Ever since a parcel tax for Oakland teachers fell flat without the support of the local teachers union, a committee has been meeting to try again, this time with a broader support base. There’s been talk of placing a tax measure on the June 2010 ballot.
And once again, talks about ways to boost teacher salaries in the midst of ongoing state budget cuts – and tense contract negotiations — have run right into a teachers union sticking point: whether any of the money raised by local property taxes should go to the city’s 30-some independently run, non-unionionized, public charter schools.
During a town hall meeting last week at International High School, Superintendent Tony Smith talked about Portland’s efforts to make school-based fundraising more equitable. He said each school could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that anything over that cap was diverted to needier schools.
Well, he was partly right. I just got off the phone with Beryl Morrison, who’s president of the Portland PTA and a board member of the Portland Schools Foundation. Here’s the story:
Portland’s PTAs do not have a cap. But some schools, in addition to a PTA, have established local school foundations – school-based organizations that can legally fund teaching positions (on the district’s payroll). The foundations were established in 1995 by the Portland school board.
Mission figs, anyone? Every Tuesday afternoon, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Glenview Elementary School kids crowd a tent with locally grown fruits and vegetables. (These lovely photos from parent Joseph Bansuelo are so last week, but we took some new ones during a visit today.) The PTA started the new produce stand, which is run by volunteers, including Carol Kuelper, a woman from the neighborhood who doesn’t even have kids at the school.
I saw one little boy tear into a red cabbage like an apple (makes for a great photo, but a rather challenging interview), and another buying greens that his mom requested for dinner tonight. He told me that grapes were so sweet — and cheap — that he ate them “for fun.”
About 10 more of these weekly farmers markets are opening at Oakland schools this year, thanks in part to funding from the East Bay Asian Youth Center. What kind of nutritional progress are you seeing at your school (and at your school’s cafeteria)? Are you noticing an improvement? Tell us about it.
Yumi Matsui, a Life Academy and Bay Area Writing Project teacher, heads to a Congressional briefing Monday to talk about digital storytelling — specifically, about the immigration-focused project she and another teacher led at their East Oakland school, and how the medium helped students become better writers.
Interested? Check out this 7-minute video about the Life Academy project, produced by the Pearson Foundation:
If you want to help needy families before the start of the school year and have a couple of hours on Saturday, you can head on over to the Lend A Hand Foundation at 8105 Capwell Drive, Oakland.
The foundation plans to stuff 3,500 to 4,000 backpacks with school supplies this Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. Lunch will be served around 12:15 p.m., and organizers expect to finish the assembly process by 2 p.m. At that point, volunteers will deliver the backpacks to schools and shelters in Oakland.
Remember Arnold’s digital textbook initiative that we discussed in June?
Well, a review of 16 of these newfangled `books’ came out yesterday, and the materials – all free — are posted online.
It looks like they’re all for high school math and science: geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, calculus, physics, chemistry, biology/life science and earth science.
Ten of the textbooks reviewed covered at least 90 percent of the state content standards for the subject, and four met all of them. Only three of the 16 really bombed the review. (Step it up, Earth Systems!) Read the rest of this entry »
Some of the ideas in the declaration sound a lot like previous or existing initiatives: That principals should have greater say over staffing (i.e. hiring and firing), budgets and curriculum. That families should have the option to send their children to various district or charter schools. That Oakland should offer rewards and incentives for teachers in high-poverty areas, and raise base pay for teachers.
The 10-member Legislative Budget Conference Committee, which is reviewing Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget proposals, voted yesterday to suspend California’s controversial high school exit exam requirement through 2012-13.
This is not set in stone — the budget still has to make it through the Assembly and Senate — but it’s unlikely that a cut already agreed to by the Dems (six of the 10 budget conference committee members are Democrats) will be restored under these fiscal conditions.
This means, of course, that next year’s juniors and seniors who have yet to pass both portions of the test would be off the hook. Sophomores would still take the test, but if they fail, it wouldn’t count against them, and they wouldn’t have to retake it. Read the rest of this entry »
Cecilia Lopez, an Oakland High School senior who served as a student director on the school board this year, finished her term with a bang tonight during a discussion about stiffer graduation requirements and access to courses required for admission to state universities (known as A-G classes).
Lopez piped up after Jim Mordecai, a retired teacher and school board meeting regular, told the board that such a change would backfire — and that huge numbers of students, unable or unwilling to handle these new district requirements, would defect to independently run charter schools.
“Keep dreaming,” Mordecai said.
Lopez had this to say to the naysayers (”I have heard rumors of teachers not being for this,” she said): Read the rest of this entry »
You might have seen Jill Tucker’s piece in the Chronicle yesterday on the 23 percent drop in truancy this year in San Francisco schools, an improvement attributed to a parental prosecution policy and other citywide efforts.
The Oakland school district has its own campaign to boost attendance (and state funding), called Attend and Achieve. District staff say it seems to have had a big impact — well, at the elementary and middle school levels, anyway.
