Last Thursday the Board spent several hours discussing five issues that are at the heart of the relationship between the District and the CLC. Most or all of them will end up being addressed in negotiations over a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the CLC and the District. In this post I’ll share my perspective on what I heard at the meeting.
Measure D, our parcel tax approved in 2003, contains language allowing the District to increase the per parcel amount based on increases in an inflation index. It’s not an automatic increase because the Board has to vote to approve any change by July 31st of each fiscal year.
Last Thursday the Board accepted my suggestion that we not adopt the allowable increase for the 2010/11 fiscal year. This will avoid an increase of $1.88 per parcel, costing the District about $17,000 in foregone revenue.
After more months than I expected, the District and the San Carlos Teachers Association reached an agreement on contract terms. The SCTA approved the tentative agreement last week, and last night the Board voted unanimously to ratify it. You can read more about it on the District website.
One point that I hope doesn’t get lost as we move forward: the 2009/10 budget (i.e., for the year just ended) was adopted based on a state forecast that showed education funding increasing for the 2010/11 school year. The 2010/11 budget we just adopted is not based on an increase, and, at best, we’ll be lucky if the state doesn’t further reduce education spending.
Those of you with kids at Tierra Linda know that Leslie Martin moved on from being the principal there last month. In the ongoing quest to balance work, life and professional development, she wanted to gain some experience at the District office level, and get (somewhat) more regular working hours :).
This caused the District to launch a search for a new middle school principal. I’m delighted to say that a great candidate has been found, and the Board will vote on his being hired at this Thursday’s meeting.
The Board will vote on ratifying a contract settlement with our teachers at this Thursday’s meeting. The agreement, which was approved by the teachers late last week, completes the negotiation cycle for the 2009/2010 school year, and allows everyone to focus on the start of the upcoming school year.
The District and the teachers union, the San Carlos Teachers Association (SCTA), have been unable to reach a mutually-acceptable agreement on contract terms this year. The District needs to reduce costs and/or increase revenues by $2.85 million for the 2010/2011 school year, which begins July 1st. As part of that restructuring, the District has been looking to reduce the cost of the teaching staff by $1 million. Proportional reductions are being sought from all other District employees. In addition, the Board has cut various programs and eliminated a number of district office positions.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article today entitled “Lehman’s Ghost”, which focused on the continuing fallout from the Lehman bankruptcy and how it is negatively impacting public agencies in San Mateo County. You may recall that, collectively, public agencies which were required to invest their funds in the County-run investment pool lost $155 million when Lehman went bankrupt. Courtesy of the fact that the County Treasurer’s office had almost 12% of the entire portfolio invested in Lehman paper shortly before Lehman declared bankruptcy.
While not a focus of the article (which is quite good, by the way), certain lines in it glossed over the role the Treasurer’s office played in the debacle, and the public reaction to that role.
Which prompted Seth Rosenblatt and me to write a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading
(Note to readers: this is the second version of this post, so if it looks different from what you remembered reading, you’re not losing your memory :). I decided to edit it based on some questions raised by visitors, and, in the course of making changes, I accidentally deleted the original and had to rewrite from scratch).
Ever since I’ve been on the Board there’s been an opinion circulating among some parents in San Carlos that Heather Elementary just isn’t quite as good a school as the other three District-run elementary schools, Arundel, Brittan Acres and White Oaks. “The API scores are consistently lower,” people will say. “That proves the school just isn’t quite as good.”
In fact, that conclusion is based on the false assumption that all of our elementary schools serve the same student population. That’s an understandable mistake to make, since San Carlos is a small community and people therefore assume all four schools have the same mix of students.
Last Tuesday night the Board held a special workshop meeting to begin discussing how we should structure the 2010/11 budget given the terrible fiscal environment the District is facing. We were fortunate to have leaders of many of our key budget partners (e.g., principals, SCEF, PTA) attend as well.
The Board, by unanimous vote, adopted tonight a set of new enrollment preferences and a series of school boundary changes. Together, these actions are expected to shift, ultimately, approximately 50 students from chronically oversubscribed White Oaks to chronically undersubscribed Heather.
