Sunday, the Cabrillo Education Foundation and Cabrillo Unified School District conducted "hardhat" tours of the new buildings in the middle school.  Construction on this, the first of three phases, is expected to be completed before the scheduled date of April, 2009.

The complete project will not be finished until 2011, but a sense of the overall project is emerging.

It’s too soon to say whether the project will fit as a unified whole, but there is ample light and space in the school and the overall effect is not as crowded as it seems when viewed from the street.

The new library is much larger than the current one and includes a computer lab with room for 80 workstations.  Designed to withstand an 8.0 earthquake, it is one of the safest buildings on the Coastside. It has a two-story ceiling and generous natural light.

Most questions to the district have been about the color scheme, and the visible bracing on street entrance of the new library building.  Yes, both of these are permanent, and expect the color scheme on the new buildings to be carried over the other buildings in the school.

There are some very nice views from the second story of the new building in the back. This building features modern and thoughtfully-designed science labs. The new band room is large, with great instrument storage and professional acoustical engineering.

It looks like the new Cunha Intermediate School is going to be a great place to go to school and a real asset to Half Moon Bay’s downtown.

There will be a garden art party at Alena Jean’s Flower Shop & Nursery, 340 Purissima St, Half Moon Bay, this September 21 from 11am to 4pm.

The party will feature local artists, including jewelry, pottery, photography, mixed media, fleece, knitting and more. This event benefits the Coastside’s own HEAL Project—a homegrown, hands-on, award-winning program that brings local agriculture into the classroom.

Refreshments provided. Entertainment including Belly Dancing and Music. All ages welcome.

Alena Jean now features Annie’s Annuals as well as a wide variety of fun and unusual plants and gifts For additional information contact Alena @ (650) 726-3662

The public is invited to a Hard Hat Tour of Cunha Intermediate School (and barbeque!) on Sunday September 21, 2008, from 10:30am to 2:30pm.  The tours will be conducted by John Diffenderer, Partner from AEDIS Architecture & Planning, Arindam Bose, Lead Architect from AEDIS Architecture & Planning, and John Bayless, former district superintendent and consultant on the project.

The tour will proceed through the buildings currently under construction allowing you to preview the new band room, science rooms, library, multi-media lab, art room, special-education classrooms, and general classrooms. There is a limit of 250 attendees and reservations are required. Please email your reservation request to: [email protected]

Half Moon Bay now has a satellite campus of the College of San Mateo with 390 students signed up for 19 different classes, including accounting, golf and guitar, reports Julia Scott in the County Times.

A college campus on the Coastside has been more then 50 years in the making, and local officials have been unstinting in their support. The San Mateo Community College District always had plans for one, buying 160 acres south of Half Moon Bay back when it acquired land for College of San Mateo, Canada College and Skyline College. That location was not feasible, though, and the land is currently planted with Brussels sprouts.

The new campus opened at just the right time to host a conversational Italian class that 78-year-old Edwina Charles lobbied Tilmann for after she and her friends lost their former Italian teacher at Senior Coastsiders last year. Charles and her fellow classmates took a trip to Italy together this summer to practice their language skills, and they are reunited this fall in their brand-new classroom.

For a list of local courses, visit collegeofsanmateo.edu/coastside.

In checking my receipt from Safeway today I noticed a new section at the bottom of it with this web site:  http://backtoschools.escrip.com/  Also in the same section of the receipt is a number identifying the transaction.  When you go to the ‘backtoschools’ website all you need to do is to enter the name or zip code of the school you wish to donate to and the id number from your receipt for an amount equivalent to ten percent of your purchase to be donated to the school.  The deadline for entering the information is Oct. 13, 2008.  If we all do this the community can make a significant difference in our schools in the upcoming year.

Enrollment in the Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) may be about to increase for the first time in a decade if recent demographic trends continue, and the school population is about to become majority Hispanic.

Is the district, or the community, ready for these changes?

The total enrollment of CUSD grew at a fairly rapid pace until it peaked around 1997-98. It has been declining steadily ever since.

In 1996, the district forecast its enrollment of 3,900 would grow to 5,200 in 2008, and it planned for an aggressive expansion in its facilities. Today, the actual enrollment is 3,300. The steady fall in enrollment has taken a good deal of facilities pressure off the district.

The reasons behind the fall in enrollment are a subject of some debate, with flight to private schools and demographic changes being the most popular explanations.

But, the overall enrollment numbers don’t tell the whole story.

White enrollment has dropped rapidly since its 1996-97 peak. Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment has grown steadily. Other subgroups have held relatively steady, at least as a group.

