The Oakland High School junior died yesterday evening, his grandfather cradling him in his arms, Trib reporter Harry Harris reported today.

I just don’t get it.

This morning, after countless e-mails and security clearances, I finally stepped foot in a maximum security classroom at juvenile hall. It was for a story about Lauren Bishop, a 2009 Alameda County Teacher of the Year (and an Oakland Tech mom).

As I walked into Bishop’s science classroom and scanned the young faces sitting before her, I knew that most of them had been charged with a “707 B” offense: one of 23 crimes including murder, kidnapping, gang activity and discharge of a firearm.

I also learned from one of the supervisors that more than half of the boys in Unit 2 might eventually be shipped from the center to an adult prison — quite possibly, on their 18th birthdays.

Whatever their histories, Bishop said, she sees each kid as just that — a kid. After observing her class and interviewing a couple of the older students, I can see why. 

I noticed that they seemed quite attentive to a relatively dry review session on ionic and covalent bonds. Then they picked teams for Game Show Friday, a weekly event in which they’re quizzed on the lessons of the week. It was Thursday, their last chance to cram.

Wayne, one of Bishop’s students, told me later that it wasn’t just the chance to win Game Show Friday that made everyone so competitive, but the prize: “Candy, you know, Snickers.”

Walking from the World Affairs Council building in downtown San Francisco the other week testified to my growing understanding that Senior Year is not as fun, exciting, or easy as others had told me. I find myself more occupied and stressed than any other year of high school, in fact. How can a senior high school student find the time to really focus and excel in every facet of academics when college applications and extra curricular activities are beckoning for attention? That isn’t the ideal definition of “the best year of your life.”

With college applications on the lips of everyone around me, there is a sense of urgency and desperation to cram in every last extra curricular activity, score well on standardized tests, and write the “perfect” personal statement. How others seem to be focused on college and balance other school work is beyond me. Personally I am managing four advanced placement classes, rehearsals for a school play, cross country running, my work with the World Affairs Council organization, and completing college applications.

Teachers are not bending their class courses in empathy. College deadlines aren’t going to change. And days will not become longer. Is this how senior year is supposed to be? One could put the blame on me for electing to be engaged in all of these responsibilities, which is partly true, but where’s the fun in life?

All seniors understand that their last year of high school will be the best, but is it a fluke to tell underclassmen this? Or do they have to wait until after submitting college applications for the excitement to start? But then the admittance and/or rejection letters come a short few months afterward, and I can only imagine the renewed stress that comes with that.

Jonathan Trinh is a senior at Skyline High School.

That seemed to be the thinking of the Oakland school district’s administration, at least during a special budget meeting in which the school board began to figure out how to reconcile its priorities with a $27 million budget cut (which equals more than 10 percent of the district’s general purpose funds).

Using an interactive Excel spreadsheet — which is supposed to be made available to the public soon — CFO Vernon Hal plugged in various average class sizes and teacher costs and, boom! Out came the number of students that school would need, overall, to cover its fixed costs (principal, clerk, utilities, etc.), and vice versa.

Increasing the district’s average class size by just one student would save almost $4 million, Hal said. Average class size is 21 for Oakland’s elementary schools and 26 for its middle and high schools, according to the presentation.

The takeaway message? Schools generally can afford to be smaller and pay their teachers a higher salary if their class sizes are bigger, since there would be fewer teachers on the payroll.

I should note that Hal didn’t promise any pay raises, and there’s no telling if they would follow such a policy move.

Of course, reality is not so neat as manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet. Staff acknowledged that larger class sizes would probably lead to layoffs, even when the district’s 14 percent teacher attrition rate is taken into account.

Layoffs and staff consolidations typically involve “bumping,” a provision in the collective bargaining agreement in which one teacher takes the spot of another, largely based on seniority. The teachers union, which is negotiating a new contract, has listed small class size as a top priority and has rejected such proposals in the past.

If district administrators decide this is the way to go, they will face a technical and philosophical challenge as well: how to implement such a change in its largely decentralized, school-based budgeting system.

I can already hear you saying that this is a false choice, but given the budget situation, it might be one which district officials will be making: Should OUSD shrink the size of its teaching corps to make ends meet (and, potentially, to pay the remaining teachers better)?

Superintendent Tony Smith says he wants to hear from the public. “There’s no way that we, just district folks, that we, as a board … can come up with the one best way to make all of these cuts,” he said.

On the agenda is a recent asset management study (it addresses, among other things, what the district should do with its underutilized space) and a vote that could influence David Kakishiba’s decision to remain on or leave the school board.

