Annual Conference looks back, ahead
Published: January 1, 2006
Buoyed by strong support for schools at the ballot box but with other struggles over finances, standards and local control continuing, California School Boards Association members and allies ushered in the association’s 75th year at the Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego Dec. 1-3.
The event drew more than 3,100 district and county board members, administrators and staff to the San Diego Convention Center, where compelling speakers and more than 200 workshops explored the crucial issues facing public education today – from universal preschool to high school exit exams and beyond.
The conference broke new ground with the formation of five Student Issues Conference Groups, an ongoing project expected to transform a legacy of concerns into effective action plans for specific minority and ethnic student groups and those served by county offices of education. The gathering also launched the CSBA-led adequacy campaign to both calculate and generate support for the true cost of the high standards California has set for its schools and students.
State of the State
Occurring midway between November’s special election and the start of the 2006 legislative session, the conference offered an inside view of the policy-making and politics that affect important services provided by more than 1,000 local school districts and county offices of education.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell drew a sharp lesson from the resounding defeat of Proposition 76, the centerpiece of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Year of Reform” that culminated in the November balloting. Speaking at the conference’s first general session, O’Connell said the election rebuked Schwarzenegger for not honoring his agreement a year earlier to restore full funding to education if the revenues became available.
“A deal’s a deal. You fund the deal,” O’Connell said. “The message is loud and clear: We need to fully fund Proposition 98.”
Speakers at the closing general session’s State of the State symposium two days later drove home the point.
“Everybody else got made whole except K-12,” Rick Pratt, CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations, said. He was comparing schools to the many groups that saw their state funds first reduced in the budget proposal released by the governor nearly a year ago, then adjusted upward in the midyear revisions after revenues improved. Schwarzenegger claims that schools are his first priority, Pratt noted, but “the budget says that the last priority, really, is public education.”
Still, he and other speakers reached for conciliatory signs.
The state “had a colossal waste of time and money” in 2005, CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin observed, but he also vowed to keep the lines of communication open. “I take no joy in the humiliation of the governor,” he said.
Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff for Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Núñez and an influential force in education policy, noted that Proposition 49, the 2002 initiative for after-school funding that Schwarzenegger rode to political prominence, may take effect for the first time this year if the forecast revenues hold up.
Simpson also saw a possible opening for school construction and improvements in Schwarzenegger’s post-election call for an ambitious state building plan, to be financed by long-term bonds.
“It seems to me that we’re at least as much a part of the infrastructure as sewers and water systems and parks and highways,” Simpson said.
‘Sipping from a fire hose’
Conference topics ranged far beyond politics and finance, allowing participants to consult experts – and each other – on academic standards, assessments, charter schools, regulations and the abundant challenges of equipping California’s 6.3 million public school students for the future. In his welcoming remarks, Plotkin quoted Annual Education Conference Committee Chairman Dennis Mobley’s description of the yearly event as “a little bit like sipping from a fire hose.”
Pre-conference activities included a daylong symposium on preschool and an orientation session for new board members such as David R. Rose, recently elected in the Charter Oak Unified School District in Los Angeles County.
“It’s a lot to digest. I’m overwhelmed,” said Rose, a parent and special education teacher. “Going from a parent to a board member is a big change in status. I have to be a team member and be in touch with other board members and administrators on the issues.”
The people who came to San Diego represented nearly half of the state’s 1,000-plus school districts and offices of education, and the 239 trade show exhibitors who showcased their products and services set a new record, according to Kristy Bird Trouchon, CSBA’s Education Conference Coordinator.
“It was wonderful to walk through the San Diego Convention Center and see how many people were actively engaged in the sessions and how inspired they were by our general session speakers,” Trouchon said.