School board trustee Michael Ellis has had a warrant out for his arrest since August 2008—just one more thing nobody has known about him

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that Michael Shane Ellis, whom voters had no choice but to elect in April 2006, has now become the most curious, most confounding, most sought-after member of the Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education, perhaps ever. How did this guy get so popular?

Well, he’s not—not now, anyway. When he was sworn into office three years ago, Ellis had just coasted to a somewhat amazing victory over incumbent school board trustee Suja Lowenthal (more on that in a minute). Yet, instead of wowing us with the sort of up-from-the-classroom insight you might expect from a teacher—and a teachers-union-backed candidate—sources say Ellis has spent the succeeding 36 months distancing himself from some colleagues and outright alienating others.

Which is not to say he’s not wanted—in a manner of speaking.

Ellis is a wanted man; he has been for 11 months now—since Aug. 28, 2008 when Torrance Superior Court Judge Sandra Thompson revoked his probation for an Oct. 2006 arrest in Redondo Beach and subsequent conviction on two misdemeanors: a hit-and-run and driving on a suspended license. That same day, the court issued a $15,000 bench warrant for Ellis’ arrest.

Since then, Ellis—like no other elected official in modern Long Beach history—began going to bed with a price on his head. Every night, even after he was evicted last fall from his Alamitos Beach-area apartment for failing to pay his rent and had moved downtown.

Amazingly, no one has known this. Not his fellow school board members, not the media, not the district superintendent, not the leader of the teachers union—not even the Chamber of Commerce CEO who raised and spent $50,000 in an unsuccessful attempt to recall Ellis.

But they do now, thanks to the phone calls The District Weekly made to ask them about Ellis’ fugitive status.

“Oh! No wonder he doesn’t come to board meetings,” says Long Beach Unified School District Board of Education President Mary Stanton.

“Oh, God. I didn’t know that. That’s pretty serious stuff. That’s not good,” says Long Beach Unified School District Superintendent Chris Steinhauser. “The way I understand, a bench warrant means that they can arrest you at any time. It’s an active issue.”

Yes, that is what it means, and an officer of the court has confirmed that Ellis’ warrant is very much active.

“Oh wow. Okay. You learn something new every day,” Steinhauser says. “That’s something I think I’m going to have to share with legal counsel. You’ve given me a homework assignment.” But does this explain why Ellis—who earns $18,000 a year if he attends every school board meeting he’s supposed to—hasn’t attended one since May 5? Perhaps. But attendance has never been Ellis’ strong point. He has missed one-fifth of all board meetings since he took office in July 2006.

Ellis remains a seated board member, but that may change. The school board censured him in December 2007, recommending he step down immediately. The Chamber of Commerce mounted a vigorous recall effort in 2008. Officials have studied the 112-year-old city charter, which contains certain school district protocols. And, well, there’s this arrest warrant.

Ellis did not respond to telephone messages and e-mails requesting comment. His attorney in the 2006 hit-and-run case and in a 2007 driving-under-the-influence case, Matthew Ruff, also declined a request for an interview from The District Weekly.

“Well, once a client, always a client. Obviously, I can’t comment,” Ruff says, confirming that he still does represent Ellis. But silence may not be helping Ellis, who turned 41 in April.

The school district, which has found no legal means to remove Ellis from the board in either its bylaws or the city charter, has determined that, according to the city charter, the board may declare Ellis’ seat vacant if he fails to perform his duties—i.e., attend meetings—for 90 days.

That three-month mark will officially arrive at the school board’s next meeting, a two-day affair Aug. 17-18, though Steinhauser says the board will probably not consider the matter of Michael Ellis at that meeting.

“Right now, it most likely will not appear on the Aug. 18th agenda,” Steinhauser says. “If he’s truly vacated his seat, the board would have to declare that [the seat is vacant]. There are two options under the city charter. [One is that] there’s a possibility the board could appoint a person to fill his seat. If that person were appointed, that person cannot run as an incumbent for that office.”

The other option is that the board could hold an election to fill Ellis’ seat—either via special election (possibly in conjunction with its planned November ballot to decide on a parcel tax) or simply by waiting until Ellis would be up for re-election in April 2010.

“We have to study this and have legal counsel look at it,” Steinhauser says.

While they’re at it, someone should take another look at Michael Ellis. It’s fair to say that less is known about him than about any school board trustee in recent memory—not only has Ellis made himself exceedingly difficult to encounter outside a school board meeting, but even in the closed-session portions of the board meetings his fellow board members say he has remained tight-lipped about himself since taking office.

