League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
	Santa Clara County, CA November 6, 2012 Election
	Candidates Answer Questions on the Issues Board Member; Palo Alto Unified School District

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of Palo Alto and asked of all candidates for this office.     See below for questions on Communication, Student Achievement, Budget, Pre-school Program Click on a name for candidate information.   See also more information about this contest. 1. What steps need to be taken to foster better communication among the school board, superintendent's office, and the local school communities? Answer from Melissa Baten Caswell: Over the last decade, PAUSD has become more than a public school district: ours is a public-private partnership. We can be proud of the deeply held community values that have made this possible. With so many stakeholders, however, our School Board trustees must--and do-- work tirelessly to oversee regular, clear, and transparent access to information. Regular, clear and transparent access to information is critical for an effective and efficiently run district. The Board must set policy and channel investment to support 1) school to school sharing of best educational practices, 2) information sharing about student needs and supports, and 3) the importance of clear, meaningful, two way, home to school communication. All stakeholders deserve clear information about our schools and District. Yet not every member of our community desires or looks for information in the same way. Current channels include Board meetings, staff meetings, community meetings, parent meetings, memos, websites, emails, community newsletters, Infinite Campus, and our new Schoology program. Over the last five years, I have consistently consulted with our superintendent to ensure regular and effective use of all available communication channels and a constant re-evaluation of their effectiveness. I strongly support a culture of collaboration, within our schools and across our District and community. PAUSD includes some of the most talented educators in the Bay Area. We need to help them thrive here. In addition to encouraging cooperation and the sharing of best practices, I am an advocate for the communication of clear pathways for professional advancement at all levels of the organization. Finally, over the last five years I have also made myself as available as possible for community questions, input and discussion. In addition to being a sworn Board Trustee, I am, after all, a PAUSD parent, Palo Alto citizen, neighbor, wife, and mother. Whether I am participating in a PAUSD Board meeting, attending official forums, visiting schools, shopping at the grocery store, or watching my children play soccer, I am here to listen and to serve. I look forward to continuing that work over the next four years. Answer from Camille Townsend: Our District is large and growing. We have 12,400 students attending our nineteen school sites. The District employs more than 1,500 employees. This does create a challenge for timely and accurate communication. Technology is part of the answer. We are using modern tools to connect parents, students, and teachers. Student registration and teacher applications have all gone online within the past three years. Our students and their parents are better able to access information from their teachers. The wider community can access much of our communication, decisions, and policies through a variety of means. These include: District website: The district website maintains information relevant to students, parents, teachers, and the larger community. It is the repository for information as diverse as the budget and bond program updates, to residency requirements. The district is working on a new design to make the site easier to search and browse. PTA Regular Online Newsletters: In addition to the district web site, school newsletters produced by the 17 PTA's for each school site, containing important district information, are pushed out to all registered parents weekly. These include important meetings dates, social events and other aspects of a student's school life or after school programs. These are also available online. Superintendent's Update: The Superintendent updates the community every two weeks at the beginning of regularly scheduled Board meetings. These meetings are broadcast and stream live on the Channel 28, and are immediately accessible as archived online records. No communication approach is complete without one to one contact. The Superintendent and School Board members regularly visit the school sites and attend school events where they are accessible to all. While improvements are always possible, one of the best measures of communication effectiveness is community support. Voters in the PAUSD district approved our school bond measure and our school parcel measure by over 77% just four years ago during my tenure on this board. Open communications from the school board, the superintendent, and from the community, were key to these votes of confidence. Answer from Ken Dauber: We need to make improvements in transparency, clarity, and accountability of decision-making. Effective parent and community participation requires that the public's business is done in public, and I will make available all communications with district staff. I will also work to ensure greater clarity in decision making, and to put in place clear metrics for communicating and assessing progress against our goals. Answer from Heidi Emberling: School board meetings must be effective, efficient, and accessible ways of doing district work. Discussion items must have clear goals and outcomes, reflecting district priorities and annual goals. An additional, mid-year board retreat would clarify progress. An open, transparent process encompassing the policy work of the board and subsequent implementation by the Superintendent and staff improves communication with parents and community members. 2. What approaches would you support to help all students achieve their educational goals, whether they are college bound or not? Answer from Heidi Emberling: Every student should be supported to reach his or her individual educational goals, whether choosing a college or career path. The recent adoption of A-G graduation requirements raises expectations for all students. To address achievement gap issues, the district must focus its efforts on the early learning years, to create a strong foundation for future academic, personal, and professional success. Answer from Melissa Baten Caswell: As your Board Trustee, I want every child in Palo Alto to receive an outstanding education, plain and simple. A good education is not just a privilege; it's a civil right! This crucial mission requires us both challenge our students AND to support them, so that they can all thrive. Challenge: I believe in strong, well-sequenced curriculum taught in creative and effective ways. We need to use our resources creativity to engage students and ignite their passions for learning in many different ways, while delivering on our commitment to academic excellence. Our District has steadily moved into greater alignment with California State Standards and