Editor's note: It takes a community to raise a child—and to support the arts and public education
By:
Brian Taylor
Published: June 28, 2012
The cover story in this issue of California Schools helps set the stage for CSBA’s upcoming Annual Education Conference and Trade Show, the not-to-be-missed professional development opportunity for school governance teams that’s coming to San Francisco Nov. 29-Dec. 1.
In “Community schools: It takes a village", staff writer Kristi Garrett ably establishes the many benefits of making school sites a strategic delivery point for social services such as health care, nutrition and family counseling. Commendable ends in themselves, those services ultimately redound back to the benefit of schools’ primary mission: to educate our children.
“School board members want kids to be healthier, happier, to have opportunities to deal with their problems, to be safe. Everyone wants that,” Jill Wynns, CSBA’s president this year and a board member in the San Francisco Unified School District, told Garrett. “But for us—as we direct or focus our schools and our school district on working on those issues with others—it has to be because it helps students do better in school.”
One of the hardest-working advocates for community schools is Ed Honowitz, a board member in the Pasadena Unified School District.
“It really takes the entire community marshaling its collective will to achieve some effectiveness in these very complicated, broad issues like closing achievement gaps, or providing health care access to low-income families—the kinds of things that support learning and student achievement,” Honowitz told Garrett.
It also takes the entire organization of CSBA pulling together to support the community schools concept—and that’s exactly what’s happened under Wynns’ leadership. The community schools approach is one of AEC’s seven major strands; find out more at aec.csba.org.
A community approach also figures into this issue’s “Conversation”. Joe Landon, executive director of the California Alliance for Arts Education, gave staff writer Carol Brydolf an example from Saddleback Valley Unified School District.
“We convened a breakfast. We invited local school board members, the mayor, the superintendent, and other leaders from around the community to come. The gathering provided unity and momentum to what had previously been disparate efforts to preserve arts education in the schools,” Landon explained. Delving into the arts of politics, he continued: “Since then we’ve been building out on that system throughout the state. It’s not enough to love the arts, you have to understand how the politics work.”
Frequent California Schools freelancer Pamela Martineau turns to athletics in her contribution to this issue, and finds benefits that half the population can relate to. In “You Go Girl! Forty Years of Working for Gender Equity in Athletics,” she reports on the Title IX Education Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“I am one of the immediate beneficiaries of Title IX,” Sheila Allen, a board member in the Davis Joint Unified School District near Sacramento, told Martineau. Allen, a class of 1981 high school graduate, helped form the first girls’ volleyball and basketball teams at her rural Wisconsin school, and she says the positive effects extended far beyond the field of play.
“It was a chance to learn about teamwork and competition and doing your best and working hard,” says Allen. “I want to make sure that is happening in our school district.”
There’s far more in the standard departments that precede this issue’s features, including two related items: CSBA Executive Director Vernon M. Billy’s prescient look at the high stakes on California’s November ballot, and my own report on West Contra Costa Unified School District’s recent emergence from 20 years of state control. They tell a cautionary tale for districts in fiscal peril, through no fault of their own, following four years of state budget cuts and funding deferrals. As Billy wrote: “I implore you to stand united with your CSBA colleagues and to support public education on Election Day.”
Brian Taylor ( btaylor@csba.org ) is the managing editor of California Schools.