The Long Beach Unified School District board of trustees butted heads on Wednesday over whether to publicly share a letter from the president of Cal State Long Beach that influenced how board members planned to vote on a proposed resolution.
The resolution aims to reinstate the original intent of the Long Beach College Promise, a 2008 agreement, which guaranteed CSULB admission to all district students who met Cal State University minimum requirements.
Since the Long Beach College Promise was made, CSULB has raised the bar for admittance, as its pool of qualified applicants has grown. Long Beach high school seniors no longer gain automatic acceptance by meeting the CSU minimum requirements.
The resolution asks CSULB to reinstate the original, looser requirements and calls on the CSU Chancellor to include CSULB as a direct admission campus, invoking Senate Bill 640, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in October. The law provides direct, automatic admission to the CSU system to California high school graduates who meet the minimum requirements.
But because CSULB does not have available capacity, it will be exempt from the law, along with five other CSU campuses, a spokesperson for the Chancellor’s Office said.
As school board President Diana Craighead turned to the resolution on the agenda, she announced that board members had received a letter from CSULB President Andrew Jones. Yet audience members were left guessing at the letter’s contents until Board Member Maria Isabel López spoke.
Jones “has concerns that the resolution comes without prior consultation with CSULB,” López said. She recommended a pause on voting “because the letter he did send is very clear that he would like to discuss it before we move forward.”
López began reading the letter aloud, but before she could finish the first line, Craighead objected, saying the author of the letter may not have intended for it to be shared publicly.
The letter, which CSULB later shared with the Long Beach Post, asked the school board to defer action in order to provide a chance to further discuss the issues at the heart of the resolution: “the intent and scope of SB640; the impacts relative to the existing Promise, and how the CSU can legally implement the bill systemwide,” Jones wrote.
He added that he was concerned that the resolution could have unintended consequences on a current program — Promise to the Beach — which CSULB is already piloting for the district’s high school seniors who have completed A-G requirements but don’t meet the higher standard for admission.
López said these concerns were important to share publicly. “Since we hold public office, isn’t this public?” López asked the district’s general counsel, Jeffrey Riel, who told her: “There’s no legal restriction from reading the contents of that letter.”
David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said Riel was “exactly correct” in this assessment. “They’re not required to read it out loud into the record,” Loy said, “but there’s no reason that they can’t.” Further, the Brown Act, a California law governing local government bodies, including school boards, requires that the letter be made available to any member of the public who requests it.
Yet Craighead voiced her opinion against the letter’s disclosure; “It sets a dangerous precedent,” she said. “It means that whatever letter we receive can be read in public.” The board did not share the contents at the meeting and took no action on the resolution.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it is fair to selectively read some letters, Loy said. “But as a matter of law,” he said, reading one letter out loud “does not mandate that they read every letter out loud.”