public university entrance requirements. To this end, over the last five years I have consistently encouraged staff and supported their efforts clarify our expectations at each grade level while continuing to challenge those students in our District who are ready for even more challenge. Taken together, this clarifying work forms the foundation of our District's next phase, as it moves toward the Common Core State Standards and beyond. Student Support: I also believe that students must receive the academic and emotional support they need to help them make good choices and handle stress, and to that end I have supported District-wide review and overhaul of both academic and psychosocial intervention strategies from kindergarten through high school. I have also pushed for broader, more cohesive strategies for further reducing our District's achievement gap. We have made some progress, but we must do even more, and my last five years on the board have given me clear views of how we can keep moving forward. Over the last five years, I continually supported and encouraged an investment in effective staff development to address student challenge, support, engagement, and the sharing of best practices. Teacher collaboration has advanced on many campuses, and I am committed to further supporting District-wide staff development work to extend best practices in all aspects of curriculum and pedagogy. Finally, I also believe that we can extend our technology use to further support and enhance classroom learning and support our teachers to effectively serve every student. Our staff has seen promising early results from a range of technological innovations, and I support work to help our District use technology to support great teaching, curricular reinforcement and enhanced student learning opportunities. Answer from Ken Dauber: In a 21st-century economy, all students need to leave high school with strong skills and the ability to work collaboratively with others, whether they are going on to college or not. We need to prepare students for college and for life. That requires supporting teachers at all levels in differentiating instruction to provide all students with appropriate challenges, whether they are struggling, in the middle, or doing advanced work. It also means ensuring that we deliver high-quality academic advising and college guidance services at both high schools, by improving our teacher advisory system at Paly and making structural improvements to counseling at Gunn. Answer from Camille Townsend: Palo Alto Unified works hard to help all students reach their educational goals. Our District is unusual, as over 90% of our students attend college. Since the vast majority of our students progress onto college, they may choose a path designed to best prepare for whatever school they choose. We also have numerous approaches for those students not choosing college. These include experiential learning in tandem with businesses, applied classes in the arts, engineering, foods, technology, computers, video-design and biotech. The district is committed to helping each student find an avenue for success early on. This includes providing a quality pre-school for those who have not had one, advice and counseling on the most appropriate schools, and additional services if a student finds school a challenge. 3. How should PAUSD address potential budget cutbacks? Answer from Heidi Emberling: PAUSD must plan carefully for potential trigger cuts from the state, the consolidation and elimination of important categorical funding, and a protection of our financial reserves in this difficult economic climate. The district must make budget decisions based on our core values, priorities and long-term strategic plan. We are fortunate to have a strong educational foundation (PiE) and PTA community supporting our our schools. Answer from Melissa Baten Caswell: Sustained excellence requires the highest standards of fiscal stewardship even in the best of financial times. Because of this, I support ongoing conservative management of our District's budget. As I learned both my MBA program and in more than 14 years as an industry executive, all effective budgets must first be built on clear values and strategic priorities. Over the past 5 years, we have done our best to soften the impact of operating budget cuts on the classroom experience of our students. We employed a values based process to gain alignment on our budget priorities. Then we used this to work collectively and collaboratively with the PTA, PiE, employee groups and the community to prioritize spending and resolve budget challenges. This process worked well in the face of faced with major cuts from Sacramento over the past 5 years and it is the process that I support to address future budget cutbacks. Despite our efforts, faced with major cuts from Sacramento, over the past 5 years we were forced into a position where we needed to significantly reduce spending. As a Board member I encouraged staff to explore every avenue of cost saving through out the District. Maintenance, energy use, transportation, use of copiers, School Lunch program, etc were all scrutinized and cost savings strategies were employed. Our values based process and clear community priorities helped clarify our decisions and helped us to protect our well rounded educational program (including electives like art, music and foreign language), avoid staff furloughs and school year reductions. Our commitment to building a reserve (the result of conservative budgeting) and our community's additional funding provides time to make thoughtful and community supported tradeoffs. In addition to state funds and property taxes, our schools are blessed with community supported operating funds from a Parcel tax, Partners in Education Foundation funding, our PTAs and booster groups. These funds provide much needed additional funding to our educational program and have helped us avoid draconian cuts when state and federal funding has fallen so dramatically. I believe that I have demonstrated my commitment to strong fiscal oversight and transparent decision making about all of the federal, state, and local community funds that sustain excellence in our schools. In addition to a focus on the management of our operating funds, I am committed to careful management of our community provided building funds. Over my term in office, I worked successfully with our community and school leaders on a bond measure that funds our current school facility renovation and building expansion program. Out of respect and gratitude for our citizens' generous funding of this important funding measure, our Board has an ethical duty to carefully oversee all aspects of this spending. I am particularly proud to report that our District's ambitious facility renovation and expansion program is on time and on budget across the District, and that our recent acquisition of land adjacent to Cubberley gives us the ability to further expand to meet student enrollment needs. Should cutbacks prove necessary, you can count on me -- and on my long record of executive experience and community leadership -- to make ethical choices based on conservative and effective fiscal principals. Clear, transparent and