.84% | 8,468 |
| Write-in votes | 0.29% | 363 |
| Total Votes | 123,782 | |
| Source: Contra Costa County , "Presidential General Election Official Results - Final," accessed December 7, 2016 | ||
Funding
Gosney reported $21,000.00 in contributions and $1,018.57 in expenditures to the Contra Costa County Elections Division, which left his campaign with $19,981.43 on hand as of October 22, 2016.[4]
Endorsements
Gosney was endorsed by the community organization Evolve and the Contra Costa Building and Construction Trades Council.[5][6]
Campaign themes
2016
Ballotpedia survey responses
Don Gosney participated in Ballotpedia's 2016 survey of school board candidates. In response to the question "What do you hope to achieve if elected to the school board?" the candidate stated on October 11, 2016:
| “ | Refocus the efforts of our Board so we return to educating our kids. Bond programs, audits, political issues, consultants--these are all important but are they as important as educating our youth. After all, it's about the kids, isn’t it? We need to bridge the divides that are keeping our community at odds with each other. Charter/anti-charter, flatland/hills, rich/poor, language divides, city against city--we’re finding too many ways to fight each other when we need to find ways to work together We need to stop the exodus of our teachers and administrators. All of these can be accomplished if we start talking with each (instead of AT each other). We’re all in this together so we need to look at this as a sinking rowboat and if we don;t learn how to work together, we’re going to sink together. I’ll take the former.[7][8] | ” |
Ranking the issues
The candidate was asked to rank the following issues based on how they should be prioritized by the school board, with 1 being the most important and 7 being the least important. Each ranking could only be used once.
| Education policy |
|---|
 |
Click here to learn more about education policy in California. |
| Education on the ballot |
| Issue importance ranking | |
|---|---|
| Candidate's ranking | Issue |
| Balancing or maintaining the district's budget | |
| Improving post-secondary readiness | |
| Closing the achievement gap | |
| Blank | |
| Blank | |
| Blank | |
| Blank | |
| “ | • What happens when you allow unfettered freedom of movement within a District or if a community has a choice of charter schools over traditional public schools. Parents tend to withdraw students from underperforming schools. The end result is a death spiral for that school with the only students left behind being those that have a difficult time doing well. Parents should make more of an effort to improve the school rather than walking away. • Special needs students have, for too long, been shunted to the back of the bus when they need to be given opportunities to learn skills that can help them to be productive members of the community. There has to be some balance, though, so that a disproportionate amount of the limited resources does not go to these students at the expense of the rest of the students. • Arts education (as with theater, dance, music and even sports) helps to build a well balanced person instead of a student who only knows one or two disciplines. Too many charters skimp on the “arts” to the detriment of the students. • Post secondary readiness—whether college or possibly the trades—should be a critical goal for a Board. Otherwise, what are the options? • Our teachers are the front line tools at our disposal. We need to listen to what they have to tell us and then help then with their needs. We need to support them as much as possible. • For too long people have looked at the achievement gap only seeing that African Americans are not doing as well as others. In this community, we have multiple achievement gaps with the Latinos doing poorly, too, and even Whites not doing as well as Asians. We need to address ALL achievement gaps and the best way is to actually speak with the students, the families and the teachers to try to learn what they think the problems might be—and then address those problems. A key to this is getting the parents involved and providing them with the tools they need to help their children learn. • One of the biggest problems school districts have is their inability to live within their budgets. Debt loads can kill a district so you need a Board that will stay on top of this issue and be creative in how the dollars are spent and even where the dollars come from.[8] | ” |
| —Don Gosney (October 11, 2016) | ||
Positions on the issues
The candidate was asked to answer nine questions from Ballotpedia regarding significant issues in education and the school district. The questions are highlighted in blue and followed by the candidate's responses. Some questions provided multiple choices, which are noted after those questions. The candidate was also provided space to elaborate on their answers to the multiple choice questions.
