Las Lomitas Elementary School District (LLESD) Superintendent Dr. Beth Polito announced her retirement on Wednesday afternoon after serving the district for over five years.
This announcement follows the recent propagation of a petition calling for Polito’s resignation. The document, initiated by LLESD parent Christine Arnould on Oct. 9, cites a lack of support offered to staff, “excluding meaningful teacher representation and collaboration in curricular decisions and purchases,” “mismanaging [of] the district budget,” publication of “disparaging and untrue comments about the teacher’s union in the press,” an “inability to negotiate contracts in a timely matter, resulting in teachers working without contract since 2023,” among other issues.
The Las Lomitas Education Association (LLEA)—the district’s teacher’s union—has expressed similar concerns over administrative spending. “They [the administration] are going on these retreats to very nice, luxurious places as a team. They went this month to New York for a two-day meeting on first-grade phonics,” said LLEA co-president Jennifer Montalvo. “Those trips don’t impact students. Our perspective is that whatever financial trips that they’re taking that are coming out of our budget need to be cut to make sure that we are spending the money on student facing activities.” Montalvo also noted the creation of new, unnecessary administrative positions further depleted funding.
Polito denied the creation of additional administrative positions this year and defended an administrative trip to New York to attend a conference on first grade phonics. “That was an important trip to begin the process of figuring out how we were going to supplement our existing English language arts program with a phonics program,” she said. “It did include district administrators and a first grade teacher, and we made an effort to have a site administrator from each school site and then administrators who represent different components of the student population.”
The petition has accumulated 860 signatures in the past week.
“The trigger was the announcement and the special board meeting that took place this week,” Arnould said, referring to a resolution included in the agenda of a special board meeting that took place Oct. 9. The resolution proposed that any teacher who strikes will either be disciplined as the board sees fit or terminated. While both the board and Polito apologized, the motion—which violates the common practice of not disciplining those who practice their lawful right to strike—has inspired fear and mistrust in the community.
In Polito’s statement, she disclosed that she had planned to retire last year, but chose to proceed working following a cancer diagnosis. “While I’d intended to retire at the end of last school year, I was waylaid by a cancer diagnosis and didn’t want to end my 31-year career (14 as a superintendent) without having an opportunity to spend as much time as I could on campus,” she wrote.
Polito revealed she had shared her decision to retire with the LLESD board in September. Her tenure will end on Aug. 30, 2025.
