Dear Santa,

I know this is an unusual request from someone far too old to believe, but I truly want to think that you can help. The situation is dire and no one else seems to have the answers. See, Santa, our public school system is vulnerable to collapse if we do nothing to make it brighter. The children you do so much to make cheery this time of year continue to wallow in a school organization stuck in mediocrity. And that is not good enough, especially today.

The Council punted the Redevelopment Agency (RDA) budget last week to February 2010. As has already been highlighted in the news, the state is taking $75 million away from San Jose’s RDA. We need to pay the State off in May and identify where the money is coming from in March (no negotiation or payment plans on this matter are allowed by the State). The legislature, recognizing that this payment would be difficult for all RDA agencies, allowed for borrowing from affordable housing money which is 100-percent funded from RDA. Twenty percent of all RDA money goes off the top to the Housing Department in San Jose.

San Jose isn’t notorious for teens killing teens. But recently there have been two such slayings: one on Halloween night, and the Nov. 10 homicide of a Santa Teresa High School student. The accused could face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole because the U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding if that is legal. 

These two events were of interest to state Sen. John Vasconcellos, who represented Silicon Valley in the California Legislature for 38 years. While chairing virtually every important Assembly committee, and then for five years in the state Senate, Vasconcellos focused on youth in crisis. He championed higher education, mental health initiatives, community-based conflict resolution projects and funding for California’s poorest performing public schools.

Last week, KLIV Radio reported that NBC Sports has learned that the National Football League is encouraging both the 49ers and the Raiders to play in the proposed Santa Clara Stadium.  Will the Raiders and 49ers both call Santa Clara home?

The possibility of the Raiders (or another team) making partial or full use of the Santa Clara Stadium is not really “news.”  The E.I.R. and Stadium Term Sheet both allowed for the possibility.  The Stadium Term Sheet reads, “49ers Stadium Company will have the right to enter into a sublease with a second NFL team, on terms and conditions consistent with and subject to the stadium lease.  Conditions of repayment to the city, forgiveness of advances, and additional revenues to the City of Santa Clara are defined in the term sheet’s outline of conditions.

Whoa! The achievement gap continues to be a very controversial topic to many SJI posters. I was the guest of my wife, Chris, last Wednesday at San Jose’s Downtown Rotary Club. She invited me because County Superintendent Weis was the luncheon speaker presenting about SJ2020 (a City and school district initiative to close the achievement gap), currently in its embryonic stages. When Superintendent Weis participated in the Q & A immediately following his 20-minute talk, the first question from the audience was predictable

The City of San José is facing yet another year of budget deficits. The projected deficit for FY 2010-2011 is over $100 million. We have cut the fat out of our budget and have laid off City and Redevelopment Agency employees. Our situation has been further exacerbated by the terrible job the state legislature did of closing their deficit by taking funding from local municipalities. Unfortunately for the City, we cannot do the same. We must make difficult decisions and have the courage to change our approach to budgeting.

Last Tuesday at the council meeting, we spent approximately 90 minutes discussing the Teamsters Union at the Convention Center. Long story-short, this is a labor dispute between two different union locals that will be settled by the National Labor Relations Board. However, in the meantime, the Convention Center (which is the largest source of the City’s hotel tax receipts and drives airport traffic) is getting negative PR which is affecting prospective convention business in San Jose.

Happy Hanukkah. This is San Jose Inside’s weekly open forum, where comments and opinions on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

San Jose’s movers and shakers are wrestling with two important questions.  First, should the San Jose convention center expansion project move forward?  And second, where should the new federal courthouse be built?

As reported on San Jose Inside last week, the city and state budget crisis has forced the city and its redevelopment agency to scale back the project from $300 million to $140 million.  And, the state’s plan to pull $75 million from the San Jose RDA creates an additional hurdle.  Councilmember Sam Liccardo has indicated that he is, “...not willing to do anything that puts the RDA’s future viability in peril.”

It is very difficult with an overwhelmed system of public education for teachers to nurture the needs of children who have experienced a sordid life. Most times these youth who need just one person to “really” care come from homes and neighborhoods filled with crime, drugs, gangs, and ridden with violence.

As I have discussed on this blog before I began my career as a teacher at Osborne School at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall. I quickly learned that what is essential in order to become an effective teacher for alternative youth is a professional relationship built with trust, care, and genuineness at its core. In a trusting student-teacher relationship there is a strong possibility that real academic learning and increased student achievement will occur.

Prior to Mayor Reed, the City of San Jose would amend the General Plan (GP) approximately seven to twelve times a year; which equates to about once every month, give or take. During this time, about 1,200 acres of industrial land were converted to residential housing. As a result, the City lost 1,200 acres of land that could have been home to jobs. A sizable percentage of the 1,200 acres was in my district.

In San Jose Inside’s weekly open forum, comments on any topic are welcome.

Young Bay Area artist Wayne Jiang was born in Guangzhou, China, and came to the United States at age 15. He earned his degree in illustration at SJSU and works as a fine artist and graphic designer. He now lives in Pacifica, but his period of residence in San Jose has resulted in a group of loving images of the city that are now on display at the Leonard and David McKay Gallery at Pasetta House in History Park.

Tonight it is purported that we will hear the president in front of cadets from West Point tell the nation and the world that we will commit an additional 30,000 US troops to the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $1 million per soldier per year. I don’t profess to know what is best for the world and our ultimate safety as a nation, however I do know our national security is threatened significantly by our failing public schools.

A couple of weeks ago I put together my own web based Redevelopment Budget survey. I shared financial information in bullet point form in the introduction and then gave information throughout the survey. In some cases I would state the dollar amount given to a particular program and then ask a question. More than 600 people completed the survey, which required that each question be answered. The survey could not be taken twice.

As with most issues that involve money, the feedback to my survey was mixed

Last week, by chance I saw some of the highlights of US Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the decision to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several other of the 9/11 terrorist suspects’ trials to a court in New York. During his testimony, Mr. Holder was asked a pointed question by Sen. Lindsey Graham that, to my surprise, went missing from the Bay Area’s major newspapers’ following day coverage.