San Rafael Saga: Nothing Unites Us More than Hatred

Concerned parent Alex Jimenez holding protest sign outside of a mediation meeting with San Rafael Elementary School parents and school officials. Photo Doug Forbes

SEPTEMBER 21, 2022

THIS IS AN opinion piece based upon what I witnessed AT The 9/20 meeting. A detailed feature article is coming soon, replete with parent interviews, public records investigations and more.

Other than the fluorescent lighting and cheerless chairs and tables, nothing was typical about the cafeteria at Pasadena’s Blair Middle School on Tuesday.

Roughly 150-plus San Rafael Elementary School parents occupied the space. A handful of them huddled with their children. Everyone was there to feast on something very different than a sandwich and soda.

We all know the details by now. A neighbor in Pasadena’s tony San Rafael Hills neighborhood dialed police dispatch on an otherwise lovely Sunday morn. His assessment of a sketchy looking figure climbing the San Rafael Elementary School fence was entirely erroneous. A devoted, underpaid custodian happened to be working overtime and the neighbor saw it all wrong or something worse — go figure.

Nonetheless, the police overreacted. Go figure.

But so did the school’s principal. And so did a private security service. And so did the Mayor. And so did the City Manager. And so did other government gatekeepers. And so did school parents and we adults in general.

San Rafael principal Rudy Ramirez had arrived on scene after the police exited. A private security guard used his body cam to capture video of Ramirez who called women bitches and nosy punks, weighed the worthiness of wetbacks and whites and said neighbors better not fuck with him off-hours. His words, not mine.

Ramirez’s punishment: a month off and a handful of rather half-hearted apologies steeped in caveats.

Fast forward to the Blair cafeteria spectacle which, a month later, played out as some performative exercise brimming with sermons of water-under-the-bridge and nothing-more-to-see-here. “It is time to heal and move forward, and the first step is a dialogue to process what occurred and its impact on the school,” said District Superintendent Brian McDonald.

Thus was the night’s convening of parents for a bewildering mashup where hope and reality devolved into estranged bedfellows.

While most parents filtered into the staging area, roughly two dozen moms, dads and children wielded bullhorn, signs and chants to lambaste defiant Ramirez supporters, the superintendent, the principal and the process by which both of those men (mis)handled the dogfight to date.

Mediators for the evening included John Williams, apparently an attorney but also a director for the Fellowship Center where they are “improving life for all people through spiritual transformation.” His co-mediator was Eric Johnson, a pastor at New Abbey Church, “A Jesus community, telling the biggest story of God in Los Angeles.”

Why were they selected to mediate? Who selected them? And although they did not proselytize, why are church-related reps entangled in the the goings on of a secular public school?

And where was a single woman mediator? After all, someone should stand up for those “nosy fucking punks” and “motherfucking bitches,” shouldn’t they? More on that in a moment.

Deputy Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco clearly did not assume such a role. In fact, she might has well have worn a t-shirt embroidered with “Rudy’s Our Guy!”

Her intermittent verbal cheerleading for the principal was not even obliquely bipartisan. “We can’t take all the good work [Principal Ramirez] has done and simply dismiss it,” she said. “He has handled crises in many good ways.”

McDonald and his cohorts determined that the best way to handle this particular crisis was to tell parents they were not allowed to speak. They instructed their adherents to write questions on note cards which McDonald and Ramirez would answer.

So, the very guy partially responsible for sparking division with hate speech gets the mic. Everyone else, keep you mouths shut. And by the way, through documents I have acquired, this is not Ramirez’s first rodeo with such hate speech at school.

Apparently, McDonald, Ramirez and Blanco endowed themselves as the only persons worthy of an actual voice… and a microphone to prove it. They relegated 150 adults to nothing more than the likes of dutiful middle school students following instructions for a pop quiz.

After an initial kerfuffle between disparate parental factions, McDonald and company effectively muzzled voices and commenced whitewashing for two hours. Healing and moving forward collapsed into a pageant of odious spin doctoring.

This was not how healing looks. This was not how moving forward looks. This was not how a publicly funded institution should function. This was not a democratic dance. This was a talking to. This was a sales pitch, not a dialog.

This was malignance.

One note card question requested that Ramirez explain why he said a school parent was ”a nosy fucking bitch.” Ramirez said, “I didn’t say that.”

Ramirez had clearly prepped for moments like this when he could carefully dissect and deny words, because he was right… technically. He actually said, on video, “She is a nosy fucking punk.” Moments later on tape, however, he did call a female neighbor “a [mother]fucking bitch.”

This is malignance.

Ramirez’s opening atonement was brittle at best, but his answers throughout the evening were an exercise in deflection and breathless self-service. “I have been receiving overwhelmingly positive comments from people”… “neighborhood relations are better than ever over the last few years”… “I established rules for the maestras [teachers] to treat the kids like their own”… “This incident had nothing to do with students—I didn’t know parents pulled their children out of this school”… “I’m a doctoral candidate studying race and power.”

