Guest View

Still unsure about the Common Core State Standards? Local schools are now actively teaching the new standards, but there remains some confusion about exactly what that means.Here are five things all parents should know about the Common Core State Standards:1. Common Core is not curriculum. The CCSS is simply a list of skills students should have by the end of each grade level. The standards tell educators what students need to know, not how to teach the skills. Curricular programs are still local decisions. Schools and districts choose methods for teaching and programs to use in classrooms. If a lesson feels wrong or confusing, ask your teacher, principal or curriculum director to explain. The problem you have could be with the program that is being used, not the standards themselves.2.Common Core is not a test. The Common Core State Standards do not require any assessments. Standardized tests are designed by large organizations, often for profit. States adopt and mandate these tests. Most current state tests were designed after the CCSS were imposed and attempt to assess whether students know the skills in the standards. Other assessments may be designed or selected by schools or districts.3.Common Core is easily accessible to the public. Go directly to the source. Read the standards before formulating an opinion about them, because your opinion may be about the chosen curriculum or the methodology your school is using, not the standards themselves. Don’t assume something is “in the standards” unless you can find it there. The official (parent-friendly) website is corestandards.org.4.Successful interpretation and implementation of the Common Core depends on training. The standards can be interpreted in many ways. Teachers need both time and quality training to successfully implement them, and schools and districts must provide this training. Training may come from employees of the district or from consultants outside the district. If you don’t already know, ask your local school to explain how its teachers are being trained to ensure your child’s success with the standards.5.  Educators have used standards for many years. While the Common Core State Standards are new, the concept of standards is not. Educators have depended on pre-set lists of skills for decades and have used the standards to assist them in deciding what subjects to cover. Before the Common Core State Standards unified the educational landscape in the U.S., all states had different lists. Some were more rigorous than others. Now, continuity is guaranteed from state to state. Also, educators across the country can now collaborate about best practices, lesson ideas, differentiated support, and tools and resources.There are many rumors and opinions swirling about the Common Core. Reading the CCSS and understanding the differences between standards, curriculum and instruction can help you be an informed participant in the debate.Debbie Lera is a national consultant, author and literacy specialist.  She is also a teacher and Common Core Liason at The Charter School of Morgan Hill.

John McKay in a recent column said the city must grow. But how do you define growth?  He mentions the good work of General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC), but does not mention the 30,000 additional residents the GPAC is considering adding to the 40,000 already here. Such numbers would overwhelm our community, change it and put it at risk.Thirty thousand new residents will place overwhelming demands upon municipal services and infrastructure. You would think that the city will gain from the new property tax but the city receives very little of that as the state, county and school districts siphon most of it. Cities that relied on a residential tax base suffer and are at risk of becoming insolvent.This city struggles to meet its current demands. It has difficulty in maintaining what we have. The city has deferred millions in needed street and other projects but it does not have resources to address them. We spend millions on property for ball fields we don’t need for which we have no resources to build. Point being we cannot grow without revenue to support such growth. We have to grow with all other considerations, including our quality of life. It must be a planned and balanced approach.Realtors and developers have been engaged, and are salivating at paving over precious farmlands and open space. I attended a number of the public meetings of the GPAC and attendance was few in number and always the same people: property consultants and developers. But that is not public engagement.  If you want to gather information from the community, you also scientifically survey and/or present the projects for municipal vote, neither of which has happened. At the moment, county landowners and developers run this city and gave the council an ultimatum last week to which this weak council yielded. So who is running this city?When you start addressing interest in the downtown, John, I would expect you would have many business owners interested as the effects are immediate and close by. But many consider the Southeast Quadrant, where most of the growth will occur, as a distant project and cannot fathom the impacts of traffic, crime, noise, pollution, sewage and the need for higher taxes to support a massive new population.The City has thousands of acres of land within its existing city limits. There is plenty of land to grow up, if not out. Building within the existing city limits/framework is the most cost effective and efficient means of growth—no ifs, ands or buts. Annexing county land and paving over farmlands in light of climate change without a mitigation and adaptation plan and a constrained city budget is irresponsible leadership.John McKay, if you want to discuss the future and growth of Morgan Hill, I would surely like that conversation. Your perspective in my opinion is not aligned with what I believe the residents of Morgan Hill really want and more importantly the protections they absolutely need.—Mark Grzan is a former Morgan Hill City Councilmember/Vice Mayor.

It’s the end of the year and that usually means that we all look back and reflect on what we have done and what stands out that we have witnessed over the last 12 months. Then we might think about what we want to make happen next year or call it good and rest on laurels. My guess is that not many will do the latter.

