Complaint Review: Ron Kawaguchi Dinuba Unified School District

My complaint is about a slip-and-fall accident while working for a school district that resulted in illegal termination.  

I went to work as a computer technician at Dinuba Unified School District in the summer of 1998.  My goal was to work my way up to a computer network management position and that would take at least three years.  Getting my bachelor's degree, followed by Netware CNE certification, along with CompTIA A+ seemed like the right thing to do to make it happen.  Termination was something I did not see coming.

The job interview was the first clue I had that something was wrong.  My supervisor, Ron Kawaguchi, sat idle and didn't say much.  When I asked about the size of the newtwork, he coudn't tell me the exact machine count.  Not even an estimate.  This made it more difficult to decide about accepting the position because I knew that 50 to 100 machines was about all one man coould handle.  After I got hired, there were at least 225 of them spread out across the district with about nine servers, running a combination of Netware, Windows workstations, Macs, and one unix server.  That would take about four to six techs to maintain, unless someone really maxed out on automation, and they just kept buying computers and adding them to the network.

I felt a little sorry for the boss.  He was promoted into the role of network manager after only a year and a half and did not have any certifications with loading vegetable trucks as his previous job.  He wasn't even using Managewise to make the work go faster, so I informed him about it.  The users were poorly protected because of Ron's policy that anti-virus software was "too expensive".  When I suggested the free versions, he became upset and didn't want to take the time.  He often times got mad when I suggested best practices.

I found the communications to be old-fashioned.  We used forms for the work, not so much as ticket software.  The brands were not in alignment with easy maintenance since there were far too many.  Workstations were tricky because they were always changing and Kawaguchi didn't give me any disks or manuals when I arrived.  I almost felt like I should just change jobs because they were too far behind without enough manpower or money to fix what they had.  Overwhelmed with too many requests is understating it!

One day, after about six and a half months of work, I was walking up to the maintencance building at 1111 Magnolia Way when the Assitant Superintendant Ron Lyons told me that it was alright to walk on a freshly-poured cement slab.  Since the ground was muddy from light rain that morning, I stepped onto it carrying my tool bag and a dozen cinnamon rolls.  There was a thick sludge layer of grey slime that matched the color of the concrete that caused me to slide and fall on my right side, very hard.  My feet just shot sideways and I had a bruise on my ribs that felt like they were broken.  My back started hurting after I got up, took about three hours and felt like a buldging disk.  That would later be diagnosed as lumbago with an X-Ray and body scan.  The slab wasn't cleaned and prepared with tools the way it needed. Lyons had just pulled up the little flags around the thing.  

When Lyons walked by and heard the fall, he turned and said, "Oh great!  I pour fresh cement and you fall down on it!"

He then stompped off toward his office without offering me a hand getting up.  There were a few witnesses there, Mike and Les, standing with one or two others talking near an automobile.  I got up and tried to clean my self up, picking up my stuff and continuing to Kawaguchi's office.  He sent me to the district office where Kathy Jackson was for a service call.  A woman in the office where Kathy worked named Alice asked me questions about the fall and made a one-page note about it for future reference, although it wasn't in my HR file that I requested as per Federal Labor Code Section 1198.5.  Kathy saw the clothing and told me I should go back to Maintenance and use the dryer that the janitors had in the warehouse after using the sink to wash my pants.  In retrospect, they seemed to be covering the event since there wasn't any worker's comp claim and Lyons terminated me within days.

There was another event that I did not have full recall of that I reported to the Attorney General's office, complaint ID #3315, when I got date-rape drugged and beaten and tortured before being hospitalized at Alta Delta hospital.  I was placed back at work without being told what happened, so management must really have felt like they were working overtime to handle it all. Ron Lyons must have known about it before terminating me.

He called me into his office and asked me for my keys and pager.  He stated it again after I asked what this was about.  He claimed "removing icons from the desktop" of Georgia Davidian's computer at the high school where Lyons was Principal for seventeen years.  That was a recent job that Kawaguchi had sent me to do. I told Lyons that Kawaguchi and I had a personality conflict.  Lyons did not have a paycheck ready and told me I could go home or stay the rest of the day, then he opened his office door to greet the union rep named Edna and told me he had a meeting with her now as he pushed me out the door.  I went to a few co-workers and told them that I thought Kawaguchi never really wanted me there and might have helped to do this before going home.

Lyons then called and told me that he was "waiting for that letter of resignation because the vacation days are using up" implying that they lied about my departure.  He was pushing for one, even though it was illegal termination.  I wasn't sure, but felt like I would be better off just moving on and typed one up.  I later learned that this was called "constructive discharge" when a worker just moves themselves on due to too many problems in the workplace.

I had back pain that would come and go, but after a sports therapy session, I felt pretty good and continued to look for work.  My back wasn't 100%, but I figured that I wanted my career back on track. Unfortunately, it wouldn't get there.  There just were not any opportuinities for a computer technician in Fresno or close by, so I had to change careers.

Last year in 2014, I wanted to inform the new management about these issues and learned that I could request a formal investigation into anything I had a problem with, due to HR regulations.  So that is what I did, but they just sent letters denying to conduct one due to the age of events.  I thought I was giving them what they needed to uncover wrongdoing against me and possible others in the district, but Joe Hernandez and Marti Kochevar didn't want to delve into it.

I would like the school administration, or anyone else, to hire a private investigator and work with an investigative journalist to uncover the criminal wrongdoing that went on and talk about it in print, in interviews for television and radio and internet so that the public will know how their money is being wasted and I was getting targeted at work.