After an auspicious beginning five years ago, it seems that the UPCC, United Parents of Culver City, is going the way of every local parent coalition put together by a small group of citizens to achieve specific goals by getting their leaders elected to office.

It appears the UPCC website has not been updated for well over a year. One prominent announcement proclaims that the public can “Meet Our New Superintendent” on June 28. It turns out, this announcement is not for our newest interim superintendent, Leslie Lockhart. It is for last year’s announcement to meet-and-greet then newly hired Dr. Joshua Arnold. He is the same leader whose contract was terminated soon after the end of the school year.

Numerous other out-of-date articles from previous years still are on its website.

After joining the UPCC at its inception, I described my feelings in an editorial. I thought, in reading about its objectives, that it could turn into something very special locally, something worthwhile in joining and supporting. I had hoped it would turn into more than what other previous citizen groups became: Only an election vehicle.

But when I went to its first public meeting and saw its leaders making what sounded more like campaign speeches, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake in joining.

One local reporter sheepishly asked me after the meeting what I thought of the new organization. “Ask me next year, if I re-up my membership,” I said. True to my initial misgivings, I have yet to renew my membership!

Keeping up a website is very time consuming.  Why should they keep it up- to-date. The parents’ union leadership has achieved their primary goal. They got themselves elected to the School Board, and for the last three years they have had a like-minded majority in making many far-reaching District decisions.

How long they can stay in control of the Board remains to be seen. Unless the UPCC can continue to morph itself into something that resonates with the new generation of young, millennial parents moving into Culver City, it, like other short-lived parents’ groups of the past, will fade to obscurity. These incoming parents will want to elect their own generation to have a say in the District’s decision-making process, based on their own parental wants and their children’s needs.

Mr. Laase may be contacted at GMLaase@aol.com