School 94501/94502

Support for Measure H continues to grow.  Following Tuesday’s Alameda City Council vote to endorse Measure H, on Friday afternoon ACLC’s Governing Board announced that it too supports Measure H.  The ACLC Board’s resolution calls on the ACLC community to “participate in activities that will encourage Alameda voters to vote yes for Measure H.”

Here is the full text of the resolution:

ACLC Governing Board Resolution Supporting the Passage of Measure H:

Whereas:  ACLC learners are AUSD public school students, and

Whereas:  ACLC learners benefit from their ability to participate in Encinal High School and other AUSD sports, music, drama, and other elective academic classes, and

Whereas: Most ACLC learners come from the AUSD K-5 system which will benefit from the passage of Measure H

Resolved that:

On May 7, 2008 the Governing Board of the Alameda Community Learning Center hereby declares its public support for the passage of Measure H and encourages its facilitators, parents, learners, alumni, and community supporters to:

1.      Participate in activities that will encourage Alameda voters to vote yes for Measure H

2.      Participate in and support the “ACLC Jogathon” to raise money to be donated to the Encinal High School Athletic Boosters

Last night’s “Save the Music” concert was packed with talent and passion and great music. I’ll admit to being a completely biased critic, but for me the greatest highlight of the show (among many highlights) was “We Shall Overcome” by Lynn Tousey’s elementary school singers. I found it incredibly beautiful and moving. As the judges might say on American Idol, it was a perfect “song choice” for those little cuties.

I realize that I may sound a bit like a broken record (or a scratched CD or an old iPod), but I think the situation we’re in warrants many reminders: If our kids and our schools and our town are going to overcome all that confronts them in 2008, we all have to step up and do all we can to make that happen. Stepping up means BOTH fighting as hard as we can for our fair share in Sacramento AND passing Measure H on June 3. We also have to be prepared with whatever other temporary, stopgap measures like “Save the Music” we can put together if we were to fail this year with our efforts in Sacramento and with Measure H.

My family and I are doing all we can on all three of those fronts. In fact, yesterday at her elementary school my daughter was recognized with a “life skill award” for making her birthday party into a fundraiser for “Save the Music.” She asked her friends and their families to donate money to “Save the Continue reading ‘Save the Music (and Everything Else Too)’

As I hope you already know, Saturday at 10am at Encinal High School, there will be a “Town Hall” meeting organized by Sandré Swanson. The meeting will focus on issues near and dear to my heart: the state budget cuts and education. I regret that other obligations will prevent me from attending the meeting, but I urge all who are able to attend to do so.

In addition to the Town Hall’s organizer (Sandré Swanson), several other prominent state-level politicians are scheduled to attend. To me, the most interesting and important among these is Assemblymember John Laird, Chair of the Assembly Budget Committee.

This week I am fortunate to have an Op-Ed piece about Measure H running in the Alameda Sun and in the Alameda Journal. The piece attempts to explain what is at stake with Measure H and why it would be irresponsible and unrealistic to adopt a “Sacramento only strategy” (i.e., We cannot vote no on H in the hope that the state will somehow, miraculously, get its act together in the next two months.)

Since the Journal has tighter guidelines on the length of Op-Ed pieces than the Sun, the “Journal version” is a bit shorter than the “Sun version.”

For any who didn’t get a local newspaper this week, the “Sun version” follows: Continue reading ‘Measure H: What Will We Choose?’

At its meeting Tuesday evening (April 22), the Alameda County Board of Education voted 6-0 (with Dennis Chaconas absent) to deny the charter school application of the proposed new NCLC charter school in Alameda.

As you may recall, after the AUSD school board voted 5-0 in January to deny NCLC’s charter school application, ACLC-NCLC appealed to the Alameda County Board of Education. The County Board held a “public hearing” on the charter appeal in March and then made its decision denying the charter at Tuesday’s meeting.

At Tuesday’s meeting, there was some disagreement about (1) how much time (if any) speakers pro and con would be allowed (since there had already been a public hearing on the matter. Ultimately both the “yes on NCLC” and the “no on NCLC” had ten minutes - I was one of the “no” speakers) and (2) NCLC’s attempts to add new information about curriculum, facilities and finances to their application (NCLC contended that it was “supplemental information” rather than “new information”).

The County staff recommended strongly that the Board deny the charter. If you are inclined to read the County’s “Petition Review Executive Report” and “Review Summary,” you can link to them from Mike McMahon’s website here under “April.”

NCLC now has the right to appeal this denial to the state. Based on what happened at the County meeting tonight, I expect that sooner or later the applicants will either appeal to the state or reapply to AUSD for a charter application.

But for now, NCLC does not have a charter to operate a school and it seems it would be quite difficult for NCLC to open a new school in the fall.

(You may also recall that, as The Island reported on April 10, Renaissance Leadership Academy has also appealed to the County to reverse the AUSD school board’s rejection of their charter school application. I do not yet know the timeline for the County’s public hearing and/or action on that item.)

