Monthly Archives: June 2017

8 students have a brighter futures as Rotary Success Scholars – Daily Republic

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By Amy Maginnis-Honey

Giovanni Villa didn’t think college was an option.

He struggled with a learning disability and graduated from Armijo High School in 2016.

Enter the Police Activities League, its boxing coach Pete Padilla and director Heather Sanderson.

And, local Rotary clubs.

Villa now has the financial and emotional support to enroll at Solano Community College. He will meet with a counselor at the school soon and plot his future classes and career.

Source: 8 students have a brighter futures as Rotary Success Scholars

Foundation awards 6 scholarships from Fairfield High staff endowment – Daily Republic

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By Daily Republic Staff

The Solano Community Foundation has awarded $30,000 in scholarships through the Fairfield High School Staff Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Two $10,000 awards, paid out over four years, were given to Maria Rico Osornio, who is attending Solano Community College, and Calista Lum, who attends the University of California, Merced.

Also awarded were four, single-year $2,500 scholarships: Juan Sebastian Teodoro, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Lizeth Gutierrez, University of California, Davis; Isabel Hernandez, Solano College; and Adrian Rosas, California State University, Sacramento.

Source: Foundation awards 6 scholarships from Fairfield High staff endowment

Bond committee will discuss possible future Measure S projects over summer – Benicia Herald

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By Nick Sestanovich

Benicia Unified School District trustees heard an update on Measure S projects completed to date and potential projects for the future at Thursday’s school board meeting. The presentation was delivered by Roxanne Egan, the Measure S bond director.

Measure S was a ballot initiative approved by Benicia voters in 2014 to provide $49.6 million in bond funding for projects for the district’s seven schools. The bond funds were initially going to be issued in three series: Series A, B and C. Due to low interest, Series B and C were consolidated into one bond issuance. Series A projects were announced in 2014, and 11 have been completed so far: technology infrastructure upgrades at all the schools, phone system upgrades at all the schools, renovated playgrounds at all the elementary schools, fixing the roofs at Benicia Middle School and Mary Farmar Elementary, fixing the softball field bleachers at Benicia High School, repainting the exterior at Benicia High, installing new camera security systems at all the schools, upgrading the fire alarm system at Benicia Middle, upgrading the IT server and replacing the clocks, bells and PA systems.

Two projects are currently in construction at Benicia High: a renovation of the George Drolette Stadium and fire alarms. The former is expected to be completed over the summer while the latter is estimated to be completed by October, Egan said.

Source: Bond committee will discuss possible future Measure S projects over summer

Summer camp for Fairfield-Suisun students out of this world – Daily Republic

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By Ryan McCarthy

Ayden Davanzo, a 13-year-old student at Grange Middle School who has seen the movies “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” will get closer to outer space as one of 40 students who’ll visit Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and see the control center where rockets are launched.

Davanzo wants to work one day as an engineer for NASA.

“I want to create the rockets to send man to another solar system,” he said Monday.

James Frische, 12, of Suisun Valley Elementary, said he’s also looking forward to Vandenberg in the Fairfield-Suisun School District STEM Camp for science, technology, engineering and math.

Source: Summer camp for Fairfield-Suisun students out of this world

Trustees get request to dedicate bench at Armijo High to honor student – Daily Republic

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By Ryan McCarthy

A request to dedicate a bench in front of the Armijo High School Library in honor of Andrew Lucas, a student who died in a 2015 car crash along Waterman Boulevard, goes before Fairfield-Suisun School District trustees when they meet Thursday.

Lucas’s friends created the club called Andrew’s Bookshelf that sends students to elementary schools to read to students. The club wants to place a bench in front of the library – Lucas’s favorite place on campus – to honor their friend, the request states.

“He was an exceptional student who participated in band and athletics at Armijo High School. He would have graduated June 2017,” wrote student Alex Peppard.

