High Tech High School, a California Public Charter School located in Redwood City is holding an open house Saturday. The school’s principles include small school size, openness of facilities, personalization, emphasis on project-based learning and student exhibitions, a requirement that all students complete community internships, and ample planning time for teacher teams during the work day. 

HTH will hold an informational meeting on the Coastside, where parents can meet current students and parents from the coast, and get a hands on feel for the school. Limited openings are also available for 10th and 11th grade for 2007-08

419 Correas Street, Half Moon Bay
Saturday, February 3rd 4:00 – 6:00pm
Questions:  Please call 650-726-7125

The Coastside Mothers’ Club will host its sixth annual education roundtable: A Parent Perspective—Schools on the Coastside. The roundtable will be held Thursday, February 8, 2007 at The Bell Building, 565 Kelly Street, Half Moon Bay, 7 to 9pm. 

This event is recommended for families who are beginning to plan for kindergarten and is open to the public, free of charge, as a community service to all Coastside residents.

The roundtable: A Parent Perspective - Schools on the Coastside is a unique opportunity to hear Coastside parents openly discuss their thoughts on selecting an elementary school (public, private or home schooled) that was right for their child.

Each of the parent speakers will share their experiences in choosing a kindergarten program and what they feel makes their school unique.  Some of the factors past panel members have discussed include: school size, parental involvement, finding the right school to match their child’s learning needs, or finding a school which offers a variety of enrichment activities (art, music, science, etc).

Click here for the full story.

There will be a special meeting of the Cabrillo Unified School District board on Monday at 7pm. The only agenda item in the public meeting will be “Review of Modernization and Expansion of Cunha Intermediate School”.

There will also be a meeting of the “ad-hoc” committee on the middle school project at 5:30 in the District office. The public is welcome to attend.

The meetings will be at the district office at 498 Kelly Ave, Half Moon Bay.

Click below for agenda.

Click here for the full story.

Local kid-rock sensation The Sippy Cups, founded by three Montara dads, have designated a limited number of tickets to their 1:30pm show on Sunday, December 10 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco to be sold by the Farallone View PTA.  Ten percent of the proceeds will be donated directly back to the school. 

The band’s hot-off-the-presses, fully original CD Electric Storyland was recently rated among the top ten kid’s CDs released this year, while the new Electric Storyland show has been touring the Bay Area and L.A. to rave reviews since early October.  Complete with dancing dinosaurs, juggling super-heroes, friendly robots, trained dogs, and of course, spandex-clad parents gone kid rock stars. 

Don’t miss this chance to catch the show, party and dance with your Coastside friends and neighbors, and benefit Farallone View School at the same time.  A special, kid-friendly, Sippy-inspired menu will be offered.  For more information or to purchase tickets contact Nina Greeley, or 415-335-4422.  Tickets also available at the Farallone View Scrip table and Holiday Bazaar.

The Sippy Cups in Electric Storyland
A Rock & Roll Extravaganza for Families
Sunday, December 10, 2006 at 1:30 pm
at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco

Kings Mountain Elementary School as a Scholar School for the second year in a row. Using academic achievement data from Just for Kids-California, the California Business for Education Excellence Foundation (CBEE Foundation) identifies, selects and then honors the highest performing public schools in California. This year 204 schools from across the state were awarded the honor.

Scholar schools have a proficiency of 80%—or 50% with significant increases each year since 2002.  All subgroups of students must out-perform expectations based on a linear regression analysis of statewide data.  The school must also met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals for at least two years.  

I’m deeply disturbed by the take-no-prisoners approach to campaigning we’ve seen in our school board elections lately.

What are the stakes? The school board can’t raise taxes and is unlikely to do any more building any time soon. They have zero control of district student demographics and pretty marginal control over test scores. They have no ambition to operate buses. The schools are crumbling and dirty. The board is dependent on handouts from millionaires for discretionary funds, parcel tax campaigns, and political contributions.

The bright spots in our district—the teachers and parents—carry on admirably in the midst of the chaos.

I’m sure the candidates are ambitious to help our kids. But why step on anyone or be less than perfectly candid with your friends and neighbors to get a seat on the board?  But, then, I have no idea why anyone would subject themselves to the kind of smears mounted against people who run against the incumbents in our school board elections.

Sure, there’s a legacy of bitterness. But we all won—and we all lost—the middle school battle long ago.  The newer-is-better crowd got to control the school board, but can’t build at Wavecrest. And the less-is-more crowd got a middle school at Cunha, but can’t even get a neutral candidate on the board. And nobody got a parcel tax.

Our kids are already several steps behind the starting line because they go to school in California and because they’re unfortunate enough to live in a nation where the adults pretend that slogans like No Child Left Behind are education policy.

Some of us are better prepared than others to raise children in this hostile environment. None of us should have to do it without the full support of the community.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s necessary to turn our school district into a steel-cage death match to get things done.

This piece originally appeared on Jonathan Lundell’s blog Pragmatos.

Last June, a parcel tax proposal by CUSD failed, for the fifth time in recent memory. On Tuesday, Californians will vote on Proposition 88, an initiative that seeks a perpetual statewide $50/year parcel tax. Reliance on local parcel taxes to supplement public education funding is bad public policy, for two main reasons.

First, parcel taxes are regressive. Whether you live in a 10,000 square foot McMansion in Beverly Hills or in a shotgun shack on a postage-stamp lot, your parcel tax assessment is the same (if you’re only renting the shack, the parcel tax will almost certainly show up as a rent increase).