When the state fails in its responsibility to fund public education adequately, local communities currently only have two legal options: (1) get more than two thirds of voters to pass a local school parcel tax and/or (2) look to an education foundation as a partner to increase private fundraising.

I’ve written plenty about the parcel tax (Measure H) and you’ll hear more from me about that soon.

Today I wanted to remind us that we have a great education foundation in Alameda (AEF) leading the fight to leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding revenue for our children. Although there are larger and much wealthier foundations out there, AEF may be the most dynamic and ambitious education foundation in the country right now.

A front page article in today’s L.A. Times entitled “California Public Schools Seek Private Money Just to Cover the Basics” provides a good overview of the growing importance of foundations. The article discusses AEF’s “Public Education Is Too Valuable to Throw Away” campaign and closes with a quote from our very own Brooke Briggance.

If you can, please “step up” and donate to AEF.

In order to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to protect Alameda education as we know it, we must commit BOTH (1) to pass Measure H on June 3 AND (2) to continue to fight the long battle at the state level to fix the broken school funding system.

In my last substantive posting here, I criticized as naive and reckless the idea that we could vote down Measure H and instead gamble everything on a “Sacramento-only” strategy. (I don’t know of a single Measure H supporter who is in favor of a “Measure H-only” strategy, but that would be an equally irresponsible approach.) We can and we must both pass Measure H and continue to fight Sacramento.

In this post, I’ll mention some new information about state level advocacy and share an important breakthrough in our efforts at bringing litigation to force reform of the state’s school finance system. Continue reading ‘Leaving No Stone Unturned/Litigation Project Breakthrough’

For some reason, this site has been inundated with spam comments today.  So, at least temporarily, I have changed the settings so one has to “register” before commenting.  I promise not to do anything with the email addresses of anyone registering except for using the address to determine whether you are in fact a real person commenting on a school topic in Alameda.  Thanks/Sorry.

As more and more Alamedans are now coming to understand, California’s school finance system is broken. But based on the complaints of Measure H opponents, I am concerned that not as many Alamedans also understand that many of us already have been working hard for years to fix that broken system and will continue to do so (probably also for years), regardless of what happens with the Measure H vote on June 3.

The point of Measure H, of course, is not to solve permanently our school funding problems. The point is to offset this year’s precipitous and unprecedented proposed cuts in state funding of education and to continue to protect Alameda’s great public schools temporarily while we fight the long battle to fix the system in Sacramento. We can and must both play “defense” locally with the parcel tax as well as continue to play “offense” in Sacramento. If we vote down Measure H and gamble everything on a reckless Sacramento-only strategy, we risk destroying public education as we know it in Alameda. It really is too valuable to throw away.

Anyone who seriously opposes a four-year school parcel tax on the grounds that we should gamble on a Sacramento-only strategy has no real understanding of how, in the real world, systemic changes in policy at the state level might happen: If one looks at the past few decades of California school finance policy, the best analogy may be the movement of tectonic plates: Change comes slowly in tiny increments (e.g., a few equalization dollars here or there), though every once in awhile there is an earthquake (e.g., Serrano v. Priest, Proposition 13, Proposition 98, the recession of 2008). I do think the time is right for a earthquake of positive reform of this broken system in the coming years, but Continue reading ‘Tectonic Plates, Pie and Measure H’

Warning/Disclaimer: This is a relatively long post. Read on at your peril.

Timeline for the K-12 Restructuring Task Force

As others have already reported, (e.g., in the Alameda Journal, on Mike McMahon’s website, on Blogging Bayport Alameda under “Closing and Consolidating,” on The Island), AUSD has just launched a new K-12 Restructuring Task Force (“K-12RTF”) to examine whether/how to restructure AUSD. The K-12RTF replaces last year’s Elementary Facility Capacity Task Force (“EFCTF”) and Secondary Education Task Force (“SETF”). The K-12RTF’s primary goal is to “examine and recommend alternative facility and program configurations that are fiscally sustainable” for AUSD.

The 25-member K-12RTF first met on March 20. It is scheduled to meet five more times this spring (including this coming week), to meet weekly next fall, and then to make any recommendations it may be making next November. It is unclear whether (1) the current school board or (2) the “new” school board to be elected on November 4 would act on any of the K-12RTF’s recommendations. Since even the possibility of school closures and boundary changes (indeed of any significant changes in “facility and program configurations”) are so potentially politically explosive, I suspect that the work of the K-12RTF will be a major issue in the school board election campaign next fall and that ultimately it will be the new board that will act/not on the K-12RTF’s report in early 2009.

The K-12 Restructuring Task Force’s Decisions re School Closures Will Be Difficult and Complex

Despite the fact that the K-12RTF so far has had just one organizational meeting, since this is Alameda, the school-closure-rumor-mill is already running at full throttle. Continue reading ‘Restructuring AUSD?’