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Palo Alto may boost school class sizes and delay re-opening of Garland School in response to dramatic budget uncertainties and slower-than-expected enrollment growth.
School board members will discuss that and more Tuesday in a meeting with a heavy focus on the Palo Alto Unified School District’s beleagured budget. The meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the board room at district headquarters, 25 Churchill Ave.
The agenda is packed with discussion of the budget, Garland’s future, an update on the controversial Mandarin immersion program and opening bids for renewal of a teachers’ union contract that expires June 30.
Pending state-budget cuts in Sacramento “dramatically increase our level of uncertainty as we move into the upcoming school year and complete our work on our 2009-2010 budget,” Superintendent Kevin Skelly said.
State funds comprise 12 percent of the district’s general fund, while property tax contributes 68 percent.
Skelly said he will take “a very conservative approach to the allocation of resources, staff hiring, class size and the like.” Class sizes in kindergarten through third grades, now at 20, may have to go to 22, school officials said.
“Enrollment growth has slowed considerably” and now trails earlier estimates, Assistant Superintendent Scott Laurence said.
On Garland, administrators are recommending that, instead of partially re-opening the school for some grades in the fall of 2011, the district postpone that decision and reconsider whether and when to re-open it as a full elementary school.
The district already has notified Garland’s current occupant, the private Stratford School, of its intention to take back the campus, and has proceeded with architectural plans for major rebuilding.
The Mandarin immersion program sparked bitter feelings at the time of its 2007 adoption when the school board narrowly rejected it and later reversed itself after backers signaled their intention to start a charter school. The board feared a charter could have cost the district even more.
The immersion program was launched last fall at Ohlone School with two K-1 classes comprised of 24 English-speaking children and 16 Mandarin-speaking children. Initially, 98 English-speaking children and 42 Mandarin-speaking children had applied for those spots, which were filled by lottery.
The high school Mandarin program, which began in the fall of 2006 with Chinese I, now serves 131 students at Gunn and 121 students at Paly. Students are enrolled at all levels from Chinese I to a fifth-year AP class, which is offered only at Paly and serves 23 students.
For the middle schools, officials said an earlier plan to spend 2009-2010 examining the viability of a Chinese program has been pushed to the 2010-2011 school year.
Mandarin Immersion Update will also be part of this meeting (but was not in the title of this article.)
Why is it that teachers are the first to go when the budget is cut? What about all the school administrators? How many Deputy Superintendents do we really need?
There’s a lot of difficult decisions to be made. I think its an interesting consequence of the boom-and-bust conditions we’ve had. They may reopen Garland only to find enrollments declining for several more years ahead, and just when when they’ve got it straight, they’ll be another boom and the schools will be over-enrolled.
The article states that 12% of the budget comes from the state and 68% from property taxes. What is the source of funding for the remaining 20% of the budget?
Also, I thought that we received state or federal funding for keeping class sizes at 20 or under in K-3. If we raise the class sizes above 20 we will lose that funding, won’t we?
I think everyone is assuming that the state funding for reduced class size will be gone with the budget mess the state is in. It’s probably a safe bet.
It’s not clear that class sizes are the driver of success that people infer they are. Even the book Outliers questions this concept. Anyone have real data to show this is truly the case?
The Daily story on this said that four of the Mandarin native speakers have dropped–pretty big drop for a program that’s not even finished out the school year. Parents felt that the kids weren’t learning English fast enough. I’ve always felt there was going to be an issue getting enough Mandarin speakers–the demographics here don’t support it and one of the reasons you’d move to Palo Alto as an immigrant family is to make sure your kids assimilate.
And Hoover, in many ways, feels more familiar in terms of educational philosophy.
How about all the construction planned at the high schools that is costing a small fortune. Seems like that should go before teachers.
What about the Santa Clara county education supervisors? Who supports this — county taxpayers? I’ve never understood what they do. Time to reduce administrators before we cut teachers.
Check the closed meeting agenda: The District will apparently be backfilling its assistant superintendent slot even though it is faced with uncertain financial/enrollment times – a position that was long vacant, before it was used to try to keep Scottie Laurence from jumping ship. That worked for a couple years but Scottie is on to greener and higher pastures and the position should be mothballed again, until further notice – at least until after contract negotiations.
Watching,
Good point. Better to have vacant administrative positions frozen for the time being. It seems to be the nature of bureaucracies to maintain themselves no matter what–but having an asst. super just isn’t that important.
“Class sizes in kindergarten through third grades, now at 20, may have to go to 22, school officials said.”
Funny.. .. at a recent staff meeting we were told K, 2, and 3 would have 21 in their classes and 1st would have 22. To me it feels like the decision has already been made.
What is a big deal of increasing class size from 20 to 22. Two extra kids in the class should NOT affect the education of the whole class. If this increase will ease some budget problem, go for it. It will be better than cutting other school programs.
teacher,
Yes, my impression is that there’s a lot of decisions that arrive in public long decided.
Parent,
I was under the impression that the whole 20-student thing was an issue of funding–ya pay for not keeping your numbers down.
That said, I’d rather see 22 in a class instead of huge schools and playgrounds covered in modular classrooms. It’s not ideal, but better than some of the alternatives we’re seeing.