This is malignance.

And then there’s Superintendent McDonald who could have simply pressed the rewind button all night long. Asked multiple times in multiple ways about what it would take to terminate a principal, he said “Yes, the buck stops with me. But, I had to weigh the facts that were presented to me.” Rinse and repeat roughly a half dozen more times.

So, I will answer for him. It’s acceptable for a Pasadena Unified School District principal to call women nosy fucking punks and motherfucking bitches and make various other disparaging race-fueled comments — which I will detail in a forthcoming article — as long as that principal is willing to suffer a slap on the wrist and a few indifferent mea culpas.

This is malignance.

There was one relatively encouraging note, however. McDonald and I spoke a couple days before the meeting. I asked him what he felt about my reporting that the video of Ramirez was likely illegal. He said he was concerned. During the meeting, however, he offered a far less measured statement.

“This video taken without consent was a violation of trust, which makes it hard to continue a relationship with Metro Patrol.” According to documents I have acquired, however, the problem is that McDonald and the Board pushed for a no-bid contract from Metro Patrol. They also accepted contract terms that were vague at best.

Oh, and the owner of Metro Patrol happens to be a former Pasadena cop. Yes, the plot thickens.

This is malignance.

And then there’s the tumultuous tug of war between Team Rudy and Team Fire Rudy. The tightening of face muscles, the bitter eyes, the quick-trigger temperaments, the trading of barbs… all of it contributes to a wide line drawn in the sand and a host of fractured relationships among former friends. Not to mention, a host of crestfallen parents have pulled 15 students out of the school due to their fears of an environment which, they said, suffocated them and their children.

This is malignance.

I’m extremely familiar with malignance. I trade in it every day through the work I do. I live it out every day through the grief I endure. I understand the language all too well, solely because of the hand I have been dealt.

Dead child. Then dead wife. Then dead mother. All in one nearly fell swoop.

I live in a house of ghosts, where a little girl’s laughter echoes wall to wall. Where the future in her pupils was snuffed out by adults who savaged the most basic principle of life—protect and promote our most vulnerable.

I don’t get to meet my girl at the back gate of the San Rafael playground minutes after a school day sets, when each of us raced to the other with runaway love. I don’t get to marvel at our homework sessions where she would break new ground every day. I don’t get to cradle her while we learn how to read bedtime stories after bath time.

I no longer get to see my wife set the example for my daughter of what inside-and-out beauty and power and benevolence truly look like and act like.

So when I sat there among the malignance last night, all I wanted to do was jump upon a tabletop and scream at the top of my lungs, “Do you see what you adults are doing to one another? Do you see what you are doing to your sons and daughters? Do you see the carefully practiced and controlled environment to which you are being subjected, largely by men? Do you have any idea how meaningless this noise is and how meaningful it is to be true to the facts laid bare before you? You have your children. You have each other. How dare you act this way to one another.”

I also pondered whether I should have said, “Hey dads of San Rafael, what if Ramirez called your wife a motherfucking bitch? What if Ramirez called your daughter a nosy fucking punk? Would that still be OK for you?”

I, of course, did not stand on ceremony in that m0ment.

Soon after lessening my grip on the daydream, I concentrated on a restless toddler in the back of the room. As toddlers do, he was at once crying and giggling and squealing and squirming and disrupting and learning how to be a human. He was harnessing the world about him to become the human that both nurture and nature will bestow.

Every adult in that room last night was that toddler in a previous life chapter. Those days often seem like an hour ago. I, and I’m sure many of you too, can speak to the idea that life makes no guarantees about our endurance. But while we do endure, we should do our level best to not beset malignance upon another and to not excuse it away when we do, especially where it concerns the ones we cherish or revere or pay for through hard-earned tax dollars.

As a person, I don’t pretend to have any particularly exceptional skill set or nuanced thinking or moral purity. And as a journalist-writer, I don’t expect to publish especially noteworthy narratives on the human condition. But what I do have is the memory of a little girl that, in only six short years, stirred my soul to the point where I pen pieces like this to remind me, and maybe a few others, how our children are watching us adults very closely.

I watched Tuesday’s meeting through the lens of both child and adult. Both optics afforded the very essence of tribalistic, narcissistic, cannibalistic muck. Everyone should remember that the folks with the mics that night are actually the employees of the folks in the seats. And those in the seats paid for that night in more ways than mere taxes.

They’re paying with young lives. They’re paying with futures. They’re paying with unsettling obedience to unacceptable norms.

Chekhov said, “Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.” Tonight was not a healing. Tonight was a common hatred for something… the hatred of truth, of fact, of reason, of equity. It was also the shoring up of an unbridled embrace of us versus them.

The question is, who is going to take the mic and actually say something that finally makes it better?