To the San Carlos Community,
We are writing to inform you about a difficult step the San Carlos School District (SCSD) trustees had to take. At the March 11th Board meeting, the trustees voted unanimously to notify a number of teachers that their positions with the District may not exist in the 2010/2011 school year, which starts this September. This letter is to give you some context for that decision, and hopefully answer some questions you may have regarding these notices, which teachers will receive on March 15th. Please know that everyone —the Board, the District and the San Carlos Teachers Association (SCTA)—is working together to minimize the impacts this action will have. In many ways, the notifications that will be sent out over the next week reflect the District’s preparation for the “worst case.” While that must be done to protect as much of our educational program as possible, it is our sincere hope that we can find a way to retain our great teachers and minimize the impact on our children.

Mark Olbert
President, Board of Trustees

Well, now the first version of that video is done and posted online. Although my graphics are a bit primitive and the audio isn’t perfect, I think it does a good job capturing the history of California school finance, how it works now, some of the structural problems that tie our hands, and what we can do about it. It’s a little long — 40 minutes — but if you can take some time, I encourage you to take a look (it’s divided into chapters, so it can be viewed in multiple sessions).

Click here to get to the video. Let me know what you think!

The finalists are: Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee. Winners will be announced in April. Here is the Washington Post article on the finalist announcement.

Here is a related article on how the scoring worked for determining finalists. The rubric included items like making education funding a priority, demonstrating significant progress in raising achievement and closing gaps, developing and adopting common academic standards, turning around the lowest-achieving schools, ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter or other autonomous public schools, and improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance.

I have stated many times that I thought it was a low likelihood that California would be eligible for this program, and even if it were, the benefit for a small district like San Carlos would not likely be significant. That said, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to be eligible for Federal money (assuming the the requirements are consistent with our values), so I suspect California will try again in the second round of RTTT in June. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Variation in scores over 800 tell us very little about the quality of the school. Although these scores are the only system publicized by the state and federal governments for evaluating the effectiveness of schools, we need to understand their limitations. My colleage Mark Olbert wrote a blog post based on a fantastic analysis of our API scores related to the student population. He does a much better and more detailed explanation than I will give here, but essentially we must control for students’ location as well as students in special education (since Special Ed classes are not distributed evenly over the schools).

If one looks at the API scores of the four schools for general education students who live in San Carlos, the APIs of the four schools all fall within the range of 929-933! I encourage you to read Mark’s blog for a more detailed explanation, but suffice is to say that this proves what the District administration has been claiming for many years — there is no difference in the quality of the education among our elementary schools! We’re extremely fortunate to live in such a community.

That leaves us with a known problem of $1.6 million. However, as we have learned, the situation is more likely to get worse and not better, so our staff estimates that it would be more prudent to look at it as a $2.2 million problem — a combination of revenue enhancements and cost reductions equaling that amount starting next fiscal year would eliminate our deficit and keep us above the 3% minimum required reserve level. However, only a 3% reserve level hardly gives me great comfort (we were at 14% only three years ago, so it’s easy to see how the State can wipe that away quickly). Also, this assumes that we renew the Measure D parcel tax, which expires June 2011. We need to have another discussion on when to put this renewal on the ballot — definitely look out for that!

By the way, if you didn’t catch that, I did say “revenue enhancements.” I’m very excited to report that Dr. Baker and his team are aggressively pursuing ways to increase our top line, including more aggressive grant proposals as well as looking at launching some fee-for-service businesses, such as pre-school, after care, and summer camps. It’s a brilliant idea, and long overdue (although SCCLC has had a model for some years). Like any new business, we must remain conservative as to its possibilities for the purpose of budgeting, but I do agree with our Superintendent that it has tremoundous potential. Accordingly, the Board agreed that a target of around $250K in next fiscal year is prudent for the purpose of budgeting.

