Bart Fisher responds to questions

The Morgan Hill Times gave each school board candidate a slate
of eight questions. Here are the answers from Bart Fisher. Also,
view a video of Fisher at http://blip.tv/file/4178122.
The Morgan Hill Times gave each school board candidate a slate of eight questions. Here are the answers from Bart Fisher. Also, view a video of Fisher at http://blip.tv/file/4178122.

1. What prompted you to run?

I liken my last four years on the School Board as the runway. We’ve been able to set some fundamental standards in terms of a common and coordinated curriculum, evaluations for all staff, data that gets beyond yearly test scores, and starting collaboration between teachers, between teachers and administrators, and between schools and parents. All this happened in the midst of ongoing budgetary pressures. Now, it’s time for takeoff. I firmly believe that we will be able to accelerate the learning of all our students and build an innovative and inclusive district. I’d like to be part of working with our students, teachers, administrators and community to see how high we can fly.

1. The 2012 school year is forecasted to be the worst in terms of the size of the budget deficit, which is projected at $12 million. Do you have any ideas on how the school district can save money?

The cumulative effects of the ongoing budget cuts have tested the ingenuity and resolve of our entire Morgan Hill Unified community. So far, we’ve been able to brunt the impact of these cuts through being parsimonious with our funds to allow for roll-over amounts, closing a school, offering a cost-saving retirement package, increasing the size of our classes, and having the staff take furlough days.

As far as ideas for saving additional money, on April 20, 2010 the Board had to certify to the County Office of Education that we were planning for deficits through 2011-2012. We identified 7.1 million in potential cuts or funding allocations ($1.1 million more than the projected shortfall, which has since been revised to around $2.4 million), including:

Reducing routine repair and maintenance costs

Using redevelopment agency funds

Changing class size reduction to 30:1

Reduce instructional school year by 5 days

Eliminate selected extracurricular activities

Use a deferred state match

Temporarily borrow from other funds

Extend the early retirement incentive

Reduce overtime

Analyze our spending in special education

Administrative reductions

Classified reductions

Supply reductions

Contracted services reductions

These touch on the main levers we have under our control – overhead costs, personnel costs, extracurriculars, and instructional day costs. And this is the order of priority I would put them. I would be extremely reluctant to reduce the number of days of school or to increase class sizes, and then next least likely to eliminate extracurricular programs.

Whatever we do, we will be starting a community and school dialogue in November of this year to clearly lay out the situation, our options, our initial ideas, and then ask for additional ideas. We should also engage in legislative advocacy in Sacramento in order to protect federal funds, increase local flexibility, and increase revenue streams. I would be reluctant to ask for local funding (parcel taxes) in the absence of measurable results from the initiatives now under way.

1. What three priorities would you like to accomplish while on the board?

It’s all about closing gaps for me:

The Achievement Gap

The Collaboration Gap

The Confidence Gap

Achievement Gap – We need to help lower-performing students, especially Latino and English as a Second Language students, accelerate in improving their English and math competencies, as these – especially English – are the keystones to success across all academic subjects.

Collaboration Gap – There are three key variables to effecting change: Time, Resources, and People. We certainly don’t have time, we are likely to face dwindling resources, so we have to better harness the collective wisdom and leadership of our people, through collaboration and innovation. When I spoke at the opening day for school this year, I asked our staff to speak up – tell us their good ideas, their common sense solutions, their just-crazy-enough-it-might-work dreams. Not all of these will succeed – and we need to be willing to fail, sometimes – but now is the time where we need an inclusive district community to help address our most critical needs.

Confidence Gap – During the recent discussion over the Charter School, the principal was able to present impressive numbers regarding lottery requests for enrollment in the school, and we all know about the thriving private schools that serve students in our area. There’s a gap in community confidence between our schools and those schools, even when the data says that we are about equal with the charter at least two of our campuses (Nordstrom and Paradise Valley). We need to close that gap – not through PR, or putting our data in the best possible light – but by actually improving the academic performance of each and every student, offering them additional enrichment opportunities, and leveraging all available community resources to meet critical needs. We’re making a start on this, but we need to do better. Once we close this confidence gap, we then start to look at ways to ask for more resources from our local community.