Second, affluent school districts are much more likely than poor districts to be able to pass substantial parcel taxes, and so supplement California’s rather low level of state funding for education, leaving poorer districts stuck at the bottom. This flies in the face of the state supreme court’s Serrano decisions in 1971 and 1976 that basing school funding primarily on local property taxes is unconstitutionally inequitable.

There is some merit in the argument that, during an acute budget emergency, a short-term parcel tax may be justified on the grounds that it’s the only recourse available to the district (or at any rate the least bad recourse). I accepted that argument, for example (and made it myself) in 2003, though not in 2006.

Various people have advocated lowering the election threshold for a parcel tax to 55%, from the current Prop 13-mandated 2/3, as was done some years back for facilities bonds. That’s a bad idea, and more than a little disingenuous. Lowering the threshold for parcel tax measures requires a constitutional amendment. But once we’re amending the constitution, we’re no longer bound by the strictures of Proposition 13, and are free to restructure public school funding equitably. That is, if we’re going to pass a constitutional amendment, why not fix school funding right? Fix it right. K-12 funding in California is broken and needs to be fixed, and one way or another that will require higher taxes. But parcel taxes, whether local or statewide, are the wrong way to do it.

A statewide parcel tax, as proposed by Proposition 88, largely avoids my second criticism; it will be collected (and presumably distributed) more or less uniformly across the state. On the other hand, it does nothing to address existing inter-district inequity. Proposition 88 introduces a variation not found in local parcel tax proposals: no time limit. Local parcel taxes run for a few years, often five, and generally in the range of three to seven. But the statewide parcel tax proposed by Proposition 88 has no time limit at all. It would become a permanent part of California public school financing, embedded in the state constitution. Because Proposition 88 includes a constitutional amendment, it could have implemented a more progressive revenue source (such as income taxes) instead of relying on regressive parcel taxes. It’s a bad measure, and should be defeated. 

On Monday, October 30, the six candidates for three open positions on the CUSD board each answered four questions that they knew ahead of time and then answered several from the audience.  The pre-set questions and times allowed are below. Click to see our videos.

The video is available for both Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Kathee Tyson of the League of Women Voters moderated the forum. The American Association of University Women organized the event.

• What, in your background, has prepared you to sit on the Cabrillo Unified School District Board of Trustees? (2 minutes per answer)


• In your view, what are the 3 most important issues facing the CUSD in the next 4 years? (1 minute per answer)


• Which of these issues is most important to you and why? (2 minutes per answer)


• What is your plan for addressing this issue which you feel is most important? (2 minutes per answer)
• Candidates answer questions from the audience

Bob Ptacek has declared his candidacy for the board of the Cabrillo Unified School District as a write-in candidate.  Ptacek, a member of the Montara Water and Sanitary District board, is the only candidate in San Mateo county to complete the paperwork to be recognized as a write-in cadidate.

In an email, Ptacek told me: “The reason for running is mainly because I heard folks talk about not exercising all of their 3 eligible votes, And coming from behind the iron curtain (East Berlin), that went against every fiber of by belief system. So I signed up.”

Ptacek will be at tonight’s CUSD candidate forum and we have requested more information about his candidacy, which we’ll make available later this week.

Pam Fisher is the best-qualified candidate for the board. She’s a former six-year school board member from another district who can bring a fresh perspective to our community.  She advocates more responsiveness in and community involvement from the district. She wants more oversight of the district by the board, including doubling the frequency of board meetings. The board currently meets less than once a month.

We’re lucky to have Pam Fisher as a candidate. The current school board is the hand-picked successor of the boards that have failed to deliver a new middle school or a parcel tax in ten years of trying. Qualified candidates have refused to run for the CUSD because of the vicious personal attacks against challengers by school board members and their supporters. It would be refreshing to have at least one person on the board who is genuinely independent.

I’m not particularly supportive of Fisher’s neighborhood campaign over the modifications of the high school athletic fields. But the district’s neighbors and parents deserved better treatment than they got from the district. If the district had been more responsive in this case, a mutually-destructive lawsuit could almost certainly have been avoided.

Voters have three votes for three open seats in this election. In my opinion, your best course of action would be to vote for Pam Fisher only.  If you feel the need to vote for more candidates, I recommend you vote for Ken Johnson and Dwight Wilson.

Ken Johnson is a gadfly who has been after the district for years over their test scores. I like Ken and know he’s sincere, but he’s probably better as an outside critic than he would be as a board member. His principal qualifications are that he cares about quality education and he’s an outsider. You could do worse.

Dwight Wilson is part of the machine that has consistently failed to deliver the goods. However, among that group he took the lead in solving the middle school location problem, and is willing to listen to other voices.

There are also two candidates who do not deserve your support.

Jolanda Schreurs has been a leading member of the faction that has created an atmosphere of hostility and negativity around the district and its board.  I believe she cares about our kids’ education, but she has actively contributed to the ugliness that has surrounded the board and its elections. She played a big part in a last-minute anonymous attack ad in the last school board election. She was the last member of the board to accept a solution to the middle school problem and did so in a way that stoked the flames of bitterness.

Kirk Riemer looks like the hand-picked successor of the misguided cabal that has controlled the board for too long. He is endorsed by past and present board members Jolanda Schreurs, Dwight Wilson, Charles Gardner, John Moseley, Marina Stariha, Ruth Palmer, and Ken Jones.  Furthermore, he helped create the attack ad that anonymously smeared Jonathan Lundell two years ago. Even if, as the Review believes, he only reviewed the ad before it was printed, that’s pretty damning.