For years, it seemed, the school board was about one thing – holding off the economic collapse just long enough, through community charity and fundraising drives from the Davis Schools Foundation, along with securing the big and more permanent chunks of money coming from parcel taxes.
And while one candidate, Jose Granda, has called this abuse of the taxpayers, even as he proposes elaborate and extravagant programs that would cost the district millions, the voters overwhelming approved all of these measures, with the support coming at a low of 67% and peaking at 75%.
But if a recovering economy, the passage of Prop 30, and a more stable state budget position have reduced the need to focus on the fiscal issues, the volleyball scandal and the stunning Nancy Peterson resignation shook this community to its foundation – no longer could the community be content to simply view the school board at a distance.
A funny thing happened on Wednesday night, when the Vanguard hosted, along with Davis Media Access, a candidates forum, and the community came out to see it. There was an unfortunate occurrence that we did not know at the time we set the date – we were running in conflict with the Davis High back-to-school night. But, no matter, over 100 people came out to attend and the interesting thing was, while there were parents with young children in attendance, it could have been a Vanguard city council event.
The questions that came from the audience were also transforming. While we still got questions about the achievement gap, we had questions about the failure of the school system in the Daniel Marsh murder trial, bullying, LGBT issues, accountability of teachers to parents, school district chain of command, special interests, and conflicts.
The change is not just about the Nancy Peterson scandal – the community has been stunned in recent months with a series of brutal assaults, hate crimes and murders that had been foreign to the community – which had gone nearly seven years between murders prior to 2011.
In the spring of 2013, Gloria Partida’s son, Mikey, was brutally attacked in a high profile and horrifying hate crime. While the legal system sought to deal with his attacker through a local prison sentence, Gloria Partida joined with others in the community in the spirit of “Not in Our Town,” to fight back through community education and activism. Born from those efforts is The Phoenix Coalition, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
“I think people realize the district is at a critical juncture and reputation is on the line,” Ms. Partida told the Vanguard. The Phoenix Coalition provided drinks and refreshments to the forum attenders.
“The Coalition’s concern is, of course, with promoting a pro-social community,” said Ms. Partida. “That community cannot thrive in a place where all students are not an important consideration and, while the community involvement and concern for our schools is a positive thing, it inadvertently and ironically increases the achievement gap and creates an environment ripe for the Marshes and Garzons of our community.”
She would add, “The new and obviously inevitable focus on technology will guillotine the population of students already trying to bridge the gap and floundering to find the resources to just get on the internet. The stress of achievement and lack of tools given to students to manage their emotional development is an explosive combination. The questions asked last night are telling of what the community prioritizes and while it is important to maintain our standards and unique school community we will be blindsided and taken down by issues we consider and treat as secondary.”
While the brutal attack by Garzon and murders by Marsh would stun this community, in one aspect the Nancy Peterson fiasco stunned it with its banality.
For candidate Madhavi Sunder, she noted, “I definitely think that the problem with the volleyball episode last year went far beyond the fact that we didn’t have a conflict of interest policy. We spent $22,000 and countless personnel hours investigating a complaint involving a board member’s child. This really could have been handled and should have been handled differently.”
Candidate Mike Nolan told the Vanguard that, while school board members often tell the public, “It’s all about our kids,” in reality, “the Volleyball fiasco changed the inflection of that statement. It began to sound that what was really meant was: ‘It is all about MY kids.’ “
“Nancy Peterson at least had the courage to resign,” Mr. Nolan stated. “The savvy political types were dumbfounded because, as one explained, Nancy would have many chances throughout her term to exact revenge from the coach as well as those on the board whom she thought let her down.”
“All of which indicates a political board at odds with the disinterested public service one would expect from well functioning school board,” he continued. “Of course how the remaining members of the board handled the matter shows an effort to sustain the firing of the coach, with her re-hiring for the girls team 5 days later.”
“What did that show?” Mr. Nolan would ask. “That a firing instigated by an individual board member will be sustained by the entire board, but in the face of popular support for the coach, the board decided that she was well qualified to be re-hired for the next season. And, in the face of this cognitive dissonance, two members, apparently with the approval of the others, demanded that the public ‘get over it’ and stop discussing the matter.”