Specifically:

Adoption by the Board of Education of its sentiment, after its public session and discussion on November 12, 2009 of conflict of interest laws and the Board’s By-laws, to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to enter into, or not enter into, any proposed future contract, recommended pursuant to District standards and presented in the normal course of business, with East Bay Asian Youth Organization, while Director David Kakishiba, is on the Board of Education and further directs its standing committee on Rules and Ethic, at its next regular meeting to consider and recommend, or not recommend, appropriate modification of Board By-Law 9270 and Coherent Governance Governing Culture 08, the District’s Conflict of Interest Rules, applicable to a Director.
 

Also, the board will hear a petition for a new charter, the Community School for Creative Education. In other charter news, OUSD’s charter schools office has recommended the denial of an online school, California Connections Academy @ VIMS. In September, The Oakbook reported that its principal had been pushed out of two schools before trying to open the virtual school in Oakland.

 (We’re still working out the kinks on this new blog server of ours; I’m not able to post links to PDF files at the moment — hopefully soon!)

Until today, when I saw Oakbook’s report on a new OUSD asset management study and checked it out for myself, I didn’t know that:

• Oakland’s public, non-charter schools can fit almost two times the number of students that they hold right now.
• The district’s buildings, in all, are 5.8 million square feet, and its property spans 487 acres.
• The city’s school-age population (5 to 17 years old) is 68,436. Of that number, 2,504 attend public schools outside of Oakland; 1,386 are not in school at all; 18,912 are getting a private education or are home schooled; and 7,189 go to tuition-free, but independently run charter schools. Just 38,445 (56 percent) go to regular public schools in Oakland.

On Page 30, two options are given for how to leverage the unused space: the High Efficiency School Choice Model, where the district only operates as many schools as it needs, and the Community School Model, where schools “incorporate complementary and income-producing uses.”

NOTE: OUSD staff say home schooled children, along with the privately educated, should have been included in the 18,912 figure presented in an earlier version of the report posted on last week’s committee agenda. The latest draft adds out-of-district and out-of-school children to that total, bringing it to 22,802.

EBAYC has received 64 contracts worth $6.5 million and brought 21 grants worth $8.3 million to the school district since 2004, according to the legal analysis. While Kakishiba says he doesn’t take part in the drafting of those contracts or vote on them, the attorneys say that’s not enough to remedy the appearance of — and opportunity for — impropriety, especially since he’s the head of the nonprofit.

Laura Schulkind of the SF-based law firm Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, which reviewed the case, said “the law doesn’t care” if Kakishiba is a noble and ethical public servant — that the laws were written to protect public institutions from nepotism and conflicting economic interests.

It’s not just Kakishiba who faces a potential conflict in the current situation, in her view. For example: What about an OUSD employee who — through no doing of Kakishiba’s — decides to promote a contract with EBAYC, rather than with another organization, in part because he or she thinks it will please the board member (and, maybe, offer job security)?

Enter the “red flag” e-mail. Oakland Unified’s General Counsel Jackie Minor said an e-mail sent by an EBAYC staffer to Kakishiba and Jennifer LeBarre, OUSD’s Nutrition Services director, illustrated the sticky situations that can arise as a result of such an “entanglement.”

In the e-mail, the EBAYC staffer asked for input on contract language for a farms-to-schools grant. She wrote: “Dave and Jennifer, how to make this language about OUSD funding less of a red flag?” (Kakishiba said he didn’t respond to the e-mail, and that the staffer violated his organization’s protocols by sending that message. But he told me the same thing has happened twice since with the same employee.)

“The decision to step down is the trustee’s and the trustee’s alone,” Schulkind told the board. “If the trustee doesn’t resign, then our recommendation is that the board should refrain from entering into contracts with EBAYC.”

After the meeting, I spoke briefly with Greg Cluster, a teacher at Metwest High School. Cluster noted that OUSD is a major employer with countless economic ties in the community. He said he wondered who would be able to serve on the board, by this standard, and how many people involved in the local schools (or who have spouses or children that are) would be precluded from leading the district as a result.

What do you think? If you want to watch the discussion online, go here and click on the video button next to the Nov. 12 special meeting.

As I wrote earlier, the board doesn’t officially decide until Wednesday whether to accept these recommendations. But here’s a preview of how three of the six might vote, based on their public comments:

Gary Yee: “I think the presentation affirms my interpretation to ask Director Kakishiba to stay on, not the other way around.”

Alice Spearman: “We enter into contracts all the time for some pitiful reasons. … There’s been some things that have been done from board members that should definitely be looked at as a conflict, but we don’t do it. … I think I’ll use my better judgment to recommend to David Kakishiba not to resign.”

