Nine eligible people have applied for the Trustee Area 1 vacancy on the Orange Unified School District Board of Education (which was created by the resignation of Trustee Diane Singer last month):

1. Barbara Christiano
2. Andrew Fisher
3. Roberto Flores de Apodaca
4. Christopher Nguyen
5. Kenneth Rulon
6. Gregory Salas
7. Alan Trudell
8. Victoria Webber
9. Andrea Yamasaki

Area 1 is entirely within Anaheim Hills; click here for a map.

At its 7:00 p.m.  meeting this evening, the OUSD Board will decide on the date, time and process for making a provisional appointment to fill the vacancy. An appointment has to be made by September 29, or else a special election will take place by default.

According to state law, even if the vacancy is filled by appointment, a special election can still be forced via citizen petition:

A petition shall be deemed to bear a sufficient number of signatures if signed by at least the number of registered voters of the district equal to 1 1/2 percent of the number of registered voters of the district at the time of the last regular election for governing board members, or 25 registered voters, whichever is greater.

I don’t know how many OUSD voters there were on November 4, 2014, but today that number is 105,785. So a successful petition would need about 1,600 valid signatures.

There were 105,848 registered voters in OUSD on November 4, 2014. Consequently, 1,587 valid signatures would be necessary to force a special election.

I recognize the names of some of the applicants. Chris Nguyen works on the staff of Supervisor Todd Spitzer, co-owns the OC Political blog and is also a campaign consultant. He ran for the Area 1 seat in 2010, losing to Diane Singer.

Kenneth Rulon is the former police chief for both Colton and Montebello. He was fired by the Montebello City Council in July 2010; Rulon sued and the city paid him $130,000 in late 2012 to settle the suit. Rulon had also been fired in April 2007 as Colton police chief, after all four lieutenants and 83 of the 89 Colton Police Department employees voted “€˜no confidence” in him. €Five years later, a jury found against him in a wrongful termination suit against the city. Rulon is now proprietor of a private investigation firm, is a director of the Anaheim Hills chapter of National Junior Basketball, and is Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait’s next door neighbor.

Roberto Flores de Apodaca is the psychologist whose findings that now-controversial Judge Marc Kelly relied upon to shave 15 years off the 25-year sentence of Kevin Jonas Rojano-Nieto, the 20-year who was convicted last year of sexually molesting a 3-year-old female relative. From the OC Register:

After the jury’s guilty verdict in December, Kelly used an independently-appointed psychologist to aid in his sentencing decision, Puthawala said. The psychologist, Dr. Roberto Flores de Apodaca, found that Rojano-Nieto was not a pedophile and not a sexual predator. Testing revealed a low risk for recidivism, he said.

“As the defense has noted, he is a confused young man who acted inappropriately in an instant with immensely damaging ramifications for the victim, his family and himself,” the judge said in court documents.

Dr. Apodaca ws also a witness in the trial of the Fullerton police officers who fatally beat homeless man Kelly Thomas in 2011, according to the LA Times:

A doctor who wrote a report on Thomas following the assault on his grandfather, which concluded he likely sustained damage to his cognitive functions due to chronic drug use, is also expected to testify. Dr. Roberto Flores de Apodaca wrote that Thomas told him he used methamphetamines and did “a lot” of LSD up until 1994.

A toxicology report found that Thomas didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in his system the night of the beating.

Froeberg ruled, however, that if Dr. Flores de Apodaca could prove the damage was permanent and irreversible, “it might explain the demeanor of Mr. Thomas on the night of the incident.”

We’ll update readers as more information becomes available.