By Danny Kelleher
Editor-in-Chief
While Chevron Corporation’s financial support of Manhattan Beach Unified School District helps the fiscally struggling district, the company fails to back the long-term goals of California state education and also unnecessarily supports a wasteful STEM program.
Chevron is California’s largest oil company. In 2010, as part of a national community outreach campaign, Chevron’s El Segundo refinery gave more than $1 million in “Energy for Learning” science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) grants to 15 South Bay schools, Mira Costa included. These donations came in addition to Chevron’s annual monetary support of the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation through sponsorship of MBEF’s Wine Auction. MBUSD is also currently looking into contracting Chevron engineers and experts to make the district “greener” and more energy independent over the course of the next 30 years, with Measure BB projects.
Chevron has recently been involved in a variety of lawsuits around the globe, centering on its excessive pollution, environmental degradation, tax manipulation and a plethora of other heinous abuses of the environment and communities. Its archaic equipment at its El Segundo location emits hydrocarbons and nitrogen-based particulates into the South Bay atmosphere on a daily basis. The company is no friend of the environment or the planet’s future. Though Chevron’s “green” initiatives within school districts provide strong community reputation boosts, they clearly should not cause the disastrous overall impacts the company has on the environment to be overlooked.
On top of this gross abuse for the environment, Chevron displays a similar deceptive apathy for California’s public education. California is the only oil-producing state in the United States without an oil severance tax, which typically requires companies to pay a percentage duty to the state with each barrel of oil it extracts from the ground. Chevron has repeatedly fought off attempts by the California legislature to impose such a tax.
In 2010, Assembly Bill 656 would have enacted a 12.5 percent oil and natural gas severance tax, bringing in $1.2 billion for California public higher education and $800 million toward public K-12 education annually. But the bill was repeatedly shot down, and according to Cal-Access, California’s official lobbying activity database, Chevron spent millions of dollars throughout 2010 crusading for opposition to AB 656. A similar issue arose when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a 9.9% severance tax a year later.
Chevron is harming the land Californians live on and the schools they learn in. Chevron donations that come on a close-to-home basis do appear desirable at face value, but the direct benefits of taking them do not outweigh the overall negative effects the corporation has on the state and the world. Public education is just as much about teaching morals and discipline as it is academia. If MBUSD continues to accept contributions from Chevron, it will be condoning an absence of ethical values in place of sheer pragmatism for its students and indirectly advocating a “Tragedy of the Commons” approach toward funding public education.
And along with this, while the STEM grants are nice educational luxuries, they don’t address the problems the school district is facing, most notably the pending layoffs for multiple teachers. These binding donations do not seem to be meant to help MBUSD in areas where funds are truly needed, and instead appear more as public relations stunts aimed at bringing the company positive attention rather than actually alleviating MBUSD’s ongoing issues.
The Chevron Corporation sets a bad example for students in our district. The MBUSD administrators responsible for repeatedly accepting the company’s grants should rethink their actions; in doing so, they condone a lack of ethics that shouldn’t exist in MBUSD.
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