The concomitant savings, with the death knell of Montebello, are $450,000 of public money annually.  In the Santa Clara County Grand Jury report, Finding #6 states, “The operation of 34 K-12 school districts and four (4) community college districts creates excessively high management and administrative costs.” The Grand Jury Recommendation #6 reads, “A consolidation of districts should be considered to reduce the numbers and costs of Superintendents / Chancellors, Boards of Trustees, administrative staff and overhead.”

These two issues dovetail nicely and will juice up the prospects for what I hope to be a very fertile dialogue among regular bloggers to this weekly column on education issues. Many times I have agreed with those bloggers who look for ways the educational bureaucracy can save taxpayer dollars. Some say I constantly ask for more money for education when I believe truth is I ask that all educational tax dollars get spent wisely and not wastefully. My strong wishes would be to create the leanest and meanest school/district with the highest level of achievement for ALL students as assessed with world-class rigorous standards.

I agree with the many of the regular blogger’s sentiments that we have too many school districts in Santa Clara County at a cost to the taxpayers of redundant expenditures. Not a good thing especially in these austere budgetary times. So I thought this would be an opportune time to examine the facts.

Today in Santa Clara County we have 31 total school districts serving kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Twenty are elementary districts (K-8th), 6 are unified districts (K-12) and 5 are high school districts (9-12). Several questions must be asked at this point:

When is a district too small to exist? 

Montebello had nine students during the 2008-09 school year. Lakeside Joint School District has 89 students, Loma Prieta Union has 450, Luther Burbank has 524, and Orchard Elementary has 802. These districts with 901 or fewer students are called Direct Service Districts and are served in large measure by the Santa Clara County Office of Education.

When is a district too large to exist?

The largest elementary school district in Santa Clara County is Cupertino with 16,971 students. The largest unified district is San Jose with 30,912 students. The largest high school district is East Side Union with 26,008. In comparison, Los Angeles Unified enrollment for 2008-09 was 688,138 students.

Which district configuration works the best for the goal of increasing student achievement?

In Santa Clara County we have 3 basic district configurations elementary, unified, and high school.

How difficult is it to move from a elementary district to unified or from a high school district to a unified district?

It seems I can make a strong prima facia case that it makes a great deal of sense, if starting from scratch, to create a unified districts K-12 the size of San Jose Unified. Yet in SCC we have a patchwork system created over scores of years. How difficult is it for the voters to heed the recommendation made by the GJ?

I think it would be instructive to review the efforts that led to a vote of Moreland School District and all districts that feed into the Campbell Union High School District in June of 1999 on Moreland’s effort to unify as a K-12 district.  This was the last time in Santa Clara County that there was a unification vote.  I wonder if the time is becoming more ripe for another district led unification referendum?

At a three-day strategic planning session in 1995 one of the agreed to actions was to create an encompassing community of learners preschool through adult and to make Moreland Elementary into Moreland Unified. To accomplish this strategic planning goal, authorized by Moreland’s Board) the State Board and the SCC Committee On School District Organization would need to set the voting region. After several years of debate and legal opinions it was decided that there would need to be a vote taken by effected districts and the registered voters interested enough to come out in a special election to the polls. Moreland naively thought the vote would just take place in their jurisdiction.

After four arduous years of planning by Moreland and the opposition to Moreland’s effort for unification the plebiscite was held and the dream of becoming a K-12 district with its own two high schools, Prospect and Camden, was defeated. The vote on June 9, 1999 on Measure A for Moreland Unified Ordinance Governance: Incorporation/Formation/Annexation was 45.9% (2,931) for unification, losing by 4.2%.

Even though many of us probably agree with the Grand Jury #6 Findings and Recommendation, it is almost impossible to redraw the districts in a manner that makes the most economic and result oriented sense (student achievement) if we must rely on voters to determine the end result. With that said maybe the Grand Jury is on to something that should be studied more thoughtfully and carefully. However, in the end I would say the local district turf will always be too protected to ever be penetrated with common sense. But these are extraordinary times. Montebello existed with fewer than 50 students for 117 years, but wise adults got together in grief to realize its end was better for all. The resultant savings of $450,000 of taxpayer dollars makes very good sense to me. Everyone wins.

