There tends to be a lot of noise on the online PRA system but sometimes, someone asks for records that are sort of interesting. This PRA request seemed to be most interested in police staffing but made the request broader to, maybe, not tip a hand but did receive a response regarding historic staffing levels of the Alameda PD, including a breakdown of where that staffing is within the PD structure as well.
It demonstrates, as folks have been saying for years now, the number of funded police officers has never decreased. Alameda, like so many other cities, has been slowly bleeding officers away for a myriad of reasons and has never been up to the full budgeted 88 for at least a decade now.
Unfortunately even though I anticipated being able to review the slides or presentation this morning because the presentations were supposed to be uploaded yesterday, they haven’t been:
I don’t know how much these Alameda Point car shows effect people not on the West End but man oh man was it loud on the west side on Sunday.
I mean, there are forever informal car meet ups around the Hornet and any stretch of vacant asphalt on Alameda Point and most of the time it’s pretty harmless. Just a bunch of people excited to look at each others’ cars and take amazing photos of their vehicles with an unparalleled backdrop. But this weekend there seemed to just be more around AND we made the stupid decision of walking down RAMP to get home which was a mistake that our ear drums took a long time to recover from.
So, it turns out that this is what happened per APD’s Facebook page:
Other other day #2 son was a bit later coming home from school (he’s a Freshman at Encinal) and relayed to us that he had been asked by one of the teachers who oversees the tutoring program if he would help an ELD student to understand Romeo and Juliet. I did know that he was actively engaged Romeo and Juliet because one of assignments was to memorize the opening sonnet. I told him he should just set it to the tune of Will Power from Something Rotten since it has iambic pentameter set to music (which is always easier to memorize than just straight lines). But I digress. Anyway, he mentioned that even though this student is not a native English speaker they were also enrolled in a regular English class. Romeo and Juliet is complicated enough for native English speakers and readers so it just feels as though some of our students across the district are not being set up for success.
But across the district we can see that schools with lower numbers of economically disadvantaged students have higher test scores which either means that (1) the schools are doing better at educating economically disadvantaged kids or (2) the lower number of students needing intervention means that teachers can better target struggling students. When divvying up funding folks want to believe it’s number 1 but honestly it’s almost always a factor of #2. We know where students are struggling and we know which students are struggling but when it comes budget time to distribute funds to help struggling students we still divide it equally rather than equitably across elementary school sites. We’re not setting up students at schools with the greatest need up for success.
Anyway, here are the numbers for how economically disadvantaged students doing across Alameda’s elementary schools. Unsurprisingly the schools with the lowest number of unduplicated students don’t always have enough students to show disaggregated data by grade.
I promised that I would share the test scores for economically disadvantaged students across the district’s elementary schools but first wanted to post these numbers that I pulled from the District’s slides from last night.
To note, these are not spreadsheets from the District, but these are their numbers. I took the numbers and rather than rolling them into one lump sum and then divvying them up by number of students I separated the unrestricted dollars including unrestricted general fund and parcel tax money from the restricted dollars. The total unrestricted is money that the district can distributed more subjectively. Restricted dollars are just that. They have to be allocated in a very specific way because of how they are allocated to the district. So when we say that we are distributing money with a lens toward equity we are, but we aren’t. We have to send Title 1 dollars (restricted) to Title 1 schools. That’s why you see only three elementary schools receiving Restricted General Fund money.
In hindsight I should probably have not rolled together LCFF Supplemental and Restricted General Fund because there is a level of subjectivity when distributing the LCFF Supplemental because even though it comes into the District based on need, it’s not strictly restricted like, well, Restricted GF. Because if you look at how, say LCFF Supplemental money is allocated to Maya Lin which has the highest unduplicated population of the non Title 1 schools, they’re only receiving $774 per unduplicated student. Compared to that Edison with 22% unduplicated students is receiving $1310 per unduplicated student.
Here is the main problem with the sudden focus of the District on diverting resources from Ruby Bridges’ innovative program to the latest (unfunded?) mandate from the State. This moving of budgetary deck chairs is kinda proving the point of advocates that the “fix” for student funding in LCFF isn’t actually supporting the population of kids who need it the most. When we look at the way money is doled out across the district most schools, most elementary schools are still getting largely equal shares of money, non restricted money that is. Then we’re told that Title 1 schools are getting all this additional money, as though that is leveling out the playing field, but, you know, that money came into the district for these schools and not to spread freely amongst all schools. From CapRadio:
In 2013, California adopted the Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, to equitably distribute funds to schools and close the achievement gap for disadvantaged youth.
Using the LCFF model, funding was allotted based on the number of students in classrooms. Additionally, each district could get a supplemental grant based on the number of vulnerable students in three high-needs subgroups: English learners, foster youth and a group comprised of low-income and unhoused youth. If more than 55% of a district’s students fall into these subgroups, the district qualifies for these additional monies.
After a decade, the data confirms that LCFF has not accomplished what it set out to do.
