June 17, 2005

Education-focused trip

District 8 residents take third annual bus trip to Sacramento

By Bea Baechle
Editor

A bleary-eyed, bipartisan group of Evergreen residents boarded a bus to Sacramento on May 23 with a distinct purpose in mind—to let their state legislators know how concerned they were about the education of California’s children.

Evergreen resident Rod Cryer posed many questions to local legislators in Sacramento. Photo by Amanda Brittingham

By 7:30 a.m., Chris Corpus, principal of LeyVa Middle School from the Evergreen School District (ESD), and George Perez, Superintendent of the Mt. Pleasant School District, began briefing the participants with speaking points and potential questions to ask before arriving at the state capitol building.

Proposition 98
The administrators took turns shedding light on some of the grim realities facing California’s education system, and Evergreen residents didn’t need a cup of coffee to wake up and smell the fact that the issues facing education in this state are major and very real.

For example, $2 billion of Proposition 98 education funding that should have gone to our schools in 2004 was instead used to help balance the state budget. Rather than return this money to education in 2005 as he promised, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger indicated that the same amount of money would need to be taken from Proposition 98 this year.

To put it into a local perspective, the Evergreen School District lost $2 million of funding last year because of this decision. So the first key speaking point for residents was to tell legislators not to suspend or further weaken Prop. 98.

Special Education
Special education services and transportation are significant encroachments that impact all public schools and affect the delivery of services to all students.

State Finance Director Tom Campbell, Senator Abel Maldonado and Senator Elaine Alquist were among the legislators who spoke to District 8 residents. Photos by Amanda Brittingham

The state has lobbied the federal government to increase its contribution to help fund special education. Currently, however, it is less than 18 percent, when it should be 40 percent.

To better illustrate the expense, Corpus explained that there’s been a significant increase of autistic children throughout the state. ESD serves the highest number of autistic students in the county.

This requires hiring an aide for each autistic child that sits in a regular classroom, because teachers must teach the curriculum to all students and the methodology for teaching autistic children is new territory. Yet, under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, the district must show growth with all students.

So a second key speaking point was the need for help from the state to provide resources and information to help autistic children in a regular classroom setting.

Equalization monies
A third key speaking point focused on the need for equalization money to keep educational programs going. ESD is considered a low wealth district despite the expensive housing in Evergreen. The outdated funding formula for this district was created under Proposition 13 almost 30 years ago, when Evergreen was an agricultural community. Consequently, ESD receives the lowest amount per pupil in the county.

Senator Abel Maldonado

Because the Evergreen School District has 17 California Distinguished Schools and 11 National Blue Ribbons schools, most legislators think ESD receives the same level of funding as Los Gatos. Yet unlike some districts located in Cupertino and Palo Alto, Evergreen does not have a district foundation nor a parcel tax to fall back on.

Corpus and Perez covered a number of other speaking points and encouraged District 8 residents to ask such questions as why are fees collected from developers not sufficient to cover the needs for new schools? Why are the first programs to be cut always the arts and sports programs? What is being done at the state level to increase per pupil spending? Why is California so low compared to other states?

Full lineup of legislators
Once the bus arrived in Sacramento, District 8 residents gained access to a full lineup of legislators, lobbyists and state government staff who visited the committee room where Evergreen was based for the day.

Assemblyman Joe Coto, the first speaker of the day, summed up the sentiment in the room well. “We are not making the level of investment for the sixth most powerful economy in the world. If we’re going to remain competitive, then we’ve got to invest more in the education of our children.”

Democratic Senator Elaine Alquist told the group how important it was for Evergreen residents to take the time to come to Sacramento. “We need people from the community to be holding us accountable and to be educating us,” said Alquist, who was a teacher, a school board member and a member of the Assembly before being joining the senate last November.

Senator Elaine Alquist

“The last time we made a good investment in education was in the Pat Brown years, in the late 1960s,” she said, noting that California ranks somewhere between 43rd and 47th depending on what figures you use.

“Last year there were two million children in California that didn’t have text books and we rank 49th in computer technology—that’s a crying shame, given all computer technology around us,” continued Alquist.

She encouraged people to vocalize their concerns, be it at rallies, talking to legislators or writing letters to the editor. “The Mercury News isn’t so much interested in hearing from me as a legislator—they may think I have a hidden agenda. My hidden agenda is to see every child get a good education. I’m a grandmother. All of our kids are not getting a good education and we are still going in the wrong direction.”

Republican Senator Abel Maldonado, who represents the 15th senatorial district that stretches across one third of the California coastline, provided a different viewpoint.

