School board continues hard work at retreat

Nineteen times the local school board has met since the beginning of the year, according to board chair Dan Gustafson, making this a particularly hard-working group of five trustees, and their retreat early Saturday morning continued that pattern.

Before commencing a closed session for staff performance evaluations, they conducted an open meeting from 7 to 9:30 a.m., focusing mostly on the policy paper by author Jim Collins, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” based on his 2001 bestseller, “Good to Great.” Pam Martens, Superintendent of the Sonoma Valley Unified School District, is using this book as a manual for helping her leadership team of school principals and district office staff to focus on improving district operations, and it was a summer reading assignment for the trustees, as well.

Trustee Cam Hawing was absent, but the other four trustees dove deeply into Gustafson’s challenging question, “How do we define ‘great’ for our district?” Some of the answers were based on student achievement numbers, which had been updated since their last meeting with the recently released 2009 STAR testing results from last spring.

Those results continue to show that only about half of the Sonoma Valley students can perform grade-level work. And that number is considerably lower for “SED” students – those from families designated as economically disadvantaged. According to the state’s data, only about one in three of those students can read, write, and reason on material appropriate to their grade level.

While the concern of trustee Nicole Abate-Ducarroz was acknowledged that standardized testing does not reflect the growth of the whole child, there was also recognition that, in the words of trustee Helen Marsh, “mucking around with the numbers does reflect some aspect of what goes on in our classrooms.” Student achievement is scheduled for discussion in more detail at the board’s study session on September 22.

Among the points raised during the discussion about the Collins book was the need to focus on output rather than input, that is, how are students performing, rather than how much money is spent. There was wide agreement, especially among the district staff present, that the pre-school program piloted last spring has great potential to improve student “output.” The curriculum requirements for meeting the “A-to-G” admission threshold for California State University campuses were also put forth by several of the participants as a good goal for an output test, making sure that all high school seniors have completed the appropriate courses in order to to continue their education beyond high school.

Trustee Gary DeSmet came prepared with four “big hairy audacious goals,” as Collins names them in his book, for the trustees to discuss: a “high-expectations academy” at the high school next year for SED students, two years of voluntary pre-school for all SED students, use of performance data by classroom in keeping with the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” stimulus program, and a commitment for all students to be working at grade level in English and math in every grade. Abate-Ducarroz echoed the sentiment that whatever the district does, it has to be committed to doing it well, so that Sonoma provides a “world-class education for a world-class community.”

The board will consider at its regular business meeting on Tuesday this week when to continue the discussions begun at Saturday’s retreat.