2012 Ballot / Elections Impacting Our Schools

State Ballot Measures

There are 2 statewide major ballot measures that will impact our schools - all will raise taxes in an effort to increase state revenues. Regardless of outcome of measures below, it is estimated that SDUSD will still need to cut between $50MM and $70MM of additional spending cuts. To learn about the state initiatives, who support / oppose, who has funded and details about each measure, see links below.

Proposition 30, a Sales and Income Tax Increase Initiative (Brown)

Proposition 38, a State Income Tax Increase to Support Public Education (Munger)

Local Ballot Measure

Proposition Z: "To repair neighborhood schools and charter schools with funding the state cannot take away by: Repairing deteriorating 60-year-old classrooms, libraries, wiring, plumbing, bathrooms and leaky roofs; Removing hazardous mold, asbestos, and lead; Upgrading fire safety systems/doors; Upgrading classroom instructional technology, labs and vocational education classrooms; Shall San Diego Unified School District issue $2.8 billion in bonds at legal interest rates with citizen’s oversight, independent financial audits, no money for administrators’ salaries and all funds spent locally?" Prop. Z would increase property taxes at most $60 per year per $100,000 of assessed valuation of taxable property.

SDUSD: Prop Z Web Site

Guide to Decide: SDUSD's Proposition Z | NBC 7 San Diego 

Voice of San Diego: City Schools' New Borrowing Plan: San Diego Explained

Union Tribune: Vote No on Z - It Props Up A Broken Status Quo


The School Board Races:

Three seats are opening up this year:

• Sub-District D: Current board member: Richard Barrera. Challengers: None. Barrera isn’t being challenged in this election. We won’t spend any more time on him.
  
• Sub-District A: Current board member: John Lee Evans. Challenger: Mark Powell. Evans, the current board president, is running for re-election, hoping to win a second term. His challenger, Mark Powell, caused an upset in June when he won more votes than the incumbent.
  
• Sub-District E: Current board member: Shelia Jackson. Candidates: Bill Ponder and Marne Foster.

See:  A Parents Guide to San Diego School Board Election

How Is Your School Doing?

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it" (Lord Kelvin). So, how do stakeholders know how well their school is doing? Of course this is a complex question and there are many factors both inside and outside of the school that impact student learning. Academically, often times parents rely on the schools API score that is released once a year. While an interesting metric, the API Score can be more of an indicator of "who the students are" as opposed to "how the school is doing".

Overall in the Point Loma Cluster 70% of students are proficient Math and 56% in English Language Arts (compared to a District average of 56% in English and 50% in Math). While outperforming the District, it will take all of us to help close the achievement gap.

To get a overall look at our cluster and cluster schools, see:

2011 Point Loma Cluster Schools Overview

Point Loma Cluster Schools - How is Your School Doing?

What do you think?

Field of Dreams At Corriea?

For the past two years, members of the Point Loma Community have been working closely with District, Point Loma Cluster Schools and our community to expand fields for use of the community and our schools to accommodate football, field hockey, lacrosse, baseball and more. The total cost of this project would be between $7MM and $9.5MM depending on natural or synthetic surface. Source of funding has not yet been determined.

To learn more:

See a draft layout and costs:  Point Loma Community Fields

See aerial of site: Correia Aerial

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems

Surpassing Shanghai from NCEE on Vimeo.

Surpassing Shanghai, which looks globally at the top education systems including Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, Canada and compares these systems to the US.  The US faces extreme global competition - and according to the recent PISA Rankings, the US globally ranks 17th in reading, 33rd in math and 23rd in science.

In the video, author Tom Friedman talks about the global economy and how the rules (and wages) are changing for the American worker.  Marc Tucker, author of Surpassing Shanghai" sets out to answer a simple question: "How would we redesign the education system in the US if the aim were to take advantage of everything that has been learned by the countries with the best education systems in the world?"  Tucker provides an in-depth look at global leaders and offers up a framework for success:

Benchmark

 - Benchmark the Education systems of the top performing countries

Design For Quality

 - Clear Goals: Public and professional consensus

 - Teacher Quality: Develop and support a world class teaching force

 - Principal Quality: Leadership matters

 - Instruction: Effective instructional strategies

Design For Equity

 - Finance - Money follows student

 - Standards: High expectations and consistent standards

 - Low Performing Schools: Best teachers

Design for Productivity

 - Accountability & Autonomy

 - Incentives

 - School to Work | Experience

 - Single Capable Center To Lead

What Are Your Ideas to Reconfigure Schools To Save $?

The Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation wants to hear from you.  Over the past few days and upcoming weeks, we would like to her your thoughts and ideas on possible school closures and reconfiguration.  In the forum, we are looking for ideas.  The district estimates it will save $400,000 to $500,000 per year per school closure.  The budget crises is real - read the The Ticking Time Bomb of San Diego Unified School District Finances and San Diego Schools Chief "On The Road To Insolvency.

Currently, the Point Loma Cluster has 6,400 students. 1,800 students come to our cluster from outside cluster boundary.  Due to serious budget constraints, it is likely that in the future the District will only offer transportation to students as required by law - which will reduce to number of students in our cluster. {We are working to get an estimate on the estimated decline in enrollment}.

Learn about the District's Proposed Point Loma Realignment / School School Closure.


Now, what are your ideas?

SDUSD Considers Closing Cluster School(s)

San Diego Unified School District is facing a sixth year of reductions in state funding. As part of its budget submission for the 2011-12 school year, it must submit the plan for the current year and projections for the next two years. The submission for the 2012-13 school year included $5 million that could come from "school realignments," which can include closing schools, changes to grade-level configurations, moving and consolidating programs, and the need for additional school sites, should additional capital funds become available. The District estimates it will save $500,000 per school closing.

The Point Loma Cluster consists of 10 schools with over 6,400 students.  Schools include:

• Barnard (K-6, 275 students)
• Cabrillo (K-4, 195 students)
• Dewey (K-4, 433 students)
• Loma Portal (K-4, 409 students)
• Ocean Beach (K-4, 406 students)
• Silver Gate (K-4 / 540 students)
• Sunset View (K-4 / 441 students)
• Dana (5-6 / 786 students)
• Correia (7-8 / 873 students)
• Point Loma High (9-12 / 2,065 students)

To get detailed data about our cluster schools performance, enrollment, facilities, see:

Point Loma Cluster Google Map and PL Cluster Enrollment Data 10-12.11

The District's proposal for the Point Loma Cluster includes:

• Close Cabrillo Elementary effective July 2012.
  
  
• Close Barnard campus but keep the Mandarin Magnet K-6 program by relocating it to the Dana campus effective September 2012. Expand the magnet focus from Mandarin Chinese to a Pacific Rim Language Immersion K-8 program.
  
  
• Close Dana Middle School Grade 5 effective July 2012.

• Convert Dewey, Loma Portal, Ocean Beach, Silver Gate, Sunset View from K-4 to K-5 schools effective September 2012.
  
  
• Dana's current fifth graders will return to Dana for sixth grade in September 2012. The sixth grade program will share the Dana campus with the Pacific Rim. Language Immersion K-8 program for the 2012-13 school year.

• Completely close Dana Middle School effective July 2013.
  
  
• Correia's grade level configuration remains the same for 2012-13, but will convert to a 6-8 middle school in 2013-14. Correia will serve as the only middle school in Point Loma.
  
  
• Point Loma High School is not impacted by above recommendations.

The SDUSD staff and board is seeking and wants input from the community. The Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation has scheduled a series of community meetings: Information Meeting Oct. 17, Informational Meeting October 18 and a Town Hall Meeting (Oct 24th).

To learn more and get the facts, see: Point Loma Cluster School Closing / Realignment.

Point Loma Cluster Schools Empowerment Framework

Background

The Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation (PLCSF) is a group of parents, teachers, and principals from the Point Loma community who convened around the central goal of advancing the cluster into an outstanding, cohesive K-12 environment for the children of Point Loma and San Diego. Grounded in a strategic plan, the PLCSF and the cluster community engaged in a year-long dialogue to consider options for an innovative system of public school governance to better serve the goal of student achievement across all student populations.

