My Goals as a Board Member

By Katherine "Kate" Runyon

My goals for the coming year and ideas for reaching those goals.

As a school board member I would have three main goals: fiscal discipline, improved student performance, and recruiting and retaining the best personnel possible.

We have had some rough times financially, but we live in a great community, when the facts were explained the community responded. As chair of the Dollar -A- Day campaign I started a program that raised a million dollars for our schools. Then I worked with other community members to pass a parcel tax that brought back not just the things saved by Dollar- A- Day but may others too. Now that the funding picture is better we have to be careful not to overspend.

We have two schools Marylin and Portola that have large numbers of students in poverty. The scores at these schools have been disappointing. We need to better. I would support smaller classes at these sites. I would also support additional teacher training days for these sights.

The student achievement gap is easy to spot at the low performing schools. I agree with Bill Dunlop when he talks about the subtle achievement gap, students doing well but not achieving their full potential. We must do all we can to inspire those students to do even better with programs such as Gate, Math Counts, Family Science Nights and Science Fairs.

Finally, we still get funding below our neighboring districts. But I think that it is imperative to pay competitive wages to attract and retain the best teachers. That means we have to give up something that our neighbors have. We need to have a thoughtful discussion about what we will give up, to pay competitive wages. I think one possibility is school size, I would support a policy of elementary schools being larger, with vice principals, as a trade off for excellent teachers.