According to court records, Ellis once attended San Pedro High School—though the school district says he graduated from Long Beach’s Jordan High School in 1986 and went on to attend Cal State Dominguez Hills. He was a teacher at Centinela Valley Union High School District, which is headquartered in Lawndale, during a five-year-period that crossed into the new millennium. And according to the teachers union, the Teachers Association of Long Beach (TALB), Ellis first came to its attention as president of the secondary-level teachers union for Centinela Valley.

Today, Ellis works at a private school in Studio City . . . and here the trail goes cold.

“It’s a very expensive school. Kids pay, like, $27,000 a year to go there,” Steinhauser says, admitting that neither its name nor the grade level Ellis teaches spring readily to mind. (According to the Press-Telegram’s Kevin Butler, Ellis teaches sixth- and seventh-grade humanities at the unnamed school.)

Neither does the state of his teaching credential—including the question of whether he even has one.

“Well, I’m assuming—I, personally, am assuming—that he does,” Steinhauser says. “Usually you have to to teach. [At] a private school you don’t, but a school like that you do.”

Here’s approximately where the cone of silence descends, and where almost everything we know or assume about Michael Ellis gets reduced to tantalizing snippets of remembered conversations.

“I haven’t really had a conversation with him in all the time he’s been on the board,” Stanton says. “That did not happen. And not without [my] trying. After a while, you just don’t try any more. You say, ‘The four of us have work to do, and we will get going.’” School board member Dr. David Barton—also elected in April 2006 as a TALB-endorsed candidate—agrees.

“I think he stayed in campaign mode for the first year or so. I don’t think he recognized on some deep level that he was responsible for the running of the district. He remained a critic even after he was one of the decision-makers. We were never friends. He was just somebody I’d work with and agree with on some issues,” Barton says. (One of these issues was televising school board meetings, which the district commenced following the 2006 elections.)

“I’m in the dark along with everybody else as to what’s going on,” Barton continues. “I have no idea where he is or what the circumstances of his life are. I believed before, and I still do, that if he is having substance abuse problems because of the arrest, you treat that as an illness and you hope the person gets help.”

Even current TALB President Mike Day, who recalls Ellis—briefly—from his days as president of the Centinela Valley teachers union, says he’s in the dark about the trustee’s current whereabouts.

“I didn’t know him personally much before we were supporting him for school board. He was another local leader in another local union. Since we’re both part of the California Teachers Association, I would see him at various functions,” Day says. “As far as a strong personal relationship, we’ve never had that. At the time of those incidents that happened, I had no inclination that there was anything going on.”

Day says his last contact with Ellis came in October 2008—less than two months after the court issued that warrant for his arrest. (Ellis’ probation for his 2007 DUI conviction in Orange County has been revoked twice—but reinstated both times.)

“We had . . . you know, we got together for a cup of coffee or a dinner in the fall, just to discuss school issues—about what’s going on, what’s coming up,” Day says.

Far from assuming the position of a fugitive from justice, Ellis appears to have remained immersed in at least basic school district doings through the spring of this year. That sounds unusual—and it is. But much about Michael Ellis’ time as a public official may be viewed as out of the ordinary, starting with the circumstances of his election.

“[Then-school board trustee] Suja Lowenthal was running for re-election for another full term of four years, and she initially was running against Mr. Ellis,” says Long Beach Unified School District spokesman Chris Eftychiou. “She, during that election, um, decided instead to run for the vacant Dan Baker Long Beach City Council seat that suddenly became available. And so, uh, Michael was left with no opponent in that race.”

Lowenthal, who was elected to serve out former Second District Councilman Dan Baker’s unexpired term—and went on to win re-election last year—did not respond to a request for comment.

Her former brother-in-law and longtime school-board-watcher Josh Lowenthal—rumored, as the Ellis controversy gained momentum, to be eyeing a school board run himself—credits TALB with influencing Ellis’ election.

“TALB under [then-Executive Director] Scott McVarish was this political force, and they were basically targeting her seat,” Lowenthal says. “Couldn’t there have been somebody else? There were some great people running.”

McVarish did not respond to several requests for comment made by The District Weekly. Stanton, the school board president, says that Ellis initially contemplated a run for her—and not Suja Lowenthal’s—seat on the board.

