Vantage Point: We are California, and we demand to be heard!
By:
CSBA President Martha Fluor
Published: June 1, 2011
In preparing for last month’s Delegate Assembly and Legislative Action Conference, I sought inspiration from my colleagues who served as CSBA president in previous years and what they spoke about at the annual May meetings. You know what I found? Every year since at least 2005, a majority of our time in Delegate Assembly and Legislative Action has been spent fighting to protect our precious resources.
2005: We focused on protecting Proposition 98. Kerry Clegg was president, and there was “a special urgency because Gov. [Arnold] Schwarzenegger has proposed a budget that fails to honor the agreement he made last year with the Education Coalition.”
2006: “This school year has been the most difficult year I can remember with regard to school finance, and I have been involved in public education for more than 30 years,” President Luan Rivera said.
2007: President Kathy Kinley and our partners in the Education Coalition urged Gov. Schwarzenegger “to ignore recommendations by state Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill that the state reduce allocations for public education because, in her view, the governor’s preliminary K-12 budget exceeds minimum Proposition 98 guarantees.”
2008: President Paul Chatman delivered more than 320 resolutions from school boards around the state opposing the cuts in school funding. We marched into the state Capitol carrying placards pleading SOS—“Save our Schools.”
2009: President Paula S. Campbell and others continued to call upon the governor and state lawmakers to honor the continued public support for school funding. “Time and again, voters have said that education should be protected from cuts and that we should invest in our students and our state’s future,” Campbell said.
2010: On May 20, President Frank Pugh and others threw down the gauntlet and sued the state. Pugh said the historic Robles-Wong litigation asked the courts to declare the current school finance structure “unsound, unstable, insufficient, and unconstitutional.”
This sorry tradition continues today, with the declaration by education leaders that we are now in a state of emergency. Well my friends, I am mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!
I am tired of spending my time at my board meetings prioritizing which programs should be spared and which should be eliminated or reduced. I am tired of going into closed sessions with lawyers to discuss layoff protocols, furlough days and class size increases.
I am tired of attending our Teacher of the Year celebrations and then issuing pink slips the very next day to the very same teachers. I am tired of patting ourselves on the back when we manage to stave off another year of school closures.
This has got to stop. We cannot continue to accept that doing more with less is OK. We cannot provide a world-class education with third world funding.
We school board members are the single largest group of elected officials in the state—5,000 strong. We come from all walks of life. We are teachers, parents, administrators, classroom aides, firefighters, police officers, business owners, lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants and sales clerks. We are California, and we must demand to be heard!