In the last 15 years, district white enrollment has dropped from 73% to 46% of the student population, while Hispanic enrollment has grown from 23% to 45%.

Countywide, where black and Asian students are a larger share of enrollments, the trends are generally similar, but all the trends are much less pronounced.

If we assume that the total enrollment will continue its current trend, we’d expect the district’s enrollment to continue to decline.

But if we project our three subgroups independently, we see a very different picture. White enrollment continues to decline, but the Hispanic enrollment is about to add more students than white enrollment is losing, reversing the decline in the very near future. Total enrollment may have bottomed out, having dropped by only seven students in 2008.

Hispanic enrollment is likely to overtake white enrollment by this fall, and it will be more than half of district enrollment in two years.

This analysis doesn’t consider new changes in demographic trends, the bursting housing bubble, changes in local employment patterns, and the state of the economy generally. But the basic trends have been consistent for a decade now.

While the district generally seems to be well-intentioned, there is little indication they are equipped for a dramatic shift in their student population. There have been no Hispanic members (or even candidates) on the district’s board in recent memory.

There are some encouraging signs, though. The new El Granada and high school principals have strong bilingual experience, and there have been impressive performance gains among El Granada Elementary’s Hispanic students. We’ll look at this in a future article.

Carrie Betti, who most recently served as Principal of the RISE (Raising Imaginative, Intuitive, Innovative Scholars and Explorers) Community School in Oakland Unified, was appointed by the Cabrillo Unified School District Board of Education Monday evening.

The selection process included a comprehensive file review and two rounds of interviews marked by strong school community involvement.  Betti was selected from a field of forty applicants.  Her past work experience includes service as a bilingual teacher at Turnbull Learning Academy in San Mateo and as a bilingual teacher, assessment coordinator, summer school director, and reform coordinator at Garfield Charter in Menlo Park.

Betti earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from San Francisco State University and her Master’s degree in Educational Leadership from California State-East Bay in collaboration with the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools’ (BayCES) LEAD program.  The new El Granada Principal is also a fluent Spanish speaker.

More accurate tracking and counting methods have resulted in substantially higher reported dropout rates for California schools. CUSD’s reported dropouts rose from 10 in 2005-06 to 49 in 2006-07.

From the Sacramento Bee’s July 17 story:

A new high school dropout report released Wednesday shows significantly higher rates of students leaving public school in California than reported in previous years.

…

In the past, dropout counts were self-reported by schools and districts. In many places, the figures were considered serious undercounts, especially when compared with the rates of freshmen who actually graduated with their classes four years later.

…

[State Superintendent] O’Connell said the new system was designed to make better sense of transfers.

In the past, he said, when students left schools saying they were switching to another campus, their schools counted them as transfers, not dropouts, without checking if the students actually re-enrolled elsewhere. With the new student tracking system, the state was able to determine whether such transfers took place.

The newly released Half Moon Bay High School 2006-07 numbers show 313 seniors and 239 graduates, a loss of 74, with 49 reported dropouts, a 15.6% dropout rate (27% among Hispanic students).

By contrast, in 2005-06, the last school year under the old system, the preliminary report shows a senior class of 323 students, 272 graduates, and only 10 dropouts, a 3% dropout rate.

Not all the missing graduates dropped out; some simply failed to meet their graduation requirements, including the required exit exam, and some of those may yet graduate.

The accompanying graph shows reported dropout rates for the most recent six years (through 2006-07) for CUSD, San Mateo County, and California as a whole.

Enrollment, dropout and other school-related statistics are available at Ed-Data and CDE’s DataQuest site.

NOTE: Coastsider called CUSD Superintendent Rob Gaskill for comment, but he didn’t call us back before our 5pm deadline. We’ll post an update when we hear from him.

The San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury has issued a report saying that the school district needs to exercise tougher discipline at high school games, including a zero-tolerance policy, reports the County Times.

Half Moon Bay High has contended with questionable behavior at sporting events for many years but has no clear policy or procedure to handle offenders, the grand jury said in a new report.

The district should develop such a policy that features "zero tolerance of unacceptable behavior for student athletes and the student body," the report said. "This could include forfeiting all games for that year in the sport in which the unacceptable behavior occurred."

The game in November was marred by the actions of several Half Moon Bay players who allegedly made racist remarks to the visiting opponents from Sequoia High in Redwood City. The game also was disrupted by a handful of streakers storming the field and some people pelting visiting fans with eggs.

You can download the report from Coastsider.