Trustee, Trustee Area 5 — Oceanside Unified School District

Hi there— I am running for a seat on the Oceanside School Board this November 3rd in District 5 in the virtual center of the City.  Many of you may know me from my work and community involvement with the City Of Oceanside.  I began working for the City way back in 1976 as a staff planner.  I became City Planning Director in 1985 and in 2000 I was appointed Deputy City Manager.  After over 33 years of public service I retired and have been serving on the school board ever since.  

My wife Sandi Blessing (an emergency room Nurse and educator)served one term on the school board from 1992-1996 and enjoyed it very much. She was influential in hiring former Superintendent Ken Noonan, who served the school district with distinction for over 10 years.  We have raised two sons, Joey and Ben, in Oceansode schools—each attending Ivey Ranch, Martin Luther King and El Camino High—and their graduation from these fine school we’re proud moments for Sandi and me.  I have been blessed with working with 3 fine Superintendents, Larry Perondi, Duane Coleman and for the past two years, Dr Julie Vitale.  All 3 have moved the district in a forward direction the past 12 years!

I want to continue serving on the Oceanside School Board for several reasons.  I believe I am uniquely qualified to serve on the board based upon my 40 years of public policy and planning experience.  I know the City and it’s residents and I understand that open and responsive institutions are prized in this City.
As I have done throughout my career, I would encourage all parents, teachers, and community members to be fully included in School Board policy making decisions.  I think we have done a good job at that over the past 12 years I have served the Board!

If Elected to the Oceanside School Board:

I will continue to bring a fresh perspective that focuses on collaboration in the near term to get our kids back to school as quickly and safely as possible.

I will work to increase and expand parental involvement.

I will provide experience that can assist in building needed school facilities in a cost effective and timely manner.

I will remain committed to hearing and considering all public input prior to making board decisions.

And finally, if elected, I will maintain my commitment to provide music, art, sports, and vocational training opportunities so that well-rounded young adults graduate from our schools, college and career ready, and are prepared to take on the challenges of the world.


I have been actively involved throughout my career in Oceanside in the planning of the City, and in particular with the building and shaping of City Parks and School sites.  While much more needs to be done and will be in the future, I take special pride in the collaboration between the City and the School District in the building of the joint use park and school facilities at Cesar Chavez Middle School and  Mance Buchanon Park.  I was also very involved in the planning and construction of the joint use school amd park along Mesa Drive that is home to Martin Luther King Middle School and Ivey Ranch Elementary School.  Finally I was instrumental in the consensus building process and initial planing efforts for the El Corazon Master Plan approved in 2005.  The park, in the Heart of the City, already provides a Senior Community Center, a world class soccer tournament facility with 22 fields for youth Soccer, and a competitive swimming complex under construction and scheduled to open next summer! 

As City Planning Director and Deputy City Manager I worked to ensure that land uses were preserved in the City's Ocean Ranch and Rancho Del Oro's business tech centers so that like companies such as Genentech, and Gilead could bring high paying bio-tech jobs to the City. This is important to the financial health of the city, and will allow our kids the opportunities to live and work in a quality job environment, right here In Oceanside.  Development of these new business areas will also demand that our school system produces highly motivated and well educated young adults to serve these growing industries. 

I want to thank all of the past and present Mayor's and City Council Members for their support of my running and serving on the Oceanside School Board.  And I also want to thank the hundreds of property owners, community activists and business operators from all over the City who have endorsed my candidacy for the Oceanside School Board and the District 5 Seat along with the Oceanside Teachers Association (OTA) and the Republican Party of San Diego, and Planned Parenthood, Pacific SouthWest.   After working so long in public service, in a sometimes super-charged and heated environment, it’s gratifying to get such wide spread support from all segments of the community!

I’m Todd Maddison, and like many of you I am a parent of Oceanside Unified kids.

My wife and I have three great kids who have gotten an excellent education in Oceanside.  Two are recent graduates (2018 and 2020) and are now studying at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, one is currently a junior at El Camino High School.

I’ve been involved in helping the District make our education system work better for our kids for years.   