He added, “Of course, the board members will tell you that they listen to the public. But when they did not like what they heard, their rebuttal was to ‘shut-up.’ And these are the very voters that the board will have to approach, hat in hand, and ask for a renewal of the parcel tax.”
Alan Fernandes on Wednesday noted that rebuilding trust is critical because, without trust, the community is not going to continue to support parcel tax expenditures that enable the school district to fiscally stay afloat.
He would later tell the Vanguard, “The recent situation surrounding Nancy Peterson’s resignation brought to focus the issue of trust and conflicts of interest for school board trustees. Specifically, the Peterson situation highlighted the fact that a school board member must represent the community at-large. Further, it brought to the community’s attention that district policies must be drafted for the community at-large and implemented in a consistent manner so as to not favor a school board member or active volunteer anymore than a hard working guardian.”
“Last night’s forum reiterated that the misuse of the public’s trust is still on the conscience of the community,” he stated. “There were questions about trust and conflicts of interest. One member of the community asked each candidate to explain what special interests each candidate represents. Although I do not represent any one particular special interest and stated that at the forum, I do have children in our schools and want them to succeed, but not at the expense of other children in our district.”
“My top priority as a board member is to restore the public’s trust,” Mr. Fernandes reiterated. “The school board needs the confidence of the community to effectively develop and implement policy and procedure for the schools.”
He added, “The Nancy Peterson situation reminded us that just because someone is an avid volunteer within our schools does not by itself mean that this volunteer service comes with more direct access or special advantage within the school system. It also does not mean that the particular person may understand the role of a Trustee of the District better than others.”
Barbara Archer agreed that rebuilding trust is important. She noted, “Our community is engaged in our educational system probably more so than many other communities.”
“PTAs/PTOs actively raise money for salary for positions (this started in 2010), such as school counselors at elementary level, computer specialists, and reading aides,” she stated. “In positions alone, I have heard a figure of $350,000 donated for salaries alone. These groups are also donating toward site technology budgets. Our community also donates generously to charities like the Davis Schools Foundation, Blue & White Foundation and Davis School Arts Foundation. And then there is the parcel tax that accounts for about $9 million in salaries and program. Parents and community members also donate large sums to a wide variety of music and athletic booster organizations.”
“Our community has stepped up to the plate time and time again for education. I believe we have to rebuild trust in the community so that they know their money is being used wisely,” she stated. “We need to be transparent with our spending and look into a better system of checks and balances. My commitment for this new board is that we work together with staff to define new methods of budget transparency that are equal to the level of commitment shown by our community. We must be donor and customer service oriented.”
On Wednesday night, the community did not speak these words. Most were worried about the future rather than the past, but for the first time in a long time it seems that the public is tuning in and they are not asking the board members about their service on site councils and the district’s strategic planning committee, they want to know if the candidates, who will represent 80 percent of the new board, heard the message on openness, transparency, and not putting their kids’ needs above those of the rest of the district.
The new candidates should be judged on what they will do to ensure that never again will we have to spent $22,000 to determine if a board member’s child was properly cut from a volleyball team.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
I received some feedback this morning and need to clarify that with eight candidates in the race, it did not seem practical to interview all eight for this story even though several of them offered similar thoughts and comments on this subject. Instead, we will seek to do a series of these stories and solicit other candidate responses.
“The new and obviously inevitable focus on technology will guillotine the population of students already trying to bridge the gap and floundering to find the resources to just get on the internet. The stress of achievement and lack of tools given to students to manage their emotional development is an explosive combination. The questions asked last night are telling of what the community prioritizes and while it is important to maintain our standards and unique school community we will be blindsided and taken down by issues we consider and treat as secondary.”
You have to give them credit for their skill at exploiting every spin opportunity.
But the irony is think enough to cut with a chainsaw.
The system primarily fails to educate the “students already trying to bridge the gap and floundering”, and yet we are suppose to worry that reform will be worse for these kids.
Hey kids… we know you are stuck in a crappy system, but those people that want to reform the system just want to make it crapper! Right.
Here is the simple truth. We are spending too much money on education and not getting enough education value. The tremendous costs are the result of a bloated education workforce.
