The Morongo Unified School District is contracting its workforce, including, it appears, an unknown number of teachers.
The bloodletting includes the specified layoffs of 13, together with the elimination of 29 currently unfilled posts. The school board made those decisions at its February 13 meeting.
The district entails Condor Elementary School, Friendly Hills Elementary School, Joshua Tree Elementary School, Landers Elementary School, Morongo Valley Elementary School, Oasis Elementary School, Onaga Elementary School, Palm Vista Elementary School, Twentynine Palms Elementary School, Yucca Mesa Elementary School, Yucca Valley Elementary School, LaContenta Middle School, Twentynine Palms Junior High School, Black Rock High School, Twentynine Palms High School and Yucca Valley High School.
Eleven instructional assistants, a campus supervisor and a school office technician are to be handed pink slips. Those positions are at schools throughout the district, according to officials, who did not specify which schools each of the individual employees are working at.
Further, again without being specific, the district is to end its contractual relationship with an unspecified number of certificated employees, meaning teachers, counselors, librarians, media specialists, psychologists, process coordinators, principals, assistant principals and department directors.
The move brought objections and protests from district employees, some of whom emphasized that the district’s schools were in need of more instructors and student support personnel, rather than fewer. In addition, teachers complained, last month the school board signed off on providing Superintendent Patricio Vargas and other top administrators raises.
District employees told the Sentinel they were thrown by the district’s claim that the expiration of additional funding the district received for response to the COVID outbreak more than three years ago had triggered the need for the layoffs. One employee said the district should be solvent, since the epidemic crisis had elapsed and the district had ceased in-class instruction when the pandemic was at its apex two-and-a-half years ago, which reduced school maintenance and other costs at the time. Some federal funding should have been salted away into the district’s reserves, the employee said.
According to the district, the employees and instructors to be laid off were hired on provisional conditions, and they fully understood that their positions were not permanent ones.
The district received $33,730,581 in funding through the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund put in place after the COVID crisis hit, or $3,977.19 per pupil. The district used some of that money to provide make-up instruction and assistance to students who had fallen behind as a consequence of the COVID-19 school closures that began in the spring of 2020 and continued throughout most or all of the 2020-2021 school year.
It is the teachers with less seniority who will be laid off under the traditional “last hired, first fired” policy.
According to Superintendent Vargas, he and the assistant superintendents who were given raises in January have earned and deserve those pay enhancements, particularly when compared to those in comparable positions in nearby districts.
Vargas, who left the Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District as superintendent there to come to Morongo Unified in July 2022, did not specify his own pay grade, which includes a yearly salary of $222,413.44, perquisites and pay-add ons of $6,192, benefits of $73,895.42 for a total annual compensation of $302,500.86. He will see his total compensation jump to $374,496.73
Among his assistant superintendents, according to Vargas, the highest paid is now receiving $189,389 yearly. Pursuant to the raise, that compensation will escalate to $234,464 per year.
The board, consisting of Robert Hamilton, John Cole, Kerri Condley, Christopher Claire and Roberta Meyers, unanimously voted to approve the layoffs.