“The most disappointing thing for me is the partisanship that goes on in this building,” said Maldoando, who served in the assembly for six years before joining the California Senate last November. “When I was a councilmember, we never worried about who got the credit—we just got the job done. We never worried about what was good for the Democrats or good for the Republicans—we just got the work done. That’s been my biggest frustration up here.”

Maldonado said that with slight improvements in the economy and a bit more tax money coming in, California’s $115 billion budget had a little extra money than originally expected. “The governor has made a commitment that the first $1.3 billion of that extra money would go towards transportation. He made a commitment to pay off the debt, so a couple of billion dollars are going toward paying off the debt.”

Sal Alvarez asks a pointed question.

He explained that 45 cents of every dollar spent in this $115 billion budget goes toward education and only 1.6 cents goes to transportation, which is also very important.

“I won’t bore you with the details of the budget,” said Maldonado. “I think what’s important here is that we have a budget that’s balanced, and hopefully we can come together as Democrats and Republicans to get this budget resolved so that we won’t have to spend another $80 million on a special election … It goes
back to, can’t we just get along and can’t we just come up with some good ideas to balance the budget and put California first, not our political parties, to move this state forward.”

Yet a month after the bus trip, the governor announced a special election for November that will place several initiatives before the voters, including topics such as teacher tenure, reapportionment of district boundaries and the state budget.

Regaining fiscal order
State Finance Director Tom Campbell, who lives in Almaden Valley, is also the dean of the business school at UC Berkeley and agreed to take this job in Sacramento only until next spring. He tried to shed some light on the state’s difficult budget challenges.

“The budget of California was hugely a part of why Governor Schwarzenegger became governor. Folks were concerned that we weren’t fiscally responsible, and that we ought to be fiscally responsible if we were to attract and retain jobs,” said Campbell.

Jon Rasmussen reviews the back information supplied by District 8.

He explained that in the proposed state budget, “there are no new taxes, no new borrowing and we paid back half of what we borrowed from the cities at the end of the Davis administration. We’re going to pay it back one year early. I think that’s consistent to living within our means.”

Going forward, Campbell feels the debate should be, “How do we spend the revenues that the state has, and what should those revenues be? Reasonable people can have different points of view, but what shouldn’t be debatable is that we don’t spend any more than we have.”

He noted that when he took over as budget director, California had been spending more than it had. “We had accumulated more than $12 billion that we had borrowed—not from bonds that the people can authorize, but from special accounts, including from Prop 42, which is an account for highways, bridges, airports.”

Maintaining competitiveness
He said in order to be economically competitive, California also borrowed from Prop 98 and the vehicle license fee. “We started the last fiscal year $8.5 billion out of balance. That’s because we have formulas that required us to spend, and those formulas were not restricted to the amount of money we had. They were driven by population and by CPI, and that was true for welfare, MediCal and Prop 98.

Campbell noted that if Califonia started the year in balance, rather than engaging in a debate about what gets cut, the legislature could engage in a debate of how much more could be spent for what purposes and divide up what money is available. “I think that’s a whole lot more healthy,” said Campbell.

District 8 residents also heard from Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymembers Sally Lieber and Simon Salinas, and several legislative aides. Estelle LeMieux, from the California Teacher’s Association, rounded out the set of speakers.
By 4 p.m. the District 8 bus loaded its passengers and departed for San Jose. Shorty Joe Quartuccio, a retired musician who lives at the Villages, provided some light entertainment to balance a full day of information sharing, questions and debate about how to stabilize education funding.

Shorty Joe Quartuccio entertained the participants on the bus. Photos by Amanda Brittingham

“Wow! What an interesting group of people from Evergreen,” commented Evergreen resident Jon Rasmussen on the return trip home. “… There were Republicans and Democrats, retired and still working, private and public school graduates, parents and grandparents who were all united in their efforts and concern for the funding of our Evergreen schools. I hope our Sacramento legislature and governor realize the mixed messages that we’re receiving regarding their support and commitment to education.”

Ernest Ngwiri found the trip very enlightening and informative. “It was worth it for the benefit of learning what’s going on.” Mita Dey, who brought her eighth grade son Akash, said the trip was extremely worthwhile and it “gave us some understanding of politics.”

“It’s really clear that there’s a definite divide in the way Democrats perceive educational priorities and the way Republicans do,” said Evergreen resident Frank Biehl.
“Democrats clearly favor educational spending, and Republicans adamantly are opposed to any tax increases.”

The debate goes on.