We need to redirect each and every employee of the system to the needs of the students… not the needs of the system.
Technology has transformed every other industry to this very thing… allowing companies to do more at a lower cost… redirecting expensive human resources to focus specifically on the needs of the customer instead of the needs of the company and the employees of the company.
We need more counselors. We need more tutors. We need more mentors. We need more coaches. We don’t need as many teachers teaching subjects that can be better taught using a facilitate high tech instruction delivery system.
Exploit the technology and use it where it works, and restructure the education system workforce to provide the greatest value meeting the needs of 100% of the student population.
Frankly: We don’t need as many teachers teaching subjects that can be better taught using a facilitate high tech instruction delivery system.
There is a long way to go in discerning where technology can and cannot work in education.
I find it fascinating that many tech company employees and executives resist using technology as much as you’d expect in raising their own kids.
A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
And something that has been circulating recently in social media:
Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent
Frankly: Here is the simple truth. We are spending too much money on education and not getting enough education value. The tremendous costs are the result of a bloated education workforce.
Education costs more in the U.S. because we haven’t adequately addressed childhood poverty, which is high in this country. Children require more education now than they have in the past. And finally the job conditions that would entice a stronger force of teachers aren’t there. As long as you and like-minded folks view teachers as basically worthless compared to imagined alternatives, we will be having this conversation for decades without seeing desired results.
You’re viewing education as roughly equivalent to downloading software into the computer-brains of kids. There are heavily under-appreciated soft and social skills that play as much a role in successful outcomes as focusing on content. What you seem to imagine is that you could separate the content instruction and somehow let more automated technology take that on, and just let smaller force of teachers address whatever else you imagine to be important. It is all integrated. Adult teachers have to be involved to coach, model, guide, and advise students how to succeed in learning what’s needed.
The reason that NCLB is a failure is it did not adequately account for anything beyond content. Common Core will have problems if it doesn’t address these issues adequately.
As for DJUSD, this district isn’t perfect, but it works better than many others because we can have some say in what to curriculum to offer because of school parcel taxes. Even with that, our district operates with below average funding.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all.
Several points.
One – Go back and re-read the hundreds of posts I have done on this topic. I have always repeated that the opportunity for technology to deliver instruction is for older students and certain subjects. By using more effective less expensive tools and methods for the older students and certain subjects, we can afford to redeploy human resources to younger students, students with special needs and other subjects.
Two – The technology is advancing. Investment has been slow in coming because of the irritating political template of the left and left media that makes teachers out to be victims and reformers to be child-haters. Why would Steve Jobs invest millions into something to change the world when we would be branded as a hateful, mean teacher and child hater? The reason the investment is building is that the education system continues to grow crappier in relation to the needs of students. So, the dissatisfaction with education is growing… including the out of control hyper inflationary cost trajectory for higher learning.
“While we still got questions about the achievement gap, we had questions about the failure of the school system in the Daniel Marsh murder trial, bullying, LGBT issues, accountability of teachers to parents, school district chain of command, special interests, and conflicts.”
That all of these secondary or tertiary issues were at the forefront of the minds of the people in that audience–including, of course, Mr. Greenwald’s–could be seen as good news or bad news.
The reality is that the primary job of a public school system–and by extension its school board–is to make sure that as many students as possible obtain a strong, fundamental education which prepares them for life after school. All of them need to be very strong readers, competent writers and have a sound understanding of U.S. and California history, American government, mathematics and the basic sciences. In Greenwald’s long list of what voters care about, there is no mention at all of the fundamentals, the role of standards or parents or teachers.
Now that could be good news, if it suggests that the DJUSD has fully mastered its core task.
I tend to think it is bad news. I think, at least for a substantial minority of students who matriculate in our system and who will never go on to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher, we are not giving them the basics they need to become successful, productive citizens. And, alas, the folks who tend to pay the most attention to school board races and who run for the school board don’t seem to really care about this long-running problem.
