Reject Georgia Acosta for Watsonville Planning Commission

Editor’s note: This letter was written to the Watsonville City Council.

We are Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice (PVESJ), a local grassroots coalition that has been organizing students, teachers, and community members at PVUSD for almost two years. 

In last November’s election, our group organized and mobilized PVUSD constituents to successfully vote out all three incumbent trustees, including former board president Georgia Acosta, and replace them with representatives who ran on platforms of care, accountability, and transparency to students and constituents.

We are writing to voice our strong opposition to the appointment of Georgia Acosta to the Watsonville city planning commission. In our time advocating for students and teachers at the PVUSD school board, we have witnessed Acosta act with a shocking lack of integrity and transparency, and demonstrate an utmost disregard and contempt for constituents and the students she was elected to serve. 

In addition to not replying to a single one of the emails or formal agenda requests sent by many members of our coalition over many months, she abused her power to actively suppress student and community voices, brazenly lie to constituents, staff and the media, violate state laws and processes, and ignore students’ interests in favor of her own agenda and authoritarian control.

These are just some of the actions and behavior we have witnessed from Georgia Acosta during her 2024 presidency on the PVUSD board:

• In March 2024, when dozens of students attended board meetings to advocate for their own education and the return of the ethnic studies contract, Acosta arbitrarily cut each speaker’s allotted time from two minutes to one, disregarding the published agenda in order to suppress student voices. 

• On March 27 2024, Acosta prevented a community member from reading a student’s written public comment on their behalf, despite the fact that this is a fairly common practice, particularly with students who may not be able to attend or speak in person. She violated the student’s right to have their voice heard and made it clear that she did not care about what they had to say. 

• Between May and July 2024, Acosta repeatedly rearranged meeting agendas, both through the formal published agenda and during the meeting itself, to delay the public comment item till later in the night. Without any explanation, she arbitrarily shifted public comment to occur after the consent agenda. Because it is hard for students to stay that late on school nights, this effectively silenced student voices as many had to leave before being able to make their comments.

• On June 12, 2024, Acosta changed the regularly scheduled board meeting to a special meeting with less than 48 hours notice, then tried to use that changed meeting status to override the published agenda and deny constituents the right to speak at public comment. She was opposed and overruled by her fellow trustees, who voted to let speakers give comment.

• On August 27, 2024 at a trustee candidate forum hosted by the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers, Acosta lied to teachers, claiming that the district’s ethnic studies contract had been cancelled due to funding reasons. PVFT’s vice-president publicly called out her lying behavior at the August 28, 2024 board meeting.

• On Sept. 25, 2024, Acosta walked out on a parent who had come to speak about his child being bullied at school. Rather than listen to a hurting parent’s concerns for two extra minutes, she chose to call an unscheduled recess and delay the board’s business by half an hour. She actively chose to waste her colleagues’ and constituents’ time in service of maintaining cruel authoritarian control of the meeting. 

• On Oct. 1, 2024, Acosta again lied to Lookout Santa Cruz reporter Hillary Ojeda, claiming that the district could not revisit its decision on the ethnic studies contract because of the proposed Assembly Bill 2918. This was a month and a half after AB 2918 was officially withdrawn by its authors. She did not respond to requests for clarification after her claims were shown to be blatantly untrue.

• On Oct. 23, 2024, Acosta as board president sat by and allowed her vice president Oscar Soto to verbally bully and berate Student Trustee Daniel Esqueda. Despite her regular policing of constituents’ behavior and respectfulness at board meetings, she tacitly supported the aggressive public bullying of a teenage PVUSD student by a fully grown adult trustee on her board, even as teachers, parents, community members, and other students defended the student trustee and voiced outrage at the public bullying. The student trustee later filed a formal complaint.

This list does not include Acosta’s previous actions that led to her formal censure in 2021, which Council Member Quiroz mentioned at the last city council meeting. 

These actions are well-documented in public records and in the media, but we want to highlight that in his support of the censure, Supervisor and former Watsonville Mayor Luis Alejo said, “Serving in public office is an honor, privilege, and an important responsibility. When there is an elected official who divides the community, loses public trust, repeatedly violates school board policies, causes unauthorized legal fees and regularly fails to attend public meetings, there comes a time when the PVUSD school board and the community must hold such incompetent persons accountable. Pajaro Valley students, parents, staff, and communities deserve better … Georgia Acosta’s record is one of the worst I’ve seen in all my years in politics by any elected official.”

We want to emphasize that there is a long and consistent record of unethical behavior that demonstrates Acosta’s gross unsuitability for any kind of public service. Any kind of private sector employee with such a horrendous track record would long be fired and disqualified from any form of rehire. 

Acosta’s actions completely destroyed any semblance of public trust and goodwill between the PVUSD board and the community, and was the primary cause of the escalating levels of public anger, disrespect, and disorder toward the board throughout 2024. The current PVUSD board is still struggling to recover and rebuild trust with students, community, and PVFT as a result of her legacy.

We believe that appointing Georgia Acosta to the city planning commission would severely damage public trust both in the planning commission and in the city council members who approved the appointment. For the sake of the Watsonville community and the public legitimacy of the city council, we strongly urge you to reject the appointment of Georgia Acosta to the planning commission, and also to reject any other future proposals to appoint her to any position of public service within Watsonville.