Jody London: “I still feel like Director Kakishiba adds extreme value to this board … and my preference is for him to be able toserve out his term, for a number of reasons.”

Thanks, TheTruthHurts, for the suggestion.

On another technical note: Between noon and 1 p.m. today, we won’t be able to post anything on the blog, as it’s being moved to a different server.

Although the board doesn’t vote until Wednesday it seemed clear, from their questions and comments, that they’ll do what they can to convince Kakishiba to stay.

“David, did you hear me?” Alice Spearman called out after the meeting had ended. “Don’t write nothing till Wednesday.”

In October, Kakishiba announced he’d resign from the Oakland school board because of a conflict-of-interest ruling by General Counsel Jackie Minor. Then he said he’d wait to submit a letter of resignation until the basis for the opinion was explained publicly, which it was — in great detail — tonight (more on that tomorrow).

Minor and an attorney from an outside law firm that reviewed the case stressed that they did not find evidence of wrongdoing and that it was Kakishiba’s call whether to stay or go. But they also said that amended board bylaws would not change their conclusion, as some have suggested.

The issue raises larger policy questions which I’ll address tomorrow, along with more detail about the inquiry.

Dan Adiletta is a first-year teacher at Explore College Preparatory Middle School in East Oakland.

So there I am, fighting for control of a classroom against students sloshing knee-deep in disrespect towards each other and towards me, and all the while my observing school coach is clacking dourly on her computer. I know what my lesson and my classroom management is lacking; I need to include greater academic rigor and better routines and instructions to minimize disruptive behavior.

Tomorrow will be better, I say, I’ll work my tail off to make tomorrow better.

I come home late because of a flurry of mandatory meetings and student requests. I was at school an hour and a half early to prep. My lunch break was 20 minutes. I taught five back-to-back classes that were all a grueling struggle. I sit on my couch, my shirt untucked and left eye twitching, with my head in my hands feeling miserably guilty for failing the students whose education is in peril. I only have three or four hours to eat dinner, grade papers and prepare a better lesson for the next day before I pass out. It’s not a particularly stressful day, it’s just Tuesday.

I can’t work any harder (I’ve been making a stand for a while now), so I need to start working smarter. I’m using this memorial to our veterans and to the end of World War I, hooray for Armistice Day, to ask a fantastic online community for feedback (Sorry Cranky Teacher, your sage advice to relax can’t work if I’m dreading the next day. I need to take it head-on).

The feedback I’ve been getting from my administration consists of them asking me how I thought my lesson went and what I need to do. And my school’s professional development is focused entirely around developing learning targets, (LTs are great, but they don’t address the glaring holes in my performance). I’m not yet in BTSA because I don’t have two hours a night for extraneous paperwork. Stress has eliminated my ability to self-analyze. I record myself but I can’t stomach reliving my classes right after work. I need someone to frankly tell me, “Your performance is ______. You need this and this. You’re doing well here.”

These are the ideas I have so far:

- Recruiting students to grade papers before and after school
- Increasing my usage of team points in class. Perhaps students will be more focused if their group is immediately rewarded for compliance
- Lining the class up until the late bell rings. All my classes start chaotically because I’m required to monitor the hallways and throw myself between the occasional fights. I can’t be in the classroom to initialize appropriate behavior. So while I’m forced to wait out in the hall, perhaps my students should be as well
- Trying to adjust the school’s class rotation so perhaps once a week I can team-teach with the science teacher, another first-year teacher with whom I enjoy working
- Sending letters home to request parental volunteers to function as teaching assistants
- Suggesting a total rethink of the seventh-grade curriculum. I’d love to center the class around a single, continuous game using the electronic student response system I have. This exciting facade would be a mechanism for not only teaching the seventh-grade World History content, but also ethics, appropriate academic expectations, and methods to develop greater self-awareness

Ideas I still need:

- I have to find a way to develop lessons faster so I can spend my time reviewing them to clarify instructions, increase the pace and accountability,  and include extra material to help scaffold
- I have to find a better system of consequences. I have a policy that five disruptions warrants a referral to the office. But with most of the class earning three or four disruptions, it’s a non-stop fight. Detentions are a joke. They last half an hour, and assigning detention to a student is a hassle. I gave my own detentions but only one out of ten would show despite the consequence of a referral. Contacting parents is awesome and I try to do so but more often than not I can’t find a working phone number or the parent will simply hang up on me. I can include more carrots to encourage appropriate behavior, but don’t I also need a stick?

I refuse to be anything but great at this job and I’m outraged that I’m not there yet. I thank you in advance for any thoughts you might have. And please keep an eye out for a BBQ invitation this summer. My wife and I can host a crowd quite pleasantly when we’re not over-stressed.