Jason Landver and Alan Greenburg have withdrawn their appeal of the San Bernardino County Planning Commission’s rejection eleven months ago of their proposal to establish a resort hotel in the desert community of Wonder Valley.
On March 23, 2023, four members of the county planning commission – Kareem Gongora, Michael Stoffel, Matthew Slowik and Jonathan Weldy – devoted four hours 37 minutes and 45-seconds to considering the San Bernardino County Land Use Services staff’s recommendation of approval and the presentation of the project made by Landver and a team of development consultants along with the input of 47 residents of the area or their advocates who inveighed against the project. Commissioner Melissa Demirci was absent from the meeting.
Landver and Greenberg’s proposal called for constructing a 106-room hotel, to include an all-night restaurant, spa/wellness center, conference hall and event center, a 6,000-square foot swimming pool, hot tubs, outdoor showers, a 180,000-gallon water tank and a 205-space parking lot on 24.4 acres situated on 223 acres they have acquired centered on a point identified as located at 78201 Amboy Road, not too distant from the southwest corner of Amboy Road and Gammel Road.
The county’s land use services division’s personnel assigned to the project, consisting of Senior Planner Azhar Khan and Supervising Planner Chris Warrick, were favorably disposed toward the proposal, and they recommended that the planning commission recommend approval of the undertaking to the board of supervisors. Board of supervisors approval of the project would be required for the project to proceed because, of the 24.4 acres that are to be developed, only 3.18 acres are currently zoned for service commercial use, which is consistent with a resort. The remaining 21.22 acres are zoned for residential development, with a requirement that each dwelling unit be located on a five-acre lot. Only the board of supervisors has the authority to grant the required zone change, conditional use permit and policy land use amendment Landver and Greenberg sought.
While Gongora, Stoffel, Slowik and Weldy seemed, by the tenor of some of the comments to be favorably disposed toward the resort concept,things went awry for Landver and Greenburg when Landver gratuitously and presumptively made an assertion suggesting he and Greenberg had an absolute “right” to develop the project as they proposed it and that the commission, board of supervisors and county had no discretion with regard to the project approval or terms of approval. Things worsened for the proponents when it was revealed that the team of development specialists Landver and Greenberg hired to usher the project past the planning staff and planning commission, which included the politically well-connected David Mlynarski and his assistant, Julie Gilbert, made misrepresentations about the presence of endangered desert tortoises on the subject property and those development consultants then made a personal attack on the biologist who found evidence of those tortoises’ presence, questioning his ethics, apparently because they felt that by withholding payment to him for that study, they could prevent him from publishing his findings.
The assertion by Mlynarski and Gilbert that the biologist had acted unethically by refusing to keep his survey results under wraps and providing a copy of the study he completed to entities that had not paid for it, coupled with a threat by Gilbert to blackball the biologist, Ed LaRue, with the development industry appeared to have sorely offended the commission members, who took the effort to bury the evidence of the endangered tortoises being present on the property as an affront and an attack on the integrity of the county’s land use approval process.
Ultimately, Weldy, Slowik Stoffel and Gongora declined to make any recommendation to the board of supervisors, which was tantamount to a project denial.
Landver and Greenberg appealed the passive denial to the board of supervisors.
In communications with members of the Wonder Valley community, Aron Liang of the San Bernardino County Land Use Services Department informed them that an email from Jason Landver informed county officials that he and Greenberg had decided to “pull the appeal” of the planning commission’s denial of the project. It thus seems the project, as was previously proposed will not be pursued.
Landver and Greenberg still own significant acreage in Wonder Valley. In the email to the county land use services division, Landver stated, “We intend to find a path forward in developing a project that adds beauty, jobs, and place where people can connect with the landscape.”
Wonder Valley residents are continuing to monitor the situation. One of those told the Sentinel they take action if a new proposal is contrary to or conflicts with the Countywide Plan and the Wonder Valley Community Action Guide.

The Union Pacific Railroad Company has purchased outright the MHX transportation services operation, which lies within the shadow of what was the Auto Club Speedway, it was announced last week.

Union Pacific, last spring, made the acquisition for a reported $75 million in the immediate aftermath, of Ross Perot Jr., Dallas-based Hillwood Development Company and Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis Investment Management acquiring the 433-acre speedway property with the intention of turning it into a logistics center.

The MHX property, located at 13600 Napa Street, spans 118,984 square feet, or just under 2.73 acres. It contains a warehouse/industrial complex where highly involved operations for the maintenance and perpetuation of logistics and transportation activity takes place.
That activity includes handling various types of railcars as well as conveying large volumes of heavy commodities, including steel, lumber, pipe, aluminum, zinc, liquid bulk, dry bulk, food grade, and finished goods.
MHX previously had 10 facilities which, according to corporate statements, “partnered with dedicated carriers to transport material from California to Mexico” and had “the ability to handle all commodities moved through rail distribution in the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, and Stockton.”

Its in-house transportation services involved a large flatbed truck fleet with ability to handle various commodities safely through local distribution in Southern California and Northern California along with state wide trucking, a liquid tank fleet in Southern California and what the company termed a “light weight tractor trailer combination” with fleet load weight ranges from 48,000 pound to 56,000 pound gross load weight.
The company, operating from different sites in coordination with the Fontana site also provided port services, extending to container movement, devanning of heavy weight and standard weight containers and access to direct movement off of various break bulk terminals in Port of Long Beach/Los Angeles and Port of Stockton locations.
In particular, MHX specialized in heavy weight container drayage and warehousing. Drayage is the transfer of shipborne containers to rail carriers or trucks or vice-versa for delivery to an ultimate or penultimate destination. As such, MHX has experience in import and export involving movements out of the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach in the heavy weight corridor.
In making the purchase, which involved Jim Vena, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Vincent McLeod III, representing the sellers, Budway Enterprises and MHX, Union Pacific paid $630 per square foot for the property.

The facility is to remain as a transload facility. Despite the sale taking place nearly 11 months ago, it was not made public until recently. It is unclear whether the personnel who previously were employed at the facility by MHX are to be transitioned into similar positions with Union Pacific. Under its MHX incarnation, the facility serviced trains operated by both Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.