Public employees are hired with a fundamental promise to the taxpayer: to execute specific, defined, duties that serve a broader community mission. Santa Barbara County Superintendent of Schools Susan Salcido has publicly stated that she welcomes input as an opportunity to improve.
The reality, operating behind closed doors under her administration, however, tells a starkly different story.
Public employees must be able to do the job they were hired and described to do; if they are systematically prevented from executing those responsibilities, the mission of the organization fundamentally fails. At the Santa Barbara County Education Office (SBCEO), a broken operational model has emerged under Superintendent Salcido’s leadership that perfectly illustrates this failure, one where taxpayers are effectively being double-billed because the administration refuses to manage its own workforce.
This crisis begins at the top. When executive leadership lacks the capability, technical literacy, or willingness to effectively empower their own teams, they frequently turn to outsourcing as a crutch. Under Salcido’s administration, Associate Superintendent Steve Torres and IT Manager Sheryl Pognant have built a system that actively sidelines highly qualified internal specialists.
Rather than cultivating internal expertise, this leadership team quietly hands over critical infrastructure functions to a private contractor. Internal staff were explicitly hired with job descriptions that require them to manage and secure the organization’s network, yet they are often locked out of the very systems they were employed to protect.
The financial waste of this practice is staggering. The agency pays its internal salaried staff to perform specialized work, but simultaneously pays an external vendor up to $225 per hour to actually do it. That external vendor is paid a massive premium to execute the exact same responsibilities explicitly written into the internal staff’s job descriptions, such as basic firewall administration and network configuration. Taxpayers are footing the bill twice: once for the sidelined public employee who is left severely underutilized, and again for the high-priced private consultant.
This reflects a deeper, systemic stagnation that plagues the broader government sector: the widening gap between what an agency needs to function and what its leadership is capable of understanding. Under Salcido’s administration, job descriptions for top administrative roles remain woefully out of date, referencing obsolete programming languages rather than modern operational necessities. When an organization’s listed duties no longer align with modern realities, and when leadership’s capabilities no longer meet their duty requirements, the entire agency stagnates.
Outsourcing Staff Duties is Breach of Public Trust
And instead of aligning the job to the description or updating the organization’s capabilities, this administration has chosen to protect a broken system. When inquiries are made and public records requests are filed to follow the money, the agency hides the receipts. Under the administration’s direction, Ms. Pognant, Mr. Torres, and their legal counsel use heavy redactions to obscure basic spending details, equipment models, and vendor involvement. They rely on vague excuses to justify their secrecy, using public records laws as a shield to sweep mismanagement under the rug rather than opening their books to the community.
We must look at this from a broader perspective. This level of opaqueness and inefficiency under Superintendent Salcido is not just an IT problem; it is a profound breach of public trust. When the public assumes their tax dollars are funding capable public servants carrying out their defined roles, only to discover those duties are being outsourced at premium rates due to internal leadership failures, skepticism about government takes root.
Today, technology is too critically important to be mismanaged in the dark. Public service is a responsibility. When an administration prioritizes protecting a broken status quo over capable, transparent governance, it fails the community it was built to serve.
Core Concern: Efficiency and Effectiveness
As I reviewed CompuVision’s billing patterns over the years, I noticed a recurring theme: purchases that approached, but rarely exceeded, competitive bid thresholds. While staying under bid limits is legally compliant, it raises questions about whether we’re achieving the best value for taxpayer dollars.
The concern isn’t that CompuVision’s services are, in total, unnecessary, but rather that we’re not exploring whether the same outcomes could be achieved more cost-effectively. When invoices
consistently land just under procurement thresholds, it suggests a concerted effort to work projects based on the upper limit vs. based on the need.
More troubling is the overlap between expensive external labor and the job descriptions of internal staff. When we pay $175-$250 per hour for vendor technicians while our own certified staff, already on payroll at $40-$55 per hour, are prevented from performing the same work, we’re essentially paying twice for the same service. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s demoralizing to professional staff who watch vendors perform the duties they were hired and trained to do.
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Victor McConnell is a former SBCEO Computer/Network Technician who advocates for infrastructure modernization, strict taxpayer accountability, and equitable resources in public education.
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