If you have been considering changing your landscape to make it more drought tolerant, now is the time. Last month, the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors voted to continue supporting higher rebate amounts for water conservation programs until next June.In most of Santa Clara County, you could be eligible for a rebate of $2 per square foot of converted landscape. In Palo Alto, Morgan Hill and San Jose Municipal Water’s service area, local cost sharing makes the incentives even larger.Our landscape conversion rebate program is one of the many conservation programs that is helping us through this drought. More importantly, it will help us manage dry periods for years to come. We are working to save nearly 100,000 acre-feet of water a year by 2030. That’s enough water to fill Lexington Reservoir five times.Fortunately, the response to this program during the drought has been overwhelming. From July through October 2014, about 410,000 square feet of thirsty lawns have been converted. The conversion of another 1.4 million square feet of grass is in process.Some people mistakenly believe that a drought-tolerant landscape only means a cactus or rock garden. In fact, our program allows a long list of approved plants, shrubs and groundcovers that are lush, flowering and very colorful. More and more, these types of landscapes will become the norm in our region, in place of lawns that requires mowing, fertilizers and frequent watering.In addition, the water district offers rebates for irrigation equipment that can help you reduce your water use. This includes weather based irrigation controllers, rain sensors, high-efficiency nozzles, dedicated landscape meters and efficient sprinklers. Those rebate amounts have been increased as well. About 90,000 pieces of irrigation equipment have been replaced or are in the process of replacement.To find out about our water conservation programs and their eligibility requirements, visitwww.save20gallons.org or call our water conservation hotline at (408) 630-2554. The water district strives to make the application process as easy as possible, but it is important to check the program requirements before starting any project.The board also extended our call for water use reductions of 20 percent until next June. Despite all the recent rain, our local reservoirs and our groundwater levels are still severely depleted. It will take many more significant storm systems to make up for the three long years of dry weather.Much of this county’s water is imported from outside the county. Those water supplies depend on the Sierra snowpack and the conditions at key state and federal reservoirs such as Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville. State officials estimate that we will need precipitation rates of 150 percent of normal before those reservoirs will recover.As a result, the state has issued an initial forecast for the amount of water it can deliver to our county in 2015 of only 10 percent.The bottom line is that we will start 2015 with far less water than we had at the beginning of 2014. It is essential that we continue saving, rain or shine, for the foreseeable future.—Contact Dennis Kennedy, who represents South County on the SCVWD Board of Directors, by email at [email protected].

Some good news for a change! While we have begun to see some rain, rainfall levels and the snowpack are expected to remain far below normal. Some of our local reservoirs are nearly empty. Statewide water conditions are poor, and we are expecting some significant challenges in meeting our needs this year.

My husband and I recently spent a month in Rwanda, visiting his parents who have been Baptist missionaries there for 35 years. For my husband it was a trip home, a chance to be in familiar places, to be known, and to exhale. For me it was a chance to know my husband better by experiencing where he grew up, to be on vacation for a month, to spend the holidays with my in-laws as our gracious hosts, and to explore a new country.

Morgan Hill: Where Only Some Students Succeed Parents need more local public school choices like Rocketship Education for one simple reason: Our schools are not serving all students well. At first glance, Morgan Hill Unified schools appear to be educating all students, but in fact, they are leaving many at-risk students behind. Locally, Latino students, English Language Learners and students from low-income households scored 100 points lower on state academic tests than their Asian and white classmates. Students with special needs are also not succeeding in Morgan Hill schools. This is unacceptable. All of our students must have access to a high-quality education at a neighborhood public school. The foundation that an excellent elementary school provides to children is critical. Otherwise, students who fall behind at this young age often never catch up. Knowing this, and without improvement from the Morgan Hill Unified School District, local parents have been forced to search for alternatives for their children, including looking outside the district. Morgan Hill is a great place to live, but the quality of the education system has become a drawback for many families. We need more choices locally.   Rocketship Education has an inclusion program for students with special needs. All types of students are welcome at its nonprofit public charter schools. Through its personalized learning model, all students have the ability to be challenged, supported and successful. Seventy percent of the 5,000 students at Rocketship are English Language Learners and even more are from at-risk households. Christopher is a third grader who spent four years waiting for a spot to open up at a charter school in Morgan Hill, since he was falling behind and needed extra support in English and writing. Despite having engaged parents who worked with his teachers, Christopher continued to struggle until this year, when his parents made the choice to drive 70 minutes each day to San Jose for Adam to attend Rocketship Spark Academy. He’s gone from being teased by his friends for not doing well in school to becoming a responsible leader in his class who enjoys learning. Clearly there is a need in Morgan Hill for this kind of approach to education. Rather than making it more difficult for Rocketship to open, we as a community need to do what is best for local children and give families more choices. Ethan is a fourth grader with autism attending a public school in Morgan Hill. His parents want him to be able to attend a four-year college someday, but he needs high expectations, goals and individual support to be able to get there.  While he has some great teachers, he’s not learning the 21st century skills that he’ll need to be able to succeed in life. The problems local families are facing and the possible solution shouldn’t come as a surprise to local leaders. As parents, we have been vocal about what we want: We want quality school choices. We want to keep our children in neighborhood public schools. We want Rocketship to open and operate such a school.   It was us, Morgan Hill parents, who reached out to Rocketship and requested that they consider opening a school in our community. It took numerous phone calls, gathering over 400 signatures and many meetings over the course of a year before Rocketship proposed opening a school here. Our dedication to providing what’s best for our children convinced them. This is an opportunity to guarantee that academic success is not given to only a subset of kids. All Morgan Hill children can and should succeed in school. Parents deserve the ability to find the right academic program for their child at a public school within this community. Rocketship is offering a proven option to serve at-risk students who are currently being left behind. Allowing Rocketship to open would give families a choice that we’ve wanted for years. Our kids can’t wait any longer. We hope you will join us in supporting Rocketship Nov. 5 when the Morgan Hill board of trustees will vote on the charter petition. Together, we can ensure that all families have quality school choices for their children and that all our students have the chance to succeed. Guest columnist Tony Saenz has been a Morgan Hill parent and resident for 44 years.