The rule of thumb is that the consent calendar is not supposed to include any in-depth policy or controversial issues. However, sometimes buried in the consent calendar are items that merit discussion. For example, I removed the $2.26 million golf nets for Los Lagos golf course a year ago. I thought that $2.26 million on golf nets warranted discussion and I wanted to be on record for not supporting this purchase.

At last week’s council meeting, we had several items that probably should not have been on the consent calendar. One item of interest was settling a lawsuit with a software vendor for our Housing Department. Unfortunately, the Housing Department bought software based on a promise and a PowerPoint slide. So when it came to actually implementing the software, it did not work. As a result, we spent eight years of staff time going back and forth on a settlement. We are getting only a fraction of our money back via installments over five years. 

As you may remember, I have been a fan of piloting software before purchasing it. I believe it is a smarter and smoother way to go. If the software does not work, you find out quickly and do not have to spend a lot of money or staff time. The city of San Jose now has a new policy that allows for technology pilots. Here is a link to a prior blog on this topic.

Another consent item was that the council decided to give every janitor, gardener and security guard a raise at the water pollution control plant last week. I removed this item and shared my concerns which included the idea that if we receive good services today, why should we pay more? Perhaps we would consider giving raises in a robust economy to attract workers, but we are in a recession with the highest unemployment rate in Santa Clara county since 1941. We do not have a problem getting these services delivered today. I am not sure why we continue to voluntarily raise the cost of government when we do not have to do so. I also found it interesting that this issue came forward two weeks after council raised the sewer fees and not before.

And, yet another item on consent was the public-private partnership update. As you may know, there are property management groups from homeowner associations to corporate property owners who would like to maintain certain city parks for free! They would take care of landscaping, cleanliness, etc., by hiring professionals in those fields.  Most people that I have talked with think it’s great, because then, I can free up currently deployed city park staff and move them to other parks in San Jose and catch up on the backlog of maintenance.  Ah ... but not so fast, thee who is on a quest for government efficiency ... the council policy requires that these private landscapers be paid a prevailing wage, which is higher then the market price. Therefore, our quagmire continues since private groups do not want to pay above- market rates.

Your government at work...sure...but does it have its residents’ best interest in mind?

If you’re looking for food, entertainment and a tax deduction, then consider attending Monday Night Live at the San Jose Stage Company tonight at 6:30. Tickets are $60.

Mayor Chuck Reed joined eight other mayors of California’s largest cities in Sacramento on Wednesday to ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stay away from local tax revenues. Faced with a $24 billion budget deficit, the Governor has proposed taking revenues from the cities’ gas and property taxes and from local transportation funds.

Reed pointed out that San Jose has just approved a balanced budget for 2009-2010, despite an $84 million deficit at the outset. The Governor’s new proposal could set the city back an additional $50 million. In a radio interview Reed added that only Los Angeles’s roads were in a worse state of disrepair statewide.

“Our willingness to sacrifice on the state’s behalf does not, and cannot, represent a new revenue stream or a blank check for the state,” the mayors wrote the Governor and State Legislators, also pointing out that the repayment of gas tax dollars taken by the state must be repaid to the cities within three years according to the State Constitution. They added that “we must be sure that our tax dollars make their way back to taxpayers.” Read More at the Business Journal.

Santa Clara County’s poet laureate Nils Peterson may not have written a word of it, but he was proud to announce that the county’s official poem has finally been completed. The poem, entitled “A Family Album; Santa Clara County 2009,” was composed by hundreds of local residents, each of whom contributed a line. Peterson then selected 100 lines and fashioned them into a poem, divided into such sections as Work, People, Our Lives, What Was Lost, What’s Here, and The Look of Our Place. The entire poem can be found here.

A selection:

What’s Here
I thought it would be almost like Kansas, but it’s not.
Home of garlic fog, traffic bog and many who jog.
Sometimes the earth shakes beneath our feet.
A hint of garlic seasons the morning fog.
Showers - what I once called drizzle.
Hills wrap long arms around the valley.
Winter rain stops; chartreuse gingko leaves finger the sky.
Hawks glide and dive, melted sunshine poppies spill downhill.
Morning doves coo softly from rooftop antennas.
A hummingbird whirrs through roses; jet lumbers above.
A woodpecker pounds the dead madrone, as I walk past.
Eleven ducklings in mom’s wake down Coyote Creek.
Paired for life, two geese fly over Camden before rain.
Two lizards doing pushups - Qui es mui macho?
A dog barks...bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark.
The street cat has a wild and holy light in his eyes.
With my wet laundry, I startle a doe.
6 AM: the mockingbird sang all night.
Squirrels playing soccer with walnuts on the roof.
Ocean cool morning, filigree snail trail on doormat.
Mountain lion hit on 85. Whose valley, this?
Above Silicon Valley two bluebirds are mating.
And crow, county jester, finds a way to thrive.
The Giant Orange. Not razed, just moved a mile. Hot dog!
“Two eighty south becomes six eighty north?! What?”
Moffett tarmac – white blimp, the floating skywhales return!