If you're an “involved parent” in our district, we've probably met. 

You’re my kind of people, and the kind of parent we need to be heard in our district. 

Involved parents make for a district that pays more attention to parent desires - for their kids - and that's also what we need.

Unfortunately that does not always seem to be the case in Oceanside.

I’ve spent years attempting to get our District to hear – and take action on – the things that parents and teachers want for their kids education.

I was the first Parent Representative on the district’s Local Control Accountability Plan Committee, the co-leader of the District’s Parent Advisory Committee (a group required by  state law to provide feedback to the District), a member of the El Camino High Site council, and founding member of the Oside Parents 4 Kids PTO group.

I’ve also been involved at a state level, participating in the state’s “LCFF Test Kitchen” project to help redesign the budget process to be more transparent to parents (so they can see how their money is being spent), and also participated in a panel discussion held by The Opportunity Institute in Sacramento before members of the Legislature on Parent Involvement.

And I’ve done all this while, like you, working.  To support my family and put away money for college.

Most of my career was spent as a Customer Service executive for a national retailer with over $1 billion in annual sales.  We had to provide exceptional service in the market while at the same time being financially responsible - so we could keep our promise to our employees and provide them with paychecks and retirement fund contributions. 

I’ve also been the CEO of a company and in charge of Project Management for the US Division of a huge global conglomerate.   Both jobs involving managing budgets and “getting the details right”.  Not just sometimes, but all the time.

I have never had the luxury of working in Government, where I could ignore financial responsibility and just claim the problem was that we didn’t get enough tax dollars.   The buck has always stopped with me, no excuses.

I’ve never had the option to spend more than I had, or just cut from the services I provided to customers because I wanted to give raises to staff.  In my working career I’ve always had to prove to a customer they would get value from my company if they gave us their money.

During this time, while I was putting in 12 hours a day of 6 and 7 day weeks managing hundreds of employees and multi-million dollar budgets, my wife was doing more than her part to both make sure our kids were on track as well as to help others in our District.

Patty was a volunteer on the Ivey Ranch PTO, helping to organize innumerable fund raisers, promotion and award ceremonies, and a constant volunteer in classrooms and on field trips. 

And even well before that my experience, and my families experience in education goes far back.

My Grandmother was a teacher in North Dakota, and later served on the school board of the small town I was born in, Hibbing, MN.

I was raised by a single mother with two boys in a Minnesota town, on her secretary’s salary.  At one point we qualified for the free lunch program.  I packed sandwiches and sold many of those lunch tickets to raise additional money.

I lied about my age when I was 14 and started working, for cash (I hope the statue of limitations is out on that one!)

In High School, I was an investigative reporter for the school paper and did a series on inequities in educational funding in our school district.  Our paper was chosen number one in the country that year by the National High School Press Association.

Apologies for the boring recap, but the point is that it all adds up to a simple idea.

What we’ve been doing in this district for the last twelve years has not worked – our financial situation has been a mess, our parents are leaving in droves (enrollment drops every year), and our performance has been flat at best, declining in some areas.

We need someone whose background involves real accountability, someone who has had to make customers happy and still keep the budget in line, so that he could make payroll for his employees. 

And someone who understands what our less-fortunate parents and kids are going through in Oceanside.

We need change in Oceanside, we need to put our kids first in education.

We need a vote on our school board for the benefit of our kids, not for the benefit of our district.

Thanks for your help and support in that.

My philosophy is simple – we need to pay attention to what our parents and teachers want for our kids, and put our kids’ interests first in the decisions our District makes affecting our kids’ education.

For many years now we’ve seen the exact opposite.

In my time on the LCAP committee I was involved in designing the annual surveys and meetings that are held to get feedback from parents, teachers, staff, and students.  

The idea – as legally mandated in the Local Control Funding Formula legislation – is that our school districts are given the discretion to spend our state money in almost any way they want to, as long as they can prove they are using feedback from the community to guide that spending.

In Oceanside Unified’s case, they have done a great job of collecting that feedback.  Then they largely ignore that feedback and do what they want with your money.  Spending your tax dollars in ways that often result in a need to cut from the programs and services  for our kids and little or no improvement in education.