To my mind it does not matter the race or ethnicity of a child for whom the system is not working. I think we need to accept kids as they are and nurture them to become successes in the areas they enjoy and prefer, and stop trying to take kids who would like to become plumbers or cooks or auto mechanics shoving them into a “college material” box. Ultimately, this “everyone needs a college prep program” ideology leads to kids, disproportionately black and brown and red, dropping out of school altogether, or at the very least having high rates of truancy. And our system cares a lot about truancy, only because it costs the district money that the district employees want in their pockets.
Yes (to Rich’s comments), and a question I would have liked to see would be: “what will you do to provide and expand programs and vocational training for Davis students who are not college-bound?”
One recent suggestion I gave the school district regarded its problem with school nurses, who are overworked and a bit underfunded. What I told the superintendent and every current member of the school board was that there are local JC students and probably some high school students who are interested in pursuing a career in nursing, including careers where one does not need a bachelor’s degree (an LVN, for example), and this problem could be solved by creating an internship program. The nursing students or prospective nursing students would benefit from the vocational training; and the actual school nurses would have help they need, especially with their paperwork, which ties them up and reduces the time they have to see patients.
The superintendent and all but one member of the school board ignored me completely. They just don’t give a damn about solving problems or helping kids obtain practical education. The one board member who respond (and filled me in with some good points I did not know) was Sheila Allen, who, of course, is a nurse and, though she has multiple advanced degrees (including a PhD in nursing, I think), she cares about kids who might want to pursue a career in nursing without a B.S.
DG: I opened up my profile and uploaded a picture of myself, but it is not being displayed. Don’t know if the fault is mine or the new software.
Rich, I agree we need more than the college track for kids. We need apprenticeship programs and other career tracks. Not everyone is headed to college, some because of other interests and some due to lack of money and unwillingness to become indebted. The Davis school system caters to the college bound and for the most part, that suits the parents. The worst thing we can do is to make kids who aren’t college bound feel like failures.
The DJUSD is talking about selling off school property, but it is not clear what they will use the proceeds for. The DJUSD is also proposing the idea of building new offices for school administrators on B St. So here is my question. How about the facilities the kids are learning in? For example:
1) Are the kids still sharing tiny lockers at DHS, which are very insufficient to store much of anything?
2) How about the DHS classrooms, are they still the old ones from way back when or have they been replaced/upgraded?
3) What about the MPR? Do the students have a place to eat at DHS?
What I see at DHS is fancy administrative offices and library, a beautiful new community auditorium, but from what I understand the MPR needs to be torn down (or has already been razed) because of mold, with no replacement of a building for kids to eat. I have no doubt much the same negligence is going on at Emerson Junior High, and probably at some of the older elementary schools.
Do the students have access to the latest computer technology? The reality is every student is going to have to learn how to deal with the computer age to become employed. And has been mentioned above, what of students who have no plans to go to college, but need vocational training? All students need to be taught the basics in our schools, and that includes not only the three Rs, reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, but how to use tech devices. And they need to do it in facilities that are conducive to learning, no dilapidated, inadequate and falling apart or covered in mold.
Lastly, students need to learn in a respectful atmosphere where they don’t fear going to school because teachers/administrators ignore student bullying. I have not had kids in the Davis schools for quite a few years, but I have seen the crappy lockers are still there at DHS, and I do not believe they have a new MPR to eat in. I suspect a lot to the problems I witnessed when my kids were attending school have still gone unaddressed.
Anon: The DJUSD is talking about selling off school property, but it is not clear what they will use the proceeds for. The DJUSD is also proposing the idea of building new offices for school administrators on B St. So here is my question. How about the facilities the kids are learning in?
There is a facilities master plan for facilities upgrades in the school district, produced in about 2007-08. Discussion of addressing those needs/upgrades has mostly been put on hold in the past few years because of the recession. The top priority items on the upgrade list have been the DHS stadium, the DHS MPR, and general upgrades to Emerson JH. But there is a long list that goes beyond that. Occasionally the issue shows up in the Enterprise. Here’s one letter to the editor on the issue. The district rebuilt the DHS stadium recently because that was the top priority on the list, but there is little money to do much else.
Proceeds from the sale of school property can generally only go toward other facilities expenditures. Usually districts may also pass facilities bonds for facilities upgrades, but right now the district is focusing on selling assets that are un-/under-utilized to address these needs.
Here is one version of the “Long Range Facilities Master Plan.