The Bell Curve:

The people who run our Newport-Mesa schools have been taking a lot of heat this school year — to which I contributed substantially.

The cycle started with what seemed to me an indifferent effort to make sure President Obama’s chat with students got before them in real time. That morphed into the Corona del Mar High School football players who explained publicly how they would like to rape and kill one of their classmates and — most recently — the temporary enforced paid vacation served by the faculty advisor for the student production of “Rent.”

All of these episodes drew mostly negative reaction from local citizens, sometimes almost as much for the way the criticisms were responded to as for the acts themselves. The result has been a double dose of frustration.

The populace wasn’t getting answers to its questions, and school officials — especially at the highest level and including board members — were required to give cliched answers, or none at all — to questions that they found legitimate and deserving of an answer.

And so the criticism grows with every new unanswered question until it reaches the office of Newport-Mesa Unified Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard. That’s where the buck stops.

And that’s why I was sitting in his office Monday to try and get some answers to pass along to the folks back home.

The results, as you will see if you read on, won’t stop any presses. But they might cast some dim light here and there.

Any conversation about the administrative performance of public school districts must start — I was told — with the 32-page California Public Records Act, in which one tiny entry known as Section 6254.13 reads, “Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require disclosure of records that are any of the following: personnel, medical or similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal property.”

That’s it. Even, apparently, if the personal property is a death threat.