So How Did It Go?

So here we are at the State Board of Education (SBE) at 9 a.m. as requested …on time and ready to go …but wait there are lots of other items on the agenda …and a room full of people. The “other” discussion is interesting. The parts that I find interesting are:

1. The statements and interaction of the State Board members
2. Lots of discussion about federal requirement and initiatives …and whether or how we as a state will comply with the situation
3. There was a clear discussion on the part of some of the members about poor performing or long-term lack of progress with some schools. The comments were about how we will “punish” (their word not mine) those schools.
4. Most interesting was essentially the debate over operating based on funding options or issues of principle.
5. A lengthy discussion about whether we do or don’t identify students from a racial, ethnic perspective. Overall the SBE balked, and does not want to go there with the feds.
6. We also heard about AMAO changes, API formula changes, etc.

Finally at 1:30 p.m. we get to our item #19, and the Board starts with a discussion of modified language for the Option #6 sanction proposal from CDE. At about 2:15 we presented our material, though interestingly we were never told of any time limitations until we arrived at this particular item. At that time, we were told that we had 5 minutes to present with questions following for the SBE. All seemed to go well and there was a good response from the SBE. After some others presented and more SBE discussion, there was a final decision of assigning “option #6” (which essentially equates to a mandated curriculum change) to RUSD. Of some interest SBE did assign some much more severe sanctions to other school district.

Again if you are interested in our full report, you can find it at our website or at: http://instructionalservices.rusd.k12.ca.us/rusd_state_board_report.htm