For less than a cup of coffee a day

Tonight’s School Board agenda is jam packed, from charter school applications to budget reductions to parcel tax language…the only thing missing are the anchovies.

First up, the Renaissance Leadership Academy charter school application is being recommended for a big fat denial.  A lot of the issues brought up by the review committee was also addressed during the initial presentation of the charter school application (starts around 28:00).  When asked about some of the more troublesome aspects: AUSD representative on their Board of Directors, the way audits would be conducted…the answer that was given by RLA was that their consultant told them to “put it in.”   When the RLA representatives questioned their consultant further, he simply told them to, “put it in,” so they did.   Not really a profile in “leadership,” but I would suppose it would be hard to argue with someone you are paying that is supposed to be an expert in drafting these applications.   Anyway, look for this one to probably go to the County Board of Education for appeal as well.

Budget cuts and reductions, the full breakdown is here.  Some familiar faces on the chopping block include the JROTC program which should bring out the same groups saying, “No, don’t cut us.”   A big cut of one of the (out of two) Vice Principals at Encinal High School.  Although I suppose the rationalization is fair, Alameda High has 1 Principal, 2 VP for a total of 3 administrators for a student body of a bit less than 2000 kids which equals a student to adminstrator ratio of 638:1.  The cut willl bring Encinal to a student to administrator ration of 552:1.   The big news is that most of the really huge AUSD altering changes are proposed not for this fiscal year (08-09) but for next (09-10).  One has to wonder if the district is being strategic about this, banking on the economy to get a bit better, or if they are just delaying the inevitable.  Page 11 on the reader shows that school closures, class size reductions (K-3), and counseling services are all on the block for the 09-10 fiscal year.

And the last biggie is the Board will be considering whether or not to approve placing a measure on the ballot for a parcel tax.   Before you all get your panties in a bunch, it’s actually not that bad.   Yes, there is the senior exemption (65 and older), but this has a pretty strong commercial and industrial property portion that I like.   The parcel tax will be a temporary one (will sunset in 4 years), homeowners will be assessed $120 per year.   And there will be a $0.15 per square foot assessment on commercial and industrial parcels (with a $120 minimum and a maximum of $7,500), any commercial or industrial property less than 2000 sq ft would be assessed the $120 (a savings of $180) so no worries that small business owners will be raked across the proverbial coals.   Anything larger than 2000 sq ft will be assessed at the 15 cents per square foot.

So what does that mean to average homeowner Joe and Jane like you and me?  It comes out to less than $0.35 cents a day.   It’s a better bargain than the charity that Sally Struthers is peddling since you are reinvesting in your own community.   So over the duration you will have given to the school district less than $500.  The majority of us probably spend more on [pick your vice of choice here] than $500 in a year, let alone over the course of four years.

While I’m on the subject of schools, I have to say I really enjoyed the article referenced by Jack Richard from the Atlantic, for those of you too “busy” to read it, highlights:

…Beating up on public schools is not just our nation’s favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off…who, of course, have no dog in the fight. And who adore a tragic ending.

…

[In talking about LA public schools] The extent to which feeling overwhelmed by brownness and foreignness frightens the few remaining freckled and tuna-fish-laden Caucasian children in the city away from the public schools is not acknowledged and certainly not discussed. Parents cite loftier goals than white flight (“Dylan’s learning style requires a progressive educational philosophy based on Dewey/Piaget/ Independent thinking!”). Of course, rare is the pricey Westside private (now called “independent”) school that doesn’t list, as one of its top values, “honoring diversity” … even if the diversity that is honored looks like 14 white children and the son of Denzel Washington.

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After a fair amount of heartache, I have to admit I have given up on trying to charm white people, at least a certain NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school. For these shrinking families, the aesthetics alone of public schools are horrifying—the chain-link fence, putty-colored bungalows, fluorescent lighting…Another white mom rejected my daughters’ school because our kindergarten wall art looked “rote.” Asians, on the other hand, tend to overlook the occasional snarl of graffiti…What they see…are the math and medical magnets embedded within…I’ve gradually become aware…that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation–lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League?

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That so many of L.A.’s English- speaking families are fearful of letting their children come into contact with great numbers of English-learners is ironic. The terror is that, like rockets losing heat tiles, Dylan and Taylor will drop a vocabulary word here or an SAT point there, and thus be doomed to Pitzer instead of Brown.  Meanwhile, the far more vast and gloomy possibility is that most immigrant children will plunge off the college map entirely. In their isolated, maxed-out schools, they won’t master the higher-level English they need if they are to succeed. Such language acquisition could be greatly speeded via meaningful contact with native speakers, but, as the authors of Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society point out, few immigrant youngsters have “even one native English-speaking friend.”

That is, until we came along, the pushy, whitish, Type A middle-class poor! Economics has forced us to realize that we are indeed all in this together. We are compelled to play Lady Bountiful. We will bring unneeded extracurricular “enrichment” classes and speak English at them until they turn blue. We must invest in the poor urban school, not because any moral authority à la Jonathan Kozol exhorts us to, but because that school is our school. And in return, we get to be infused with the energy of hopeful immigrants ready to try anything, in a brave new land that, to them…itself represents optimism, resources, and a better and better future…

If you have a chance to read the entire piece I would highly encourage you to do so.   While none of the schools in Alameda remotely have the same challenges that the author’s school does, it simply shows the power of the parental involvement.   Not finding the “better” alternative out there for your kid alone, but investing in what is already there in order to make your school, your community a much richer environment.