At its Tuesday public meeting, the San Diego Unified School Board approved a plan to appoint an interim trustee to replace former Trustee Marne Foster, who resigned last week after pleading guilty to receiving gifts in excess of the legal limit.
The remaining board members will appoint someone to fill Foster’s vacant seat for Sub-District E in the interim, SDUSD spokeswoman Linda Zintz told NBC 7 San Diego.
Current SDUSD Board President Michael McQuary held a news conference before the meeting, explaining that a special election is neither doable or economical.
Their staff was also able to give candidate recommendations, the public can comment on those choices and the board will then discuss and debate them. The board has 30 days to fill Foster's seat, which would give them until March 8.
They also plan to revisit their ethics training and policies to avoid repeating Foster’s case.
"We know that the public wants to understand what happened, they want to know what the issues were, they want clarity, they want confirmation," said McQuary. "And this district has worked to establish that. When there were questions about about employee actions, we had our internal investigations take a look at that."
A search warrant released Thursday revealed why Foster pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor count. In 2014, her son received money from a local couple to attend a theater camp in Seattle, as well as airfare there and back. They also provided him with roundtrip tickets to New York, where he was going to college, and paid for Foster to stay in a hotel there.
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Foster did not claim the gifts on her statement of economic interests to the Fair Political Practices Commission, though they were added on an amended form later. The amount donated exceeded the allowable legal limit.
After serving the search warrant to the school district, the District Attorney’s office announced it had opened a criminal investigation into Foster’s actions late last year. This came after the SDUSD board had initiated its own civil investigation.
The day they commissioned the investigation, the board members also honored Foster for the work she has done with the district. The move garnered criticism from community activists, who believe the board did not handle the situation ethically.
McQuary told NBC 7 the ceremony was the right thing to do and the board responded correctly with the information it had.
While she served as the president of the SDUSD board, Foster was also accused of creating an administrative shakeup at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, her son’s school, that left the principal reassigned and a counselor suspended.
Upset over a negative college evaluation written about her son, Foster told SDUSD Superintendent Cindy Marten that she wanted to sue the school district, Marten told San Diego County District Attorney investigators.
Later in the year, a $250,000 claim was filed against the SDUSD on behalf of Foster’s son, but it was not signed by his mother. Instead, the claim bore the name of John Marsh, the teen’s father who had been living with Foster and her children.
However, Marsh told the DA investigator that he did not write up the claim. According to the warrant, he remembered Foster coming up to him and demanding that he sign a blank complaint form.
Foster has denied any involvement in the claim.
The former trustee has said she made a mistake when she held a fundraiser for her sons’ college tuition, inviting people who conducted business with the school district and presented possible conflicts of interest.