| Should new charter schools be approved in your district? (Not all school boards are empowered to approve charter schools. In those cases, the candidate was directed to answer the question as if the school board were able to do so.) |
|---|
| Yes. There are 16 criteria that a California Board needs to examine and if the petition meets those standards, the Board has no option but to grant a charter. A Board Member’s own personal feelings about charters cannot interfere with their sworn duty. |
| Which statement best describes the ideal relationship between the state government and the school board? The state should always defer to school board decisions, defer to school board decisions in most cases, be involved in the district routinely or only intervene in severe cases of misconduct or mismanagement. |
| The state should only intervene in severe cases of misconduct or mismanagement. It would be a mistake to assume that all communities are the same so one set of guidelines would work for everyone. Each District needs the autonomy to deal with the issues in their own community without the heavy hand of the state trying to decide what’s best. |
| Are standardized tests an accurate metric of student achievement? |
| No. They’re a useful tool but until every community has the same tools to work with, the same economic conditions in they community, the same educational backgrounds in the homes, the same access to computers and the Internet at home, we’re not going to see the same results in the classrooms. So a one-size-fits-all test should not be the gold standard for determined the worth of a student or the teacher. |
| What is your stance on the Common Core State Standards Initiative? |
| Common Core is a good start to improving the educational model that many of us grew up with. The previous model was seriously flawed and needed work. Common Core is a good start but still needs to be tweaked. |
| How should the district handle underperforming teachers? Terminate their contract before any damage is done to students, offer additional training options, put them on a probationary period while they seek to improve or set up a mentorship program for the underperforming teacher with a more experienced teacher in the district? |
| Put them on a probationary period while they seek to improve. Terminating an underperforming teacher is a last resort—you never know whether the replacement will be any better or worse. Also, it’s very time consuming and expensive to fire a teacher unless for cause. Isn’t it better to provide the teacher with the resources and training so they can be a better teacher? This requires that the administration works closely with that teacher, first learning what the reasons might be for the poor performance. You can’t fix a problem unless you first identify what that problem is. |
| Should teachers receive merit pay? |
| No. Merit pay is too subjective. If we can’t provide all of the teachers the same type of classroom and students, why should we reward some teachers for a better performance and punish others for not? Until we allow the teachers the kind of control they need to succeed, we shouldn't be punishing them because they don't live up to our exceptions--especially when those expectations are artificially created. |
| Should the state give money to private schools through a voucher system or scholarship program? |
| No. Absolutely not. If educators want to start up their own private educational system without the oversight of an elected board of education, then they don’t deserve public funding. The same with charter schools. If they want public funding, they need to have an elected board (elected by the full community), open meetings, open books, complete public access and complete accountability for the public dollars they’ve been entrusted with. |
| How should expulsion be used in the district? |
| As a last resort (guns, violence, extreme sexual harassment). Otherwise, we need to take advantage of some great restorative justice tools to keep our students in class--all the while protecting everyone else and ensuring that disruptive students do not keep the rest of the students from being educated. Don't we owe it to all of our students to provide them with an education? Isn’t expulsion what most of these students really want? |
| What's the most important factor for success in the classroom: student-teacher ratio, the curriculum, teachers, parent involvement or school administration? |
| Student-teacher ratio This is an unfair question in that all off the options are critical. • Smaller class sizes allow the teachers to focus on educating the kids instead of maintaining discipline. • Without a decent curriculum—especially modern textbooks—how can the students learn what they need to know? • Teachers can be the silver bullet to slay the educational demons. We need to invigorate our teachers so they want to teach. • We can’t do it all in the classrooms—the parents have to be involved with the education of their kids. • School administration needs to support the teachers, provide them with the tools they need and help engage the parents. |
Priorities
Gosney said the following were his top three priorities, according to Voter's Edge California.
| “ |
|
” |
| —Don Gosney (2016)[9] | ||
Recent news
The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Don Gosney West Contra Costa Unified School District. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.
See also
- West Contra Costa Unified School District, California
- West Contra Costa Unified School District elections (2016)
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ LinkedIn, "Don Gosney," accessed October 13, 2016
- ↑ Contra Costa County, California, "Contest/Candidate Proof List Presidential General Election," accessed August 18, 2016
- ↑ Contra Costa County, "Unofficial Results - Election Night Final," accessed November 9, 2016
- ↑ Contra Costa County Elections Division, "Contra Costa County Public Portal for Campaign Finance Disclosure," accessed November 1, 2016
- ↑ Evolve, "Endorsements: November 8, 2016 General Election," accessed October 11, 2016
- ↑ Contra Costa Building and Construction Trades Council, "2016 Endorsements," accessed October 13, 2016
- ↑ Ballotpedia School Board Candidate Survey, 2016, "Don Gosney's responses," October 11, 2016
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Voter's Edge California, "Don Gosney," accessed October 13, 2016
| 2016 West Contra Costa Unified School District Elections | |
| Contra Costa County, California | |
| Election date: | November 8, 2016 |
| Candidates: | At-large: • Don Gosney • Antonio Álvarez Medrano • Tom Panas • Mister Phillips • Miriam "Stephanie" Sequeira • Carlos Taboada • Ayana Kirkland Young |
| Important information: | What was at stake? • Additional elections on the ballot • Key deadlines |
