Editorial

EDITORIAL – Madera’s Ron Montoya is back on the attack. This time he is attacking Madera Unified School District Athletic Director and CIF President Marty Bitter. He has already harassed the school board, city council, school site councils, and our mayor. Now he is taking on a school administrator who is only trying to provide an equal playing field to all students throughout the district. He is attacking another good man with false accusations.

Montoya’s latest ill-informed rant is comparing full-time district employees to walk-on coaches. He seems upset that Madera South Varsity Football Coach Matt Johnson is a full-time employee for the district with a job unrelated to his football duties. Coach Johnson was hired by the district to operate a program at Madera Unified for at-risk boys. This is the same successful program he ran at Edison High School for Fresno Unified a few years back. For that job, Johnson receives a salary from the district.

EDITORIAL - What happens when your Xfinity/Comcast Cable-TV bill tops $200 a month? You learn new (and relearn older) ways to save money on your television entertainment expenses. Over the last year, we have done everything we could think of to cut our cable bill but found the only way to really save money with Xfinity/Comcast is to forget about cutting the bill and just Cut the Cord. So that is what we did and now we have more great TV than ever before.

First thing we did was return all of our cable boxes to Xfinity/Comcast. These were costing us between $10 and $15 each per month. We replaced them with Roku streaming devices that have access to the Xfinity app. The Roku Xfinity/Comcast’s app gives you another way of watching the cable company's programming without the expensive cable box rentals. By doing this we started to save about $45 a month. 

EDITORIAL - The senior class of Madera South High School, like many senior classes throughout our country, has lost the best year of high school. They lost their proms, senior trips, yearbooks, and any chance of having a “normal” graduation. Their school year ended on the night of March 13^th when in a closed session meeting the Madera Unified School District decided to shut the schools down. But unlike other schools throughout the country or even just in our home town, the class of 2020 at Madera South also had to face being ignored by their school and principal.

While other schools put up signs of encouragement to their seniors and students, first-year Madera South Principal Ami Anderson has refused to allow any signs to be placed on the school's fences or any school funds to be used in any way to honor the class of 2020. I know of at least one senior from the class of 2020 who sent the principal an email asking if the class would still get their traditional senior sweatshirts with the entire roster of the class printed on the back. Ms. Anderson answered back telling the student that was not an “essential” item to get people to leave their houses.

EDITORIAL - Two things happened at the latest Friday night emergency meeting of the Madera Unified School District Board of Trustees, the school closures for Madera Unified, like elsewhere in the valley have been extended to May 1^st, and all seven members of the board of trustees unanimously gave Superintendent Todd Lile full authority to make unilateral decisions for the district without the need for prior board approval.

The board enacted section 35161 of the California Education Code which allows the board of trustees the right to delegate to an officer or employee of the district certain powers or duties normally reserved for the board itself.

EDITORIAL – The Madera Unified School District closed all the schools but, to be able to hold on to their Federal Grant for free school lunches, began their emergency food distributions today. How did it turn out? John Adams was out of lunches in 20 minutes, Sierra Vista ran out in about the same amount of time.

Schools from all over the city of Madera were calling for more lunches, but Lincoln School was so overstocked that many other schools were sending vans there to pick up the excess and re-distribute it where needed. Then Lincoln ran out and the district’s child nutrition office brought them more. Isn’t it funny how Lincoln always seems to get the most from the school district? Even during a time of emergency.

EDITORIAL - The Title IX attorneys are coming, but the Madera Unified School District is dragging their feet with little concern for creating equity for the female athletes at Madera High School. In July of this year, BVN published a story about the disparity between the MHS varsity baseball team and the MHS varsity softball team. That story has attracted the attention of the a California based Title IX law firm.

In April of 2016, a storm hit Madera with winds topping 37 miles per hour. Trees around Madera were toppled, a historic 58-year-old fresco of the father of the Virgin Mary over the front entrance of Saint Joachim's Catholic Church blew off the wall into the street below, and the backstop at the Madera High Varsity Baseball Field crashed down the old steel pipe and wood bleachers. The damage to the bleachers gave the school district $2 million in insurance payouts to rebuild.