From this dialogue, key elements emerged that suggest a framework that builds on a charter-school like concept of site-based management, aligns resources within the cluster, and enables schools to tailor core decisions to the needs of the community. These key elements align with research that points to a dramatic relationship between real decentralization, or the bottom-up organizational model in which individual schools are empowered to make core decisions, and the success of students.

Key elements of empowered schools FRAMEWORK - Four FREEDOMS

Our next step in the dialogue process is to craft a revolutionary new Empowered Schools Agreement that includes a significant level of decision-making at the cluster level. This agreement will take the district-led Community-Based School Reform Model to the next level and outline the key elements necessary to support a cluster-led Empowered Schools Framework—an innovative, adaptive, sustainable, and accountable learning environment.

The Point Loma Cluster will work collaboratively to craft an Empowered Schools Agreement based on four essential freedoms which include the discretion to control the school budget, curriculum, staffing, and scheduling, as well as the cornerstones of accountability and leadership. Over the next month, cluster stakeholders will provide input into the agreement development as we work to delineate both cluster-level autonomy and increased site-level principal authority.

Link: Empowered Schools Framework

For more background, see Governance on the Point Loma Cluster web site.

What do you think?

Questions for Point Loma Cluster Community Forum

Please post your questions for the "Is Charter a Better Way" community forum below. There will be ample to time to ask questions which will be submitted to our moderator to ask the panel. Please note that there will also be the opportunity to write questions for the moderator at the forum - but to the extent we can get question before the session it will help facilitate and streamline the process so more questions can be heard.

For more information about the conversations in our cluster, please see: Point Loma Cluster Governance.

For more information about the forum, please see: Is Charter a Better Way?

Please post questions below. They will be pulled from this blog up to the 4pm the day of the event.

Point Loma Cluster Community Forum - Is Charter a Better Way?

The Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation invites you (parents, teachers, staff and community stakeholders) to a community dialogue on February 2, 2011 from 6pm to 8pm at Barnes Tennis Center. Link to Information.  

This session continues the work of of cluster in exploring Cluster Governance options, to engage a dialogue (not a debate) in an effort to learn more about charter schools, best practice and innovation in education.  This is not intended to be a charter movement or to "sell charter schools" to our community.

For the past 12 months the Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation (PLCSF) has reached out to stakeholders hosting community outreach forums at 8 of our 10 cluster schools and sent out cluster wide survey to to over 6,000 stakeholders to hear your voice. A common theme from our community regarding our cluster schools has been control of budget and programs, accountability, teacher evaluation and support, data driven decision making, hiring flexibility at school sites, engaging / relevant curriculum, paced / personalized learning environments, de-tracking of students, stability of leadership, flexible / adaptive schools and real time assessment.

In addition to the above, the PLCS has been put forth various governance models for discussion by our community. No decisions have been made.  Current models being discussed in our community include:

• Continuing to improve the current model
• Exploring individual charter school options
• Exploring a charter district of cluster schools
• Exploring forming our own Point Loma School District

For more information, please see Point Loma Cluster Governance.

Are Charter Schools a Better Way?

Education is the social justice issue of this century. 67% of US citizens believe we have a crises in education. Reform conversations are occurring at a rapid pace throughout the US. President Obama says money without reform will not fix the problem. Nationally, 32 states have already changed laws to support reform to create better schools.

Despite improvement of cluster schools, 3 out of 10 students are not proficient in English Language Arts and and 1 out of 2 students are not proficent in Math. At the High School level, 4 out of 5 students are not proficient in Math.

For the past 12 months the Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation (PLCSF) has reached out to stakeholders hosting community outreach forums and sending out cluster wide survey to hear your voice. A common theme from our community regarding our cluster schools has been control of budget and programs, accountability, teacher evaluation, data driven decision making, hiring flexibility at school sites, engaging / relevant curriculum, paced / personalized learning environments, de-tracking of students, stability of leadership and flexible / adaptive schools. >>> Click Here To Learn More.

The Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation invites you to a community dialogue "Are Charters a Better Way?" on February 2, 2011. >>> Click Here For Details. Get involved, hear from a great panel, learn more about our cluster schools and have your voice heard! Follow us on Twitter.