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Lydia Gutierrez, a teacher from Long Beach Unified who is mounting a vigorous campaign in LA Unified’s District 7 to unseat board President Richard Vladovic in the May 19 elections, is turning a campaign message for Vladovic against him.

A letter supporting Vladovic’s election circulated to voters this month and paid for by the teachers union political action committee, argues, “We need to provide the parents, educators and community a stronger voice so that we don’t have a rerun of the iPad fiasco.”

Gutierrez responded with a press release yesterday, pinning the “iPad disaster” squarely on Vladovic. She reminds voters that the FBI and now the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into various aspects of the program, which rolled out with support of the entire board. Vladovic has served on the board since 2007 and as president since 2013. 

“It was Vladovic’s responsibility to obey the law and use your tax dollars wisely,” she says in the release. “As president, he set the agenda and voted twice for what turned out to be a billion-dollar failure.”

The iPad program was originally designed as a $1 billion effort to get a digital device in the hands of every LA Unified student and teacher as a tool for instruction. It went bust as glitches and problems plagued it from the beginning. Superintendent Ramon Cortines finally ended it early this year as unsustainable.

It has endured, however, as a campaign issue in at least two of the three board races, as Vladovic and Tamar Galatzan in District 3 have been criticized for their support of it.

Gutierrez’s press release was off-base on a few other things, however. Her contention that the FBI “discovered that buying iPads with bond money may have been a violation of federal law” is wrong on two counts: The FBI has not announced it has discovered anything, and the agency’s interest was not the use of bond money but the procurement process as it related to the district’s relations with Apple and Pearson.

Despite Vladovic’s winning the support of the teachers union and the state charter schools association, Gutierrez has waged an aggressive campaign against him. One internal poll last month conducted by the charters and another group found that she was leading Vladovic though the difference was within the margin of error.