That leaves us with the cuts. At our Board meeting Tuesday night, the Superintendent presented what was essentially a discussion piece developed by the Admininstration to look at restructuring the way we deliver some programs. Unlike in the past when we considered eliminating certain programs, these ideas were more about sharing responsibilities and/or reducing services rather than eliminating them. Of course, such reductions would still involve reducing personnel (as that’s where the savings lie), but they are definitely more creative solutions that would lessen the impact on the students. Some of these ideas include reducing library support, using middle school music instructors to also teach elementary school stuents, etc. These are all just concepts at this point — the Board will of course debate these and other ideas over the next few months. However, the Board did generally agree that the target for these types of programatic restructuring cuts would be about $750K. So, with $250K in revenue enhancements, that leaves us with a target of about $1.2 million in reductions that would need to come from employee compensation. Generally speaking that can happen two ways (or a combination of the two) — reductions in the average compensation per employee, or a reduction in the number of employees. The former means things like salary cuts; the latter means things like increasing class sizes (and both areas are matters that need to be collectively bargained).

This bring me to process. How are we going to approach this problem and discussion, as well as get input from the public? Unlike last year where we did a few large “town hall” style meetings, it is more likely that the Superintendent will conduct a series of smaller, school-site meetings at every school to discuss these issues with parents and concerned community members and bring back that input to the Board. Please be on the lookout for notices from your principals on these meeting days and times. Also, we still have the budget survey from last year, and that will continue to be a resource for staff and the Board. Many of you may recall from last year that we have a March 15th deadline for sending out “pink slips” to certificated employees. So, for example, if we think that increasing class sizes is at all a possibility, then the District would have to send out notices to potentially affected teachers. It’s of course a wacky system as the budget isn’t completed until June (and like last year, you can then rescind the termination notices – but of course affected employees have already started looking for other jobs by then), so you have to make a decision by March 15th to send out these notices based on a ton of uncertainty.

So, if you’re seriously depressed by the time you’ve read this far, I do want to add some perspective. Yes, the State is treating us like crap. Yes, the ramifications for California are potentially catastropic. Yes, the structural problems in the state render it unlikely that this will turn around for very long time. But we in San Carlos have an amazing history of making lemonade from lemons. We still have great schools by every measure, dedicated and inspiring teachers, a top-notch administration and staff, and passionate and devoted parents. Although it may be cold comfort to some, San Carlos has it much better than so many other places in the State, including some our close neighbors (e.g., Redwood City is facing some unfathomable reductions in their programs). This is due largely to the fact that, despite being a Revenue Limit district, San Carlos kept a large financial reserve, got the community support to pass two parcel taxes, and has a strong and growing Education Foundation. I encourage everyone to attend these budget meetings and to continue to support the San Carlos Educational Foundation, which I know is tough in these times. Also please attend Spring Fling on March 6th when we can together celebrate all that we have accomplished as a community despite the lemons that the State delivers to us.

Dr. Baker deserves a lot of credit for working tirelessly through this process, which is difficult and fuels passionate debate all around. He conducted numerous community meetings and worked the plan so as to take into account feedback but also working within our goals and constraints. The plan as originally proposed has been modified as follows:

• Some streets within Devonshire canyon will remain in the Arundel zone
• We added some streets within the current White Oaks area to now be in the Brittan Acres zone
• For homes east of El Camino, only homes at Holly Street and north will move to the Arundel zone
• We moved some parts of the Alameda to the Heather zone

This plan significantly increases the footprint of Heather, while materially shrinks that of White Oaks. It also gives some relief to the likelihood of oversubsciption at Arundel. The link to the Final Approved Planl is here. Note that these street assignments still need to be updated on the District web site.

One thing that’s worth repeating is that these changes do not affect current students or their siblings who will attend elementary school at the same time. No students are being moved in this plan — the zones will apply only to new families, so therefore the changes will effectively be implemented over the next 5-7 years.

On a related note, the Board also unanimously approved a new document outlining the “preferences” for enrollment in any school. These preferences are essentially, with only minor modifications, a codification of past practice, such as giving enrollment preference to siblings in school, etc.

Lastly, boundary changes are certainly not a panacea for enrollment issues. It is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but still a single piece. We still need to look at Middle School capacity and enrollment, potentially addding capacity at some schools, looking at transportation options, and maybe even thinking how we would add a school in the Laureola area. Some of these ideas may take years, but they’re definitely worth pursuing!

Thank you again to Dr. Baker, my fellow board members, District staff, and members of the enrollment committe for all of the time and hard work that went into making these proposals. And also thanks to the community who attended the town hall meetings and gave their input, as that was extremely valuable. Of course no change is perfect nor does everyone consider it better for them, but it’s clear that this community broadly supported this, understands that all of our schools are excellent, and really came together for the good of the whole District and all of its students!