Annie Deckert, Gwen Hacker, Dawn Haskins, Bonnie Home,
Martha Sterne, Millicent Kellogg, Mimi Ahern, Amy Meier,
Cookie Curci, Margit Look Henry, Lucy Salcido Carter, Maureen
Alexander, Erika Goss, Karen Booth, Bret Mannon, Floi Baker,
Katie Welbourn, Katy Huber Grischy, Conne Shaw, Catherine
Shinners, Sharon Nelson, Maureen Draper, Sally Ashton,
Larry White, Jennifer Swanton Brown, Stephen C. Wetlesen

California allocated billions of dollars to allow districts to decrease class sizes in the primary grades (K-3) to 20 from 30-plus students with the passage of the Class Size Reduction (CSR) Act in 1996. There is some hard evidence that smaller class sizes significantly increase student achievement. The research is limited, but all anecdotal indicators tell a story that smaller is definitely better.

Since its inception in California, the CSR formula did not compensate participating districts for the complete cost of the reduction and the hiring of more teachers. Because California increased its demand for primary teachers with the legislation, many teachers who entered the profession lacked the necessary training in the most critical subject areas. That is the primary reason that California’s CSR program shows mixed results.

But I must say that I definitely would prefer my son or daughter to be in a smaller class. I also know that a highly skilled teacher that develops quality relationships with their students can meet the academic, social, and emotional needs of 30-plus students. Student to teacher ratio is somewhat important for increasing student achievement, but not the end all and be all.

In fact, the research is becoming increasingly clear that the single most important factor to increase student achievement is improving the quality of the teacher in every classroom.

One way to do this is to begin to pay teachers based on their performance. There are a myriad of models across the nation, and many of our local Charter schools are using the pay-for-performance model now. We should learn from their experience.

We might get a bigger bang for our buck if we allocate some of the class size reduction money into a pot for districts wishing to participate in a pay-for-performance model. As I have consistently stated in my writings, the highly performing teacher should be making $125,000 to $150,000 per year for a full year, not a 10-month year (210-220 days of work). We then might get those who now enter law, engineering, or medicine to enter the teaching profession.

In the case of MEF the money saved can be used to avoid layoffs and retain library hours. This tradeoff is good for residents and good for those who would have been laid off, since they would face a job market that has the highest unemployment rate since 1941.

No structural changes were made by the Council that would lower the structural deficit over time. Next year’s budget will be even more of a challenge and next month we might have another budget shortfall since the State is considering raiding local coffers.

I find it interesting that the Legislature gets elected by city residents but then they choose to take citiies’ money. This resembles a bully who takes kids lunch money on the playground.

The big story last week was that the council spent two plus hours talking about the Operating Engineers Union (OE3), last best and final offer in open session. Prior to the council meeting we had spent hour upon hour in closed session discussing the 35 negotiation points starting back in December 2008.

After 17 meetings over six months between the union and city negotiators an agreement could not be reached—on not even one of the 35 negotiation items could the city and the union agree. So, with the budget deadline, and realizing that dollars saved on a zero salary increase could keep the park rangers employed, the Council made a last and final best offer on just four out of the 35 negotiation issues. The words shared between the city and the union in the public public relations war were not necessarily pleasant. All of this because there is zero sunshine on labor negotiations.

As I mentioned in a prior post, I believe labor negotiations should be conducted as public meetings or at the very least, videotaped to be shown at a later date. Since so much time gets wasted in the back-and-forth of «he-said» and «she said»—this does not add value in fixing issues for San Jose residents but rather is a time-consuming and hair- pulling frustration. The back-and-forth is reminiscent of playground rumors that get blown out of proportion.

There are strong feelings out there right now on the labor side of being upset with city management and in turn the council. Instead of wasting valuable time listening to the rants of city staff and the unions, we need to make labor negotiations public and we need to do it now.