1. How will you pay for any programs or services you want to retain or add?

As I stated before, I’d be very reluctant to look to local revenue sources before we’ve delivered on some of our promises. I think we need to be creative in using funding flexibility to put resources into our high priority programs, advocate for additional resources from the state, and look to grants and foundations for additional monies. We were able to secure a major U.S. History grant in collaboration with other local educational entities, and we have gotten agreements with the American Institute of Mathematics for support; we need to look at more models like this.

1. What are your ideas to close the achievement gap?

Key to closing this gap is addressing the needs of our English Language Learners (ELL) population. There’s good evidence that getting an ELL student up to proficient or advanced in their English skills, especially in written expression, actually gives those students an advantage over single-language English speakers because they have two conceptual libraries – one in each language – to draw from when faced with an academic challenge. Just this week the board approved bringing in training in Guided language Acquisition Design (GLAD), a research-based ELL program that will focus on second language acquisition but actually benefit all of our children, as language acquisition techniques can be applied equally successfully to English-only speakers.

We’re also reaching beyond the classroom in proposing a new Bilingual Home/School Liaison position in the district, which would allow our school staff to more effectively communicate and coordinate with all our parents, but especially our Spanish speaking parents. Just knowing that there is someone available to help navigate a school office or understand a policy will, we hope, make it easier for some of our Latino families to engage with and enrich our schools.

Overall though, the most important thing we can do is give or teachers the tools and resources they need to address each student’s individual needs. Our teachers can wax effusively and in detail about the particular personalities, the special strengths and challenges, of each of their student. But when it comes to addressing these needs, the tools and methodologies we give teachers aren’t specific enough, aren’t granular enough. We’re working to change that and will be giving our teachers the assessments they need to pinpoint learning gaps, and then a menu of tools they can choose from to address those issues. And then follow-on assessments to check for learning and identify additional needs. All of these developed and tested by teachers working collaboratively, looking for better ways to do things and continually improving their instruction.

1. Explain your understanding of the school board’s role.

The Board sets policies and overall goals for the district, evaluates and supervises the Superintendent, and acts in a quasi-judicial capacity within the district. The board sets overall policy goals and determines and approves the budget for implementing those goals; the superintendent implements the policies, controls the budget, leads and directs staff, and measures and reports on results. We are also the ears and the voice of the public in hearing how program are going, what new ideas are being considered, and why changes are being made. In our more judicial role, we have to decide on expulsions and employee conduct issues. While this judicial role is a smaller part of our job, these cases often inform our policy decisions by showing us where we have gaps and issues. Finally, we have direct responsibility for the evaluation of the superintendent and his contract status.

1. What are the top challenges facing the district?

I think the overall challenge is the budgetary uncertainly that is facing all of California government right now. Without some certainty – good or bad – in the budget, it’s hard to make long-term plans for future programs. Beyond that, I’d point to the gaps I identified as priorities earlier – achievement, collaboration, and confidence. Each of these is interrelated and related to the budget. We need to balance them all so that our aspirations don’t get too far ahead of our resources, while also still recognizing that resources can come from unexpected or even non-monetary sources, if we can show success and generate enthusiasm.

1. In light of the Cinco de Mayo incident at LOHS, what steps would you take, if any, to improve race relations? What policy revisions should be made prior to May 5, 2012?

First, I would say that we need to follow the example of our students at Live Oak the Friday after the incident. They used the technology that they are immersed in – Facebook, texting, etc. – to organize a rally for peace at lunchtime on their campus, where Latino, Caucasian and all students asserted that their school was not as it appeared in the national media, and they were committed to working together to address problems. With a new Principal and Vice-Principal at the school, we are looking to build on these efforts through possible engagements with the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Spirit Program” or Project Cornerstone’s “Expect Respect” program. Each of these is designed to give students better ways to address problems and defuse tensions across a variety of areas – not just race – and to promote a respectful attitude throughout the campus. We’ll also look at the peer mediation program at Sobrato as a possible model to bring in to Live Oak. The key is to give students a respectful way to vent frustrations, openly deal with tensions, and see consequences for behavior (not speech), versus letting issues just build up.

As far as policy changes go, I think the district has been clear that the decisions made on May 5 were counter to our policies and bad judgment calls. So I don’t believe there are any specific policy changes needed. However, attitudinal changes, and a site leadership that is better prepared to handle tensions, are definitively needed and are being worked on.