Buidling bridges with advocates for children and schools

Although they spent much of their time lobbying for specific policy and regulatory changes with congressional staffers and federal and White House officials, members of CSBA’s Federal Issues Council also reached out to organizations concerned with green building design, universal preschool, teaching English to non-native speakers, the work of state boards of education, and educational policies being promoted by the nation’s governors.

The FIC discussed strategies for retrofitting old buildings and building energy-efficient schools with Merrilee Harrigan, vice president for education at the Alliance to Save Energy, who is herself a product of California’s public schools. With the rising cost of fuel, and California’s burgeoning budget deficit, it’s more important than ever that school facilities use energy as efficiently as possible. Among other projects, the alliance operates a Green Schools Program that supports energy-saving initiatives at dozens of California schools.

It’s easy to be green
Harrigan said students can be passionate and effective advocates for energy efficiency. She enthusiastically described how students at Bemis Elementary School in the Rialto Unified School District convinced their local school board to repaint their school’s black roof after their research indicated that white was more energy-efficient.

“The school cut its energy costs by 35 percent,” Harrigan said. “When you educate students, you have the potential to transform communities. We’d like the education community to help lead the way, and we’re delighted that school boards are taking an interest.”

Harrigan urged FIC members to connect with the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, which helps districts design energy-efficient schools. CSBA is making energy conservation a priority. During the meeting, in fact, Immediate Past President Kathy Kinley held aloft the spring issue of CSBA’s California Schools magazine, which featured a cover story on green schools.

Research on EL students
The group also spent two hours with Diane August, senior researcher at the Center for Applied Linguistics, a former California teacher who helped her English learners become fluent in their second language by offering weekly tutoring sessions for their parents. August described her latest project: an exhaustive review of existing research on how English learners acquire a second language. The report was compiled by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, a group established by the U.S. Department of Education.

August says the research indicates that it doesn’t work in the long run to segregate English learners and drill them exclusively on mechanics.

“I have seen programs touted as models that have taught EL students to read English,” she said. ”They can pronounce the words perfectly, but they have no idea what the words mean.”

She said EL students also need access to native English-speaking classmates to learn how to effectively use the language, and they need native-language instruction in core academic subjects like math, science and history so they don’t fall behind in those areas while they are learning English.

August and her research team support a science curriculum that instructs EL students in English and their native languages, teaching English and science content simultaneously. “From the analyses conducted, it seems safe to conclude that bilingual education has a positive effect on children’s literacy in English,” she said.

Preschool and NCLB
The FIC also talked with representatives of Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group that awards foundation grants to states to promote voluntary, high-quality prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds. The group is supporting state campaigns to build awareness of the nation’s “school readiness problems” and the value of early childhood education for all.

Initially, Pre-K Now had hoped to fold funding for these early childhood programs into the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. FIC members took an extremely dim view of that idea, however. “NCLB is regimented and narrow in its scope,” said Holly Jacobson, CSBA assistant executive director for Policy Analysis and Continuing Education. “I wouldn’t want to see pre-K morphed into that piece of legislation.”

Jacobson described CSBA’s extensive efforts to support school boards that want to institute early childhood education, including a special Web site, resource page and upcoming Webinars for school districts and county offices of education.

Last, but hardly lackluster
Given that the FIC’s trip to the National Association of State Boards of Education headquarters in Alexandria was the final official event in a very long three days of meetings, it could easily have been a less than energetic gathering.

Instead, thanks to NASBE’s charismatic Executive Director Brenda Lilienthal Welburn and the importance of the governance topics on the agenda, the discussion was animated and productive.

NASBE was established to help state boards of education operate effectively, but Welburn explained that local school board members can also join the organization as associate members for a nominal fee. Associate members can participate in NASBE research and policy projects and conferences, and NASBE can sometimes provide grant funding to help with travel and lodging expenses associated with this work. NASBE study groups have published research on healthy eating and fitness, adolescent pregnancy and parenthood, AIDS, tobacco, preschool and student school board representatives.

Welburn urged school governance teams to stand up to attacks on public schools from elected officials and business executives who push for vouchers, national standards and other misguided policy mandates.

“They may think they have all the answers, but they don’t even know what all the problems are,” she said. “If we ran public school buses the way they run the airlines, our kids would be all over the place. Some of them would never get to school. We’ve got to stop letting those people push us around.”

Related links:
Visit CSBA’s Preschool Web Resource Center @ www.csba.org/AboutCSBA/CSBAFoundation/Preschool.aspx

Find the Alliance to Save Energy’s information on green schools @ www.ase.org

Learn more about the National Association of State Boards of Education @ www.nasbe.org