“That was how he came to everybody’s attention, because he was up in the Jordan [High School] area. He was a student at Jordan, and he sort of appeared up there on the Jordan High parents committee,” Stanton says. “He was on the parents committee for a while, and then as the time came for registering and starting to vote, it turned out he did not live in the Jordan area. So he moved around. At that time Scott McVarish was still around, and we—I—always had the feeling that Michael was taking direction from Scott McVarish.”

Day, the union president, says Ellis was very much his own man during the 2006 campaign—albeit a man with the union’s full endorsement.

“He’s not our puppet; we don’t own or control him,” Day says. “I haven’t spoken with him in a number of months. And in my interactions with him, he’s always been knowledgeable about education. For as long as I’ve known him, or known of him, he’s always been a strong advocate for teachers.”

Tell that to Randy Gordon. The Long Beach Chamber of Commerce CEO did an extraordinary thing last year: he spearheaded—with the Chamber’s full support—a recall effort against Ellis that raised and spent $50,000 but garnered only about two-thirds the signatures it needed to force the issue. As a bit of a fail-safe, the Chamber also backed two reportedly district-supported school board trustees up for re-election in that same 2008 contest, and both were successfully returned to office.

“We felt then, and we feel today, that Michael Ellis is the worst school board member in the history of Long Beach Unified School District,” Gordon says, remembering the trustee’s conduct at the school board meeting where the Chamber announced its recall effort.

“Right before they started (30 seconds or so), the guy came in and sat down. Obviously, this was a guy who didn’t want to talk to anyone before the meeting or after the meeting,” Gordon says. “I was looking right at him, and he didn’t even look up. I’ve never, ever met an elected official as odd as Michael Ellis. Normally, elected officials are elected by people, they talk to people and they go to events. That’s what electeds do. But not Michael Ellis. Even though other school board members would go to Chamber events around town, I never, ever met this guy anywhere.”

Michael Ellis’ conduct may be explainable—if not understandable—when you consider his situation: evicted in October (according to the Press-Telegram); possibly battling substance abuse problems; and wanted by law enforcement for nearly a year.

“The one thing that I would point out is that there’s been nothing illegal done in his job as an elected official. All his problems seem to be personal ones,” says Josh Lowenthal. “I think the thing about Ellis is that as soon as he found himself in the headlines for dubious reasons, he closed himself off instead of trying to show the human side of the personal struggle that he was going through. He closed himself off, and I think that he further alienated himself.”

Barton, the school district trustee, agrees. “I think at this point it appears to be the story of a very sad and, um, how do I say?—I don’t want to say ‘pathetic,’ but I can’t think of the word—figure. The difficulties in his life have overtaken any professional responsibilities,” Barton says, criticizing Ellis’ performance on the board. “He never really settled down into the position. Just being difficult isn’t enough. Just being critical isn’t enough. And he never really seemed to realize that.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘campaign mode,’ I would say ‘disruptive mode,’” says Stanton, the board president. “We follow the state education code; we follow a simplified, modified Robert’s Rules of Order. It seemed there was always the moment at the end of the meeting [when] he’d bring up all these issues, [when] it was not the proper time. It was throwing something out, rather than putting it on the agenda.”

Should we all have expected more from Michael Ellis? Even Steinhauser, the superintendent—who considers the school board his bosses—says yes.

“The issue we all have . . . We’re all supposed to be role models for teachers, parents, kids—but as elected officials, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. That’s what I believe. When you take on these roles, it’s an added issue, and it’s something you need to know about,” Steinhauser says. “Most of us—I would say the large majority of us—never have problems with these issues.”

But Day, the teachers union president, disagrees.

“I would be hesitant to say that he has a greater responsibility than anybody else to take care of his business,” Day says. “I mean, whether you’re an elected official or a nurse or a librarian or an administrator—regardless, I think we all have an obligation to follow the law and take care of our business. If anybody in the district had a warrant out for their arrest and was not taking care of their business, that would be a terrible thing.”

Someone does. That someone is Michael Ellis, and the obvious questions are what he’d say if he would speak up—and where he is at this very moment.

“He had said that he was a surfer,” says Stanton—offering the only glimpse I get into Ellis’ private life. “He’s a surfer, so he could be at the water.”

If that’s true, he had better be on a secluded beach somewhere. Come to think of it, Long Beach—with its polluted waters and lack of waves—could be the perfect place to spend the summer of 2009.

Tags: david barton, Felton Williams, Jon Meyer, lbusd, Long Beach, Mary Stanton, Michael Ellis, school board, suja lowenthal, TALB, teachers association long beach