Elect Martha Miller 2010 Khsd Board Of Trustees Priority 5

Devoted to Targeting Limited Resources to Directly Benefit Students

A budget is a document of competing priorities that demands tough choices. As a former teacher, I believe the classroom comes first. The Kern High School District derives the majority of its revenues from the State of California. The state economy has suffered through the worst recession in state history and the KHSD has seen its revenues from the state reduced by more than $30 million over the past two years. Provide Greater Opportunity for Parent Participation

Parents play a pivotal role in student success, too pivotal to be taken for granted. A committed outreach to parents should be a fixture in the District, school and classroom operations. As a Trustee, I would be an advocate for parents, emphasizing the importance of increased efforts to provide parents the information they need to ensure their child maximizes their options while in high school.

The Kern High School District goes to great lengths to communicate with parents regarding a variety of student matters including:

Attendance
Deficiency notices
Grades
Scholarships
Career planning

Those efforts could be improved upon with increased use of technology. Telephone and mail communications are effective but they are not as timely as modern communications such as emails, text messaging and social media options. The District could also make better use of the Parents Page web page by providing more up to date information about current developments such as the imminence of high stakes tests like the SAT and ACT. Officials at the District and school level should make a concerted effort to provide parents relevant information in these areas in a timely fashion with optimal use of technology.

The parents best friend at a campus is their childs counselor. Unfortunately, budget cuts have reduced the number of counselors per campus, requiring fewer counselors to nurture more students. Currently, counselors in our schools have several hundred students for whom they are responsible. This minimizes the kind of one-on-one attention to a student and his or parents that fosters student achievement. Counseling is especially important during the freshman year, documented in numerous studies as the key year in high school when students tend to either engage or disengage from school. The likelihood a student will wind up being a dropout is most often indicated the freshman year. We cannot afford to have too few counselors for students at this critical juncture not just in high school but their entire life. As a Trustee, I would champion the importance of school counselors and the need for more at our campuses.

Parent participation is not optional if a child is to succeed in high school. The Kern High School District has obligations to communicate with parents to ensure student success. Parents have obligations too. They need to make every effort to ensure their student attends school. Recently, the KHSD initiated a School Attendance Review Board system which can ultimately hold parents accountable if their child is not attending school. I support this accountability measure as well.

State law allows school districts to provide students the opportunity to be absent from school without parent knowledge for medical purposes that can include an abortion. The KHSD has adopted a policy whereby students cannot be absent from school in such a fashion without parent knowledge. I support this policy as a practical measure that ensures sound, safe student decision making.
Allocation of funds for programs that facilitate student learning and support extracurricular activities is the priority. As a Trustee, I will look for ways to eliminate waste and direct every dollar possible to the classroom.

Clearly, the best investment in improved student achievement is more and more highly qualified teachers providing students more classes that provide for more opportunities for a successful high school experience. A large number of teachers reports their graduate and professional school training is inadequate in preparing them for their teaching duties. That makes on-going professional development a must! Fortunately, the high school district has a strong commitment to staff development. Currently the district is in the process of training its staff to work as Professional Learning Communities (PLC). Teachers participating in this model work collaboratively to design lessons and to analyze student work for mastery of concepts and skills taught. When mastery is not achieved, redesigns of lessons occur and students are re-taught. This collegial approach shows great promise for raising student scores. Teachers are learning from each other and developing strategies that enhance student learning. Researched based staff development like PLC, when done well, provides a great return on investment.

Learning power can be maximized with technology. Faster, more accurate and more detailed information about which students are struggling in which areas and why facilitates more effective remediation. The Kern High School District has been very aggressive, a state leader in fact, in advancing the use of technology to increase student achievement. Unfortunately, budget cuts have slowed District progress in this area in recent years. As a Trustee, my budget priorities would be more and better teachers first followed by maximum optimizing of technology in the classroom including more on-line offerings for students who are struggling to graduate and for students seeking to get a head start on college.