I’m told that some of these numbers have been adjusted but I can’t imagine they’ve moved all that much, what we’re seeing here is that despite LCFF Supplemental monies being distributed to the district because of high needs students, RB received the lowest distribution per pupil of all elementary schools.
Based on the testing data which is all we seem to care about, across the district where there is enough students to measure, AUSD isn’t do great for Black students no matter where they are. Of all the schools who were able to produce data for Black students, RB is the only one which had enough kids to break down the information by grades. It also educates more than twice as many Black students as any other individual school.
So back to Ruby Bridges’ STEAM program. To recap, even though the District went through the process of discussing other magnet and innovative programs back in January/February, Ruby Bridges’ Innovative program was kept off the list for 2023-24 cuts, now we’re all getting. different message from the District that the intent was to “keep” the program but just not have a coordinator for the program which is, in fact, cutting the program. Both Maya Lin and Earhart are able to keep their coordinators for their innovative program through 2023-24 while they decide if they want to retain that position using other funding. It appears that RB is not getting that option unless the School Board makes a decision contrary to the staff recommendation.
The Principal’s messaging around this cut/not a cut is to frame it around what STEAM has not been able to accomplish. Now I realize that RB has had a lot of leadership change since STEAM was first founded and funded until today but I’m here to tell you that improving student achievement for Black and low-income students at RB was not the goal of STEAM. The STEAM program (with the Wellness portion) was designed to help (1) retain and attract families to RB who had been sending their students to other AUSD school because the program improvement status of RB made it very easy for families to opt out of RB and (2) give existing students additional tools to help them further engage in the regular school day curriculum. The fact that STEAM is being pitted against student achievement for specific subgroups is, frankly, insulting.
I would like to emphasize that the current STEAM instructor has a guaranteed teaching position at Ruby Bridges (i.e., she is not losing her job). Students and teachers will also continue to have access to the STEAM lab. This was the original intention of Ruby’s innovative program: to support the teaching staff in implementing New Generation Science Standards. Now that the STEAM lab has been up and running for five years and student outcomes have not improved, it’s time to release STEAM implementation back to the classroom teachers.
I had meant to write about this but had forgotten until #2 son engaged us in a conversation about his English class and a set of poems he turned in for a project around the book The Other Wes Moore, a book which has been on book banning lists in the past. He clearly wanted us to read these poems and, well, they were good. Yes, yes, I know I am a parents so I am predisposed to enjoying the works of my children but I am not that parent who is physically unable to critique the work of her children so I was surprised at how good it was because so much poetry from teenagers is so very overwrought and bad. I know this from experience having written bad and overwrought poetry of my own as a teenager.
Anyway, his poetry was well received by his English teacher which reminded me that his English teacher at Encinal was AUSD’s Teacher of the Year this year and will be eligible to be selected as the Alameda County’s Teacher of the Year which would be a nice honor for Alameda’s scrappy little West End high school which will, apparently, not be able to offer AP French next year because not enough students will be signing up.
From the Press Release:
Colleagues who submitted recommendation letters cited Ms. Kerber’s high professional standards and ability to both engage and connect with students. “Jessica’s teaching style is both engaging and effective,” one nominator wrote. “She has a natural ability to connect with her students and make content come alive for them. One of the things that I appreciate about Ms. Kerber is her ability to hold her students to high expectations while simultaneously differentiating instruction based on their individual needs. She is masterful at this.”
Nominators also referenced Ms. Kerber’s skill as a leader (she has served as chair of the EHS English Department as well as the professional development lead) and collaborator, as well as her creation and initiation of the “Mental Health Matters” English class at the site. In that course, students read novels that focus on mental health matters and also research topics such as PTSD, depression, anxiety, and gender norms.
In addition to teaching the lowly Freshman, she also teachers AP Literature which #1 daughter will be taking in her final year at Encinal next year which serves as a reminder to me (and to those of you who have been with this blog since the beginning) that next year this blog will see its 18th year of existence since I started this a few days before I went into labor and the picked it back up after a couple of months of hanging about with a newborn.
The other day there was a pretty epic Peeps post around a parent at, I think, an Alameda elementary school who was upset about a book that their child had brought home. The student was a 5th grader so, depending on if you’ve been around 5th graders recently your mileage may vary on how much you know about what they know right now. The parent was ranting about how the teachers and administration should “suffer” for daring to expose kids to the materials in the graphic novel. The “graphic” in graphic novel is because it’s like a comic book, not because it’s pornography or something. That they can already find on the internet.
The book? This One Summer. The student checked out this book on her own and it was contained in the section for 5th graders only which all the other kids know is where the good stuff is.
The parent has found some sympathetic ears but, in general, most are saying the book is fine and that we shouldn’t be censoring materials that some parents may find too racy for their sensitive flowers. And what is happening the Florida and other states we should be pushing back locally against these kinds of efforts. And finally, someone is pushing back against Florida:
Blogging Bayport Alameda 