@mom: The funding for the high school construction projects is coming from the renewed parcel tax. It would be illegal to divert the funds to anything other than what was described in the parcel tax description at election time.
i agree with gunn parent: get rid of santa clara county. i am a teacher in the county and i can’t quite figure out what they do. the levels of bureaucracy at so many levels is such a waste of money. keep it simple, folks. do we have to have a special election / ballot measure to solve everything??
It’s very simple; cut administrators! And an increase from 20 to 22 students seems really minimal. In the Dark Ages when I was in school we had classes of 30 or more!
We moved from out of state and their classes had around 32 students. No wonder kids didn’t learn much.
22 kids will certainly be fine.
Nora,
In the Dark Ages, you also had full-time teaching assistants or aids in the classrooms, school nurses, and other support staff — nowadays, teachers are lucky to get an assistant a few hours a week, at least at our school.
Be careful about throwing around anecdotes that may not apply — was everything really so great at 30, even with the extra teachers in the classroom, or are we just hearing from the few at the top who did fine? We know the right kind of classrooms can foster learning for all kids to a high standard, but it’s probably not reasonable to expect with 30 kids and 1 teacher.
How are budget woes in the district affecting the Garland reopening? District personnel have been treating the Measure A money like some kind of free-for-all, but the party’s only for facilities construction, not for operating expenses.
Is it because they can’t staff Garland?
We are in a budget crisis but Sup Skelley, Board and Math Committee pushed to implement a new math textbook that is the most expensive, needs significant more funds for teacher training and was least favored by parents and (secretly some teachers). This does not add up! But unfortunately now the class size will increase so the kids will suffer – so unfair. I wish board members like Dana Tom and Barb M had paid attention to the cost of textbooks before approving such controversial books. Ridiculus! BTW, I never understood what value Math TOSAs bring to the district
Sorry but they’ve already increased. Many elementary classes have more than they’re supposed to and in middle school they’re way over. Why the denial?
Mom of Midtown, do be careful not to jump to conclusions. There were no teaching assistants; the teachers had no help. Yes, there was one school nurse–for hundreds of kids. We somehow survived and children today will as well. But from what I have seen the children of Palo Alto are coddled beyond belief and will be ill prepared for the real world.
Nora – I agree that us “old” people did fine with less staff. But we also had very little homework (I don’t remember doing much more then the occasional worksheet or book report until high school), we played sports for fun and friends, not to make all-stars or put it on our college resume. There were honors classes, but not AP, our school libraries were full of current books and magazines, we came home from school to hang out or play (depending on your age), not run off to tutoring/3 sports/hebrew school/music lessons/honor band. We rode our bike to where we needed to go (or in many cases, just stayed at school for sports) . Our kids are not coddled (well, ok, some are) but they are overscheduled as are their parents!
what are Math TOSA’s, is it like a swat team?
Class size increases if we reduce the number of teachers. Have we laid of any teachers?
So why is this an issue. If we are reducing the class size with teacher-aids then we did not have the correct ratio to begin with.
The effect of class size on student achievement has not been established.
Caroline Hoxby, professor of economics at Stanford: “Most interventions in education (class size reductions…) are based not on evidence that they work, but rather on the “cardiac test” (e.g., “we just know in our heart that this is right”).”
Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute: “For two decades, advocates of class-size reduction have referenced the findings from the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project, a class-size experiment conducted in Tennessee in the late 1980s. Researchers found significant achievement gains for students in small kindergarten classes and additional gains in first grade, especially for black students. The results seemed to validate a crowd-pleasing reform and were famously embraced in California, where in 1996 legislators adopted a program to reduce class sizes that cost nearly $800 million in its first year and billions in its first decade. The dollars ultimately yielded disappointing results, however, with the only major evaluation (a joint American Institutes for Research and RAND study[2]) finding no effect on student achievement.
What happened? Policymakers ignored nuance and context. California encouraged districts to place students in classes of no more than twenty–but that class size was substantially larger than those for which STAR found benefits. Moreover, STAR was a pilot program serving a limited population, which minimized the need for new teachers. California’s statewide effort created a voracious appetite for new educators, diluting teacher quality and encouraging well-off districts to strip-mine teachers from less affluent communities.
The moral is that even policies or practices informed by rigorous research can prove ineffective if the translation is clumsy or ill-considered.” http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec08/vol66/num04/The_New_Stupid.aspx
New York Times this year: “Class Size in New York City Schools Rises, but the Impact Is Debated” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/education/22class.html),
Those folks who think there’s no difference between 20, 22, and 30 in a classroom have never been a teacher. Ask any good educator, “Would it be better for the kids to have a classroom ratio of 20 to 1 in kindergarten or 30 to 1?” Yes, the answer is logical… and it’s true.
Kids only go through school once — we should be giving them the best we can offer.
Former,
I agree that there’s a very real difference between 10 and 30 students in a classroom–I went to school during the tail-end of the baby boom and we had large classes. I think we all got through it because, frankly, the expectations were just not that high.
I think, though, we can have 22 kids in a class without it having a huge impact.
the problem is now its only 2 more kids next it will be another 2 and then another…my child was in middle school last year and she had a french class with 40 people the class was much too overcrowded and it hindered the learning environment