Source: Trustees get request to dedicate bench at Armijo High to honor student

School board reinstates previous graduation requirements – Benicia Herald

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By Nick Sestanovich

After more than a month of hearing people’s concerns, the Governing Board of the Benicia Unified School District voted for Benicia High School to revert back to its previous graduation requirements at Thursday’s meeting.

On Jan. 14, the board held a study session to discuss proposed new graduation requirements for Benicia High and went into further detail at its regular March 16 meeting. The proposed requirements— which would go into effect starting with the class of 2022— aimed to increase college readiness for all students and were modeled after the UC system’s A-G requirements. These conditions included requiring an extra year of science, an extra year of math, two years of the same world language, one year of a visual or performing art and one year of a new ninth-grade course titled “Get Focused.” The requirements were unanimously approved as part of the consent calendar at the board’s April 6 meeting.

Source: School board reinstates previous graduation requirements

Torlakson visits Mexico to boost cooperation with educators – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

State schools chief Tom Torlakson on Thursday met with the top-ranking education official in Mexico to promote closer ties and friendship between California and America’s southern border neighbor, to expand teacher exchange programs, and to help serve California students if their parents are deported to Mexico.

He conferred with Mexico’s Secretary of Education Aurelio Nuño Mayer as well as other government officials and discussed ways California could work more closely with Mexico, Robert Oakes, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, wrote in a press release.

“The national political atmosphere at this time makes it especially important to reiterate the bonds of friendship between California and Mexico,” Torlakson, a former high school science teacher and coach, said in the prepared statement.

As State Superintendent of Public Instruction, he leads the nation’s largest public education system, with more than 6.2 million students at 10,000 schools in some 1,000 school districts. About 54 percent of California students are Latino, and nearly 1.4 million are English learners.

 

Source: Torlakson visits Mexico to boost cooperation with educators

Revised Vacaville Unified grading system sets off lengthy debate at board meeting – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

On a night when Vacaville Unified leaders faced a full agenda — the 2017-18 budget and its accompanying LCAP and other LCAPs — the real showstopper was a report on revised district regulations about grading and ways to assess student achievement, a still-in-the-works system one trustee called “huge” in its impact.

At issue during Thursday’s meeting were revisions to administrative regulation 5121, changes to which have been the subject of board, district staff and classroom teacher discussion and debate for well more than a year.

Source: Revised Vacaville Unified grading system sets off lengthy debate at board meeting

Travis school district trustees hear details of Facilities Master Plan – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

A formal Facilities Master Plan for Travis Unified will be on the desks of the five-member governing board shortly after the new academic year begins in August at the earliest but possibly in September.

In the works for more than two years, it will lay out the “capacity needs” for the Fairfield district for many years to come, Superintendent Pam Conklin noted Tuesday during a governing board meeting.

Speaking in the Travis Education Center, she said construction work, which will be gradual, “needs to begin next year.”

Her comments came after an hourlong presentation by two employees of Capitol PFG, a Sacramento-based financial advisory firm that provides consulting services exclusively to public agencies. And it came before the board voted unanimously to approve more than $13 million in construction contracts related to the ongoing Scandia Elementary School modernization project on Travis Air Force Base.

 

Source: Travis school district trustees hear details of Facilities Master Plan

Travis school district leaders hire two from within and a new CBO – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

Travis Unified leaders have approved three new appointments to the district management team, it has been announced.

Hired from within were Clay McAllester, as director of human resources, and Saundra Rushford, incoming Center Elementary principal, replacing McAllester in that post.

McAllester’s appointment comes four months after his serving as interim human resources director. He has been a district employee for three of his 30 years as an educator, serving in a variety of jobs, from teacher to vice principal to principal, before his latest post.

Rushford has held the interim principal position at Center Elementary, at 3101 Markeley Lane, since February.

 

Source: Travis school district leaders hire two from within and a new CBO

Vacaville Unified school board trustees put final touches on 2017-18 budget – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

Vacaville Unified leaders late last week put finishing touches on the final 2017-18 school district budget some Local Control Accountability Plans, which will be approved, perhaps with some minor changes, at the governing board’s June 29 meeting.

