HOW DO WE IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION IN GARDEN GROVE?

By Zev Brooks

The most any school district can do is provide the opportunity for every student to maximize his or her learning potential. This paper will discuss important steps that we can take in the Garden Grove Unified School District to improve our school district so that every student in the district, regardless of ability, can maximize his or her educational achievement.

The fact is that no school board or politician can legislate an ideal environment in which to learn, but a school board can work to create programs and policies which give disadvantaged students the extra attention and encouragement they need, and which promote a better learning environment for all students.

Community Involvement:

We must call on the resources of our community to assist in the educational process. There are several ways to do this:

1. The board should work with the local jr. colleges and universities to create undergraduate internships to help needy students get more attention. (See my article "We're Sitting on a Gold Mine")

2. The board should develop programs with existing community organizations to help limited English speakers learn English. Garden Grove has many organizations and volunteers, including bilingual parents, who may be willing to create after school programs aimed at accelerating the development of English language conversational skills in our non-English speaking students.

3. The board should expand and develop after school programs designed to help disadvantaged students learn. Many such programs already exist in the Garden Grove Unified School District, but more are needed.

4. Lastly, the board must develop a relationship with the business community in Orange County as well as local philanthropists to facilitate financial support for special needs of the district. Every year, wealthy benefactors give millions of dollars to cultural institutions and universities, public and private. The board should actively pursue such gifts to the district. After all, a one million dollar gift could touch generations of students for years to come.

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

1. The board should continue to support and expand adult education classes, particularly those for non-English speakers, as well as parenting classes. The more the district can reach out to parents, the more such parents will get involved in their children's education.

2. The board should recognize the value of parents' collective experience with the schools in our district and encourage parental suggestions and input into how our schools operate. Again, by giving parents a true voice, the district would not only encourage parental involvement in their children's education, but could better discover through the parents' eyes what was working in our district and what was not.

INSTRUCTIONAL IMPROVEMENT

1. The board should implement policies and take actions aimed at improving the classroom learning environment by working to provide air conditioning to the district's classrooms and developing policies which better deal with disruptive students.

There are probably twenty or more days in the school year where outside temperatures are in excess of 80 degrees. On such days, in a crowded classroom, temperatures could reach into the nineties. Think about how distracting such heat is to a student's concentration and a teacher's ability to promote student achievement. Every day that students and teachers must suffer through the heat is a day that students and teachers are robbed of educational opportunities. We need to maximize our meaningful instructional time, not squander it.

There is probably no greater disruption to the learning environment than a chronically disruptive student because their behavior intereferes with their fellow students' ability to do classwork and robs their fellow students of their teacher's needed attention. As such, the board must find a way to better handle disruptive students not only for their classmates sake but for their own.