Imagine my delight at seeing a front-page-with-a-picture, feel-good story about TUSD in today’s Star: New TUSD outreach program gives biotech students leg up. It sounds like a great program: 240 students from Pueblo and Tucson High participating in a Biotech Pipeline.
Students will gather information on nearly two dozen local biotech businesses and conduct interviews to make career connections, learn what companies are looking for and how that connects with what they are learning in the classroom.
It looks like TUSD is making a concerted effort to get positive news out about the district, and it appears to be working. That’s a good thing. If the district is making incremental progress, which I think it is, and the community is learning about it and lending its support, that’s good news all the way around.
With that in mind, here’s a grab bag of positive TUSD stories I’ve pulled together from the media and from Superintendent H.T. Sanchez’s Team Member Updates, which he sends out as emails and posts online. I have to admit, I don’t have first hand knowledge about all the items on the list, so I’m presenting them without any analysis. Others should feel free to chime in with comments.That’s something I don’t have to tell regular commenters, but I’m sure others of you in the Tucson community, and especially the TUSD community, have information the rest of us can benefit from.
• Reaching out to dropouts. In July, more than 100 people knocked on doors of students who have dropped out of school. The preliminary results look promising: “Many [of the students contacted] have returned, including 43 out of 50 students who were seniors last year, but who did not have enough credits to graduate.”
• TUSD Strategic Plan completed. TUSD has put together a lengthy, ambitious five year strategic plan which was approved by the board. The fact that the process was public and that a wide variety of community members were involved makes it more likely the district will feel compelled to stick with it and show positive results.
• Enrollment has stabilized. It doesn’t sound like a good thing to say that TUSD enrollment is down about 200 students this school year until you compare it to a 1,500 student loss the previous year. If the numbers hold, it gives hope that the district will stop losing students and maybe even build up its numbers in coming years.
• Bilingual programs are expanding. A program which has shown success both in educating students and making them fluent in English and Spanish is being introduced in more kindergarten classrooms this year, following the model of Davis Bilingual Magnet School.
• Closed sites are being utilized. The district has a number of empty buildings on its hands as a result of two rounds of school closures. Two schools were reopened as early learning centers. The popular Dodge Magnet Middle School is scheduled to move to the former Townsend campus which will make room for over 200 more students. The former Menlo Park Elementary school is being looked into as a site for a community center, the home of Prescott College or both. One school has been sold and a deal is pending for another. Controversy surrounds some of these moves, but the district is clearly working to put its empty buildings to good use.
Lists like this never give the proper praise to all the teachers in their classrooms, where the rubber meets the road, who are laboring, often under difficult conditions, to love, respect and educate the city’s children. Their stories, their small daily triumphs and tribulations too often go unnoticed and unmentioned, so I’m noticing and mentioning them here.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2014.
The TUSD bag is much more mixed than this version of Ed Shorts acknowledges. Most of the items featured in this column are in the “we want to do this,” or the “we will do this” category. The entire strategic plan falls into those two categories. About the only real accomplishment here is losing “only” a couple of hundred students to other districts or charter schools.
We have seen the superintendent oppose the idea of the TUSD Governing Board hiring an independent auditor that would report directly to the Board rather than the administration. After all, why would we want the elected public representatives to really know how TUSD’s money is being spent? What a silly concept!
One other thing TUSD has managed to accomplish is to upset Judge Bury enough that he has ordered TUSD to pay for attorneys to represent the plaintiffs in the seemingly never-ending desegregation legal hassle. Even kindergartens know not to get on the bad side of a federal judge by ignoring what he…or the Special Master he appointed…has recommmended.
TUSD also managed to hire Augie Romero, best known the creator of the now defunct MAS program, as the principal of one of its high schools. This was done despite the fact that Dr. Romero has zero experience in running even a tiny school, let alone a huge TUSD high school. But he does have lots of experience in using made up statistics…as in the lie that 98+% of students in the MAS program graduated high school. (Later debunked by TUSD’s own statistician.) That, I am sure, makes up for his total lack of qualifications for his current highly paid position.
Marty, get your facts straight. TUSD is obligated to pay for the plaintiffs’ attorneys, period. Bury did not order TUSD to pay them because TUSD pissed him off. He merely determined the amount of the fees to which they are entitled and, by the way, agreed with TUSD that the plaintiffs’ requests were excessive. Most people would call that good stewardship of public funds.
As for attacking MAS, did you fall asleep three years ago and just now wake up?
Actually, the part about attorney’s fees may be confusing 2 issues. The Special Master has asked for his own legal advisor since TUSD in his view has been legalistic and contentious about carrying out its responsibilities. This would be a 3rd set of attorney fees and really ticked off the Brammer/TUSD team. Those of us who have been around for a long time know that TUSD has a history of ignoring internal or quasi-independent advice and going its own direction no matter what.
“It looks like TUSD is making a concerted effort to get positive news out about the district, and it appears to be working.”
Is that because Cara Rene left?
gcbl, you bring up an interesting point: “The Special Master has asked for his own legal advisor since TUSD in his view has been legalistic and contentious about carrying out its responsibilities. This would be a 3rd set of attorney fees and really ticked off the Brammer/TUSD team. Those of us who have been around for a long time know that TUSD has a history of ignoring internal or quasi-independent advice and going its own direction no matter what.”
This is an issue that the candidates for TUSD Governing Board should address at the upcoming St