Editor's note: Class acts, serendipity and the rest of the story 

Hold this magazine to the light at any angle you choose. Wear the most powerful corrective lenses or 3-D glasses you can find. Bombard it with radiation, even take it through airport security—go on, I dare you! Subject it to mass spectrometry or electron microscopes or psychotropic vision enhancement.

No matter how you look at it, it’s impossible to see how much hard work and team effort went into these pages. Much of that effort goes into the features, and this issue of California Schools is no exception. From critical thinking to cash-strapped summer schools to race, the topics our writers took up demanded forethought and more thought, research and interviews, and writing and writing and rewriting. And that’s just for the words; the illustrations and page design are a whole other story, one I’ll save for another time.

It’s no different for our departments: Scott P. Plotkin makes it look easy, but he works hard to bring a storyteller’s gifts to every Executive Director’s Note he writes. Guest columnists voluntarily undergo the indignities of editing just to help us keep our picture of public education in perspective. (They’re taking this summer off; if you’d like to contribute to a future issue, drop me a line at btaylor@csba.org.) I add my two cents in Editor’s Notes like this one.

Class Acts round out our departments. Just a page long, they usually showcase a local education program that earned one of CSBA’s Golden Bell Awards. With some five dozen awarded each year, it’s impossible to give all of them the attention they deserve; we’d need five issues a year devoted entirely to Golden Bell winners to give each equal treatment.

Marsha Boutelle’s write-up of a character development program at Golden Valley Unified School District (“ ‘Character counts!’ at this Madera County school,” page 9) is one of those Class Acts. Golden Valley uses the popular and effective program developed by the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute to enhance its students’ development—and the district won a Golden Bell in the bargain.

Kristi Garrett looked beyond the Golden Bells for her Class Act (“Contra Costa connects students with the Ivy League,” page 8). The story of West Contra Costa Unified School District’s Ivy League Connection, how it grew and the way we learned about it, is nearly as round-about and interwoven as, well, an ivy vine, and teasing it all out took a reporter’s patient digging—even after the idea arrived “over the transom,” as they used to say back in the un-air-conditioned days when editors had transoms above their doors, and dared to keep them open overnight.

Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District board member Anne White brought the Ivy League Connection to our attention, even though it’s not in her district.

“As a rising senior in high school, I attended an eight-week summer science program at Purdue University, and for me it was a life changing-experience,” White told Editor in Chief Susan Swigart in an e-mail extolling the West Contra Costa USD program, which gives selected college-bound students similar horizon-broadening experiences back East.

White would return to Purdue (a fine land-grant university in Indiana), for her master’s, but she earned her B.A. from Brown University, a member of the Ivy League athletic conference that consists of prestigious Northeastern universities, most established in colonial days. Among many other things, her undergraduate degree got her an invitation from West Contra Costa USD board member Charles Ramsey to speak at a send-off dinner for several West Contra Costa students headed to Brown, thanks in part to the Ivy League Connection that Ramsey and fellow West Contra Costa board member Madeline Kronenberg had developed.

Neither Ramsey nor Kronenberg are alumnae of Ivy League schools, and they have nothing against California’s public university system—Ramsey’s undergraduate studies were at CSU Pomona and UCLA, while Kronenberg’s peripatetic schooling stretched from New York through Ohio to California, capped with a teaching credential in adult education from UC Berkeley.

“The ‘Ivy Leaguer’ among us is my husband—Hale Kronenberg. He graduated from Dartmouth College and went on to law school at Columbia,” Madeline Kronenberg wrote in response to Garrett’s questions about the Ivy League Connection. But as this tangled tale continues, the Ivy League Connection’s roots reach beyond the Kronenbergs and Ramsey.

“Our interest came about serendipitously,” Kronenberg wrote. Ramsey was helping a West Contra Costa student who was attending Dartmouth and had learned of that Ivy League school’s Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth program for interested high schoolers.”

“That student, Peter Chau, discovered the SEAD program and wanted to ‘give back,’ so he went and advocated … to include a West Coast school in their program. It turned out that we needed the signature of an alum, and so my husband became the signator.”

One thing led to another and the program has flourished. It’s White’s original e-mail that brings the story up to date.

“I write at this time because the WCCUSD Board recently voted to continue district support of the Ivy League Connection,” White wrote. “This is no longer Charles and Madeline's project but is officially endorsed by the board. The district has found a way to focus efforts to enlarge the aspirations of some of their most capable students.”

Local projects like these, when dedicated individuals work together to further a vision of what their schools and their students can be, are an inspiration. These stories are occurring out there all the time—including in your community, no doubt.

They often go unheralded except, perhaps, in local papers, such as the news that crossed my desk recently about Moorpark Unified School District’s winning the U.S. Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row (thanks for sharing, former CSBA President David Pollock). There’s also Mira Loma High School, in the San Juan Unified School District near Sacramento, which won the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Science Bowl—
as Fremont Unified School District’s William Hopkins Junior High School did in its division.

As with the Golden Bells, we don’t have room to acknowledge all the winning students, schools, districts and county offices of education out there, but we tip our hats to all of them—and all of you who help make it happen.

Thanks for all your hard work—and thanks for reading!