Many surveys, meetings, etc have set out some clear priorities from parents for what they would like to see from our district.

• Smaller class sizes
• Better instructional materials
• Better and more tech devices
• Enrichment classes
• Academic support
• Improved school facitlities
• Social Emotional learning and support
• School safety

And, to this list I would add higher pay for starting teachers, and better funding for classroom discretionay supplies, so teachers don’t have to pay out of pocket or beg parents for wet wipes and post-it notes.

Which of these things has the District actually done?  Almost nothing. 

I have spent years of my life attempting to work within the system to make these things happen.  My biography page here lists all the volunteer work I’ve done for the District in that, but all to little or no effect.

I have spoken in front of our Board 38 times (as of this writing) in the last five years, in most cases speaking out on behalf of one or more of these priorities. Standing up for the things that parents and teachers think are important for our kids.   Again all to little or no effect.

Our District simply does not listen when parents tell them what they want for their kids.

Who do they listen to?  Themselves.

While they cannot seem to find money to spend on parent and teacher priorities, they have no problem finding money to spend on themselves.

For example, over the last few years the financial situation for the district has been dire.  Several times they have been on the verge of being taken over by the state – because they could not project the ability to pay their bills in the future.

Last fall the situation was so critical they needed to cut the last bit of bus service still available, being provided to the poor Latino kids of the Crown Heights neighborhood.  They could not afford to continue spending the $144,000/year it cost to provide that service.

Then, just a few months later, at the December 17^th 2019 Board Meeting, the District showed projections that it expected to lose $7 million in the coming year.

In that same meeting the District proposed giving themselves extra raises.  Raises above and beyond the scheduled annual increases.  Raises that cost $5 million, on top of the projected $7 million deficit.

Raises that applied to District Administrators – a group whose total median compensation in 2019 was $158,000/year.

But yet they could not provide bus service to poor kids.

And the Board approved that, unanimously.

With no disclosure at all on what they were going to cut from our kids to pay for those raises.

Clearly we see the interests of the District come first, not our kids interests.

And we have seen this multiple times in the past – district first, not kids first.

The District will tell you their financial problems stem from a lack of funding from the state.

In reality, since 2012 (when we voted to increase funding for education in Prop 30), funding for OUSD schools has skyrocketed.

In 2012 we got $8,810/ADA. In 2019 that was $13,861/ADA

That's an increase of $5,051, or 57.33%. It works out to an annual increase of 6.69%/year, which is over 3 times the rate of inflation.

Last year OUSD got an average of $381,000 per classroom in funding.

But yet that’s not enough.  At least not enough to do what parents want, but apparently more than enough to give extra raises to all.

We need someone on our Board that will stand up and tell our District “no” when they request raises for themselves that result in cuts from our kids.

I’d like to be that person, I appreciate your support!

If you’d like to find out more about where I stand, I’m not one who is going to hide my opinions behind “politically correct” language.  I’m only a politician because I feel I have to be – for our kids.

You can see more at my website, http://todd4kids.com.    There’s a video there that recaps some of this as well.

Thanks for your time!

My name is Susana Arvizu. I am originally from california and  have been a resident of Oceanside for  eight years, I have four children, two of them atteded Oceanside school discrict. Some details about my background: I am a californian born in the bay area. My father was a veteran of the Korean war, retired in Mexico where I spent several years of my  life . i ws fortunate to  not only learn the language and culture but also  obtained   a bachelors degree in  education and even  teach for some years. 

I moved back to the California  in the early nineties and worked as a Bilingual Quality Analyist for a Educational Software Company . I married my husband of thirty years in 1990 . He is an engineer in an aerospace company.

Becasue my direct experience in education, my exposure to diverse cultures and  as a mother of a Special  Education child , I am conviced that I  can bring a different perspective as a trustee in the Oceanside board of Education, make a point in the future challenges in our schools and bring and Efficient, Inclusive, and Adapted education for the success of the students in my community.

• I am pro choice, believe in human rights, women rights,  social justice, racial  equality, environment protection,  gun control, science , respect for life.