School board ponders mission, lauds Flowery

Following a lengthy closed session Tuesday afternoon, the trustees of the Sonoma Valley Unified School District opened their public meeting that evening with student recognitions. Honored were Christina Uzzo and John Murphy from Adele Harrison Middle School and William De Haro and Jocelyn Toscano from Flowery Elementary School. The students, with siblings and proud parents at their side, received public commendations as Students of the Year and a handshake and certificate from Board President Dan Gustafson.
The first two agenda items consumed the bulk of the meeting time. Trustee Gary De Smet made a presentation in support of his proposal to change the district’s mission statement to read “Every student possible at grade level.” Showing the flat performance over the last 4-5 years of student achievement scores, which have been kept on the same basis since 2002, De Smet drove home the point that less than half of Sonoma’s students can do the school work appropriate for their own grade level. He described how, in his view, adopting a “clear, concise and measurable” mission statement would help the district as it begins to plan for a revision next year to its strategic plan.
The other trustees were not impressed, finding fault particularly with the limitation of using test scores as the sole measure of student achievement. Three members of the public spoke in comment on this issue, two of them noting the need for accountability in teacher performance, too.
The board also heard a lengthy report on the status of the dual-immersion program in operation at Flowery and Adele, which received last year an award from the county for innovation in education. With graduates from that program now in high school, there is an opportunity to look at the relative performance of those students, and the trustees were presented a succession of data-heavy graphs. The speakers included Karla Conroy and Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, principals at Adele and Flowery, respectively, who reported on student and parental impressions of the program, as well.
The trustees, especially Gustafson, who is elected from the Flowery attendance area and whose children participate in the program, spoke highly of its value for students, noting that this program, in a public school setting, rivaled what would otherwise be available only in a private school.
In other business, the board directed assistant superintendent Justin Frese to close the high school tennis courts to public use, following the recent incident of vandalism, until improved security measures can be implemented.