In California, annual school district budgets and their accompanying LCAPs, a key part of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula, must be submitted to respective county offices of education on or before June 30.

Although they detail spending for all student programs, LCAPs typically lay out in detail funding for programs that help English learners, foster youth and low-income students in efforts to close the “achievement gap,” the difference in standardized test scores between whites and ethnic minorities.

Source: Vacaville Unified school board trustees put final touches on 2017-18 budget

Budget, suicide-prevention policy on Kairos agenda – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

Kairos Public School Vacaville Academy leaders, when they meet Monday in Vacaville, are expected to approve the 2017-18 annual budget and accompanying Local Control Accountability Plan, to meet a June 30 deadline mandated by the Solano County Office of Education.

The board of directors, led by Executive Director Jared Austin, also is expected to approve a board policy and administrative regulation concerning suicide prevention, as required by Assembly Bill 2246, enacted last year. Authored by Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, the bill requires school districts to adopt formal suicide-prevention, intervention and follow-up plans for all middle and high school students, including provisions that specifically address the needs of “high-risk groups.”

Source: Budget, suicide-prevention policy on Kairos agenda

Technology Doesn’t Drive Blended Learning Success … or Does It? – Education Next

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By Thomas Arnett

Blended-learning proponents can point to a growing number of schools that consistently achieve extraordinary student learning results. But is technology the key to their success?

Recently, I visited five blended-learning schools in Las Vegas and the San Jose area that are earning accolades for serving low-income and minority students and achieving strong student learning outcomes: Dr. Owen C. Roundy Elementary, Vegas Verdes Elementary, and Elaine Wynn Elementary, three franchise schools in Las Vegas’s Clark County School District, and Hollister Prep and Gilroy Prep, two charter elementary schools operated by Navigator Schools in the San Jose area. All five schools use some variation of the Station Rotation or Lab Rotation blended-learning models for core instruction in math and English language arts. But even though blended learning is a deliberate part of their instructional approaches, it didn’t seem to be the differentiating factor driving their success.

When I observed their classrooms and interviewed many of their teachers and administrators, the thing that stood out as the likely key contributor to student learning was high-quality teaching practices, inspired and supported by effective school leadership. This should come as no surprise given that education research consistently shows that the quality of a school’s teachers has a bigger impact on student achievement than any other school-level factor.

Source: Technology Doesn’t Drive Blended Learning Success … or Does It? – Education Next : Education Next

California middle class families may still get scholarship help | EdSource

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By Larry Gordon

The California Legislature’s final actions this year on higher education funding will please some middle-income families but may lead to conflicts with Gov. Jerry Brown.

The embattled Middle Class Scholarship program that Brown sought to end was kept alive in the conference committee budget legislation that both houses are expected to approve this week. Saying it was too expensive and not efficient, Brown wanted to phase out the program that provided aid for about 50,000 middle class students at California’s two public university systems this year. But parents around the state whose income was not low enough to qualify for Cal Grants lobbied the Legislature for the Middle Class aid to continue.

Source: California middle class families may still get scholarship help | EdSource

Interviews for Buckingham principal job underway – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

Job interviews for the principal opening at Buckingham Charter Magnet High School are being held this week in the wake of the resignation of Mike Boles, a Vacaville Unified official has confirmed.

Boles, who worked at the Bella Vista Road campus for the past two years, announced in an email sent to staff just hours after the school’s graduation ceremony Friday morning that he would “be moving to another position within the school district.”

Jennifer Leonard, the district’s public information officer, was unsure where Boles, also a former head football coach at Wood High, would be assigned because it is a decision that, ultimately, will be determined by the district’s governing board.

The job opening was posted on the district’s website, www.vacavilleusd.org, May 18 and it closed May 31.

 

Source: Interviews for Buckingham principal job underway

Gov. Brown agrees not to hold back money from California schools next year | EdSource

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By John Fensterwald

California school districts won’t have to wait an extra year to get nearly $1 billion in one-time funding, as Gov. Jerry Brown proposed last month. And after-school and summer program providers will see their first funding increase in more than a decade, under the terms of the 2017-18 state budget that legislative leaders and the Brown administration negotiated last week.

