Editor's note: Hope springs eternal 

Remember “Groundhog Day”? I don’t mean Feb. 2, the day a certain Pennsylvania critter is supposed to emerge from his long winter’s nap, look for his shadow and, if you believe the news reports, determine whether winter will last another six weeks. This is the Spring issue of California Schools, after all, so spring must have sprung by now.

No, I mean the 1993 movie starring Bill Murray as a self-absorbed TV weatherman who finds himself in a bizarre time loop where every day is Groundhog Day and he’s forced to cover the corny prognostication ritual ad nauseam.

School board members can no doubt relate to the déjà vu nature of that dilemma. In recent years, it’s seemed like every day brings another state budget crisis. The sorry state of education funding was an unavoidable theme of CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego last December.

“A board member told me: ‘OK, OK, I get it. We have a problem,’ ” CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin recounted during the conference. “ ‘Now tell me what to do about it!’ That’s what we are trying to do here,” Plotkin continued, with many conference sessions devoted to helping governance teams cope with hard fiscal times.

That’s also what California Schools staff writer Carol Brydolf did in "Crisis Budgeting 101." Her story captures some of the practical advice she gathered in conference sessions and hallway conversations with CSBA members who were wrestling with funding shortfalls.

(By the way, one coping mechanism not covered in either Brydolf’s story or in our Winter issue’s "The Financial Facts of Life" is the California Society of CPAs’ financial literacy program for students. A reader wrote me after that magazine came out to recommend the volunteer effort that sends certified public accountants into classrooms to help teach wise money management. For more information, go to www.calcpa.org and click on “Community Outreach.”)
Glendale Unified School District board member (and CSBA vice president) Mary Boger has some fiscal advice of her own to offer as part of Kristi Garrett’s story, “Seeing the Forest and the Trees," which explains how teachers and governance teams can cultivate professional learning communities. PLCs are a promising approach to improving student achievement through structured—and relatively low-cost—collaboration among faculty and staff.
“The real investment was allowing our instructional leadership teams to be out of their classrooms, doing their job as a leadership team. And for that you have to be willing to find—beg, borrow or steal—the money to cover that expense,” Boger told Garrett. “But the results and the actual professional development that takes place are well worth it.”

Another approach, one that’s considerably more expensive but that could be a model for that happy day when schools have all the funding they really need, is being explored in the San Diego Unified School District, as Scott LaFee reports in “Taking the i21 Initiative."

San Diego’s i21 Initiative is an ambitious five-year plan to equip 7,000 classrooms with 21st century tools—interactive whiteboards, computers for students and teachers, and more.

The $385 million price tag is financed through a voterapproved 2008 capital improvements bond totaling $2.1 billion—an eye-popping amount in these fiscal hard times, but evidence of voters’ continued willingness to invest in education. Rest assured, though, San Diego shares your budget pain. Despite having dedicated funding for i21, LaFee reports the district has had to cut more than $145 million from expenses that can’t be covered by the bond.

It’s enough to make anyone want to just go back to sleep for six more weeks. But that’s not an option for school board members, or TV weathercasters, or pretty much anybody except groundhogs. If you’re looking for the silver lining on the shadows that darken our state today, just remember: Bill Murray’s character doesn’t just survive a car wreck, get blown up, stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted and burned; he also learns to play piano, do ice sculpture, make friends and save lives—and when Feb. 3 finally rolls around, he winds up with Andie MacDowell’s character. Hope really does spring eternal.

One last note: Spring being a time for beginnings, we’re introducing some subtle design changes and a new feature in this issue: The Last Word, by CSBA President Frank Pugh.

Thanks for reading! 

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.