judicious oversight of our District's finances is fundamental to my work as your trustee. Answer from Camille Townsend: "In a community where our commitment to public education runs deep, Camille's collaboration and experience on critical academic and fiscal issues continues to earn my appreciation and support. I support Camille's re-election for School Board." Senator Joe Simitian In the past five years our state payments plummeted from $16.5 million to $5.3 million, and we added 1200 new students for which the district did not receive additional funds. With the community's help we kept the cuts away from our classrooms. Budget challenges continue to be an issue for all public education. A great teacher is the number one predictor of student learning. Most importantly we did not cut teachers. We did not shorten the school year, shorten schools days or place the teachers on furlough. This continues to be my priority and a community priority. We slightly upped class sizes, school sizes, and stayed flexible. Reduction, revenue and reserve. We did reduce non-teaching positions, used some of our reserve to smooth out the cuts, and we shared our need with the community. Our community has supported us overwhelmingly twice + with more than 77% approval + on our bond and parcel tax measures. This reflects working closely with our strong professional management staff. Even with the cuts we did have to make, our students demonstrated greater mastery of skills, with highest growth among our least advantaged students. Just in the past few months our teachers took home national excellence in teaching awards. Answer from Ken Dauber: We are fortunate compared to many districts in the state in having a relatively low reliance on state funding, which in the 2012-13 budget is 3% of total general fund revenues. Further substantial budget cuts are unlikely in the immediate future, particularly given the upward trend in property tax revenues. We should focus on ensuring that we are spending current funds wisely (for example, by fully implementing systems that we have already paid for, such as the student information system Schoology), capturing economies of scale and efficiencies by implementing best practices and reducing unnecessary aspects of site-based control, and building up reserves for possible future structural changes in school funding in California that may threaten basic aid districts. 4. Do you see instituting a pre-school program for children younger than the "early 5s" age, as desirable for the PAUSD, and if so, have you any ideas on how it might fit into the K-12 structure? Answer from Melissa Baten Caswell: Yes I believe that a pre-school program for children younger than the "early 5s" is desirable for the Palo Alto Unified School District. Studies have shown that well executed early childhood education is critical for successful later success academically and socially. It also does produces indirect savings by reducing the chances that students will be ill prepared for kindergarten and later get held back a grade or end up in special education programs. In fact, PAUSD provides an excellent, longstanding, pre-school program and curriculum through the PreSchool Family program at our Greendell site. PreSchool Family is a parent education program serving families with children ages birth through five years. The program began in 1946 and is part of the Palo Alto Adult School under the auspices of the Palo Alto Unified School District. The program is designed to offer parents an opportunity to learn about parenting and to actively participate in their child's education. For children, the program offers a developmentally appropriate, play-based, educational program. During my first term on the Board, our District also began the "Springboard" kindergarten readiness program to serve students who had not attended preschool. Data has shown that these students have shown decisive gains in their ability to adjust to kindergarten expectations and to perform at grade level through early elementary school. I have supported and will continue to support these kinds of innovative, supportive, results-oriented programs in PAUSD. Answer from Camille Townsend: Do you see instituting a pre-school program for children younger than the "early 5s" age, as desirable for the PAUSD, and if so, have you any ideas on how it might fit into the K-12 structure? PAUSD believes that high-quality early childhood programs are important to children's success in school and to their future. PAUSD continues to offer early education programs to create a strong base for children. Our local studies show approximately 90% of the students who attend PAUSD have a strong pre-school experience. For those who do not, we have a range of programs to meet their needs. The "Pre-school Family" program reaches children, birth to kindergarten. It is very affordable with sliding scale fees and scholarships. We have around 225 students participating. "Springboard to Kindergarten" targets four year olds, who have never had pre-school or a high quality pre-school program. The school district is offering this to families for those parents who could not afford pre-school or a quality program. We currently have about 40 children in this program. We also have a program for Special Education preschoolers, and approximately 30 children in the 3 to 4 year old range attend. And finally, we have "Young Fives," which we have combined with the new state mandated "Transitional Kindergarten." We in the district, believe in, and support younger and "early 5" education. It does fit into our K-12 structure. Answer from Ken Dauber: Early educational enrichment is a proven technique for improving achievement in later years, particularly for children who come from lower-income or otherwise challenged families. We should improve our ability to reach those children by providing the services they need to take advantage of our existing programs (including Springboard to Kindergarten, Transition to Kindergarten, and Springboard to Kindergarten), such as transportation and extended care hours. We should also ensure that all children in the district have access to excellent nutrition through providing fresh, local, healthy foods for our school breakfast and lunch program. Better nutrition is a cost-effective intervention for young children that is demonstrated to improve both learning and behavior. Answer from Heidi Emberling: The first few years of a child's life are a particularly sensitive period in the process of development, laying a foundation in childhood and beyond for cognitive functioning; behavioral, social, and self-regulatory capacities; and physical health. A longitudinal RAND study showed that for every dollar invested in high-quality early learning environments, society saves $7 or more in future interventions. Our district could build on the success of its current kinder-preparedness program for children who have never attended preschool, "Springboard to Kindergarten." Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' statements are presented as submitted. Direct references to opponents are not permitted. The order of the candidates is random and changes daily. Candidates who did not respond are not listed on this page.