The Legislature must pass the proposed $126 billion state budget by Thursday to meet a constitutional deadline. Schools and community colleges will get a sizable share of the funding increase. Funding under Proposition 98, the formula that determines K-12 and community colleges’ share of state revenue, will rise $3.1 billion – 4.4 percent – to $74.5 billion. School districts’ share of the increase will be $2.8 billion.

Source: Gov. Brown agrees not to hold back money from California schools next year | EdSource

School board to vote again on graduation requirements – Benicia Herald

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By Nick Sestanovich

The Governing Board of the Benicia Unified School District will be holding another vote on the graduation requirements for Benicia High School at Thursday’s meeting before it embarks on its summer recess. Staff is recommending the board revert back to its previous graduation requirements in an effort to hold further discussions with the community.

On Jan. 14, the board held a study session to discuss proposed new graduation requirements for Benicia High and went into further detail at its regular March 16 meeting. The proposed requirements— which would go into effect starting with the class of 2022— aimed to increase college readiness for all students and were modeled after the UC system’s A-G requirements. These conditions included requiring an extra year of science, an extra year of math, two years of the same world language, one year of a visual or performing art and one year of a new 9th grade course titled “Get Focused.” The requirements were unanimously approved as part of the consent calendar at the board’s April 6 meeting.

Source: School board to vote again on graduation requirements

Several public hearings, manager contracts, developer fees on TUSD agenda – The Reporter

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By Richard Bammer

Several public hearings, senior manager employment contracts, and a proposed hike in developer fees are on the agenda when Travis Unified leaders meet tonight in Fairfield.

The first public hearing concerns the district’s school facilities needs analysis and a resolution, set for a vote later in the meeting, on Level 2 developer fees.

Likely to pass muster among the five-member governing board, the resolution calls for a hike in developer fees from $5.42 to $5.49 per square foot for new housing, with the exception of any residential development subject to mitigation agreement or a Mello-Roos Community Facilities District (CFD) special tax.

Trustees also will hear any public comments about the district’s Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP, the document that guides virtually all of a school district’s spending under Gov. Jerry Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula.

 

Source: Several public hearings, manager contracts, developer fees on TUSD agenda

Closed session set for end-of-year evaluation of Fairfield-Suisun schools chief – Daily Republic

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By Ryan McCarthy

Trustees will meet Tuesday in a closed-door session for the annual end-of-school-year evaluation of Kris Corey, superintendent of the Fairfield-Suisun School District.

Raising Corey’s salary to $241,088 won trustee approval last July after a motion for a higher raise to $245,820 was not seconded.

“We started her out low when we hired her,” then-Trustee Kathy Marianno had said in seeking the higher raise.

Other trustees praised Corey but voted for the $241,088 raise that reflected a 1 percent increase based on her evaluation for the 2015-16 school year and a 2 percent salary increase granted other employees in April.

Source: Closed session set for end-of-year evaluation of Fairfield-Suisun schools chief

Benicia High’s special education department to undergo changes – Benicia Herald

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By Nick Sestanovich

Benicia High School is in the process of changing its special education model to allow students with disabilities to have greater access to general education courses, according to a letter sent out by Dr. Carolyn Patton, the director of special services for the Benicia Unified School District.Patton said a number of things influenced the district’s decision to move away from Benicia High’s current model, including the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District which stipulated that Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) should give students higher standards in education. Another was the California Department of Education, which requires districts to increase the percentage of students who spend 80 percent of their day in the general education environment.

Patton said the district had also been looking into laws provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990.“There’s always been an emphasis for kids to be in the general ed environment with correct support,” she said in an interview with the Herald. “Districts are supposed to start with that premise that if a student can be educated in general ed with support from the special education department, then that’s where they’re supposed to be.”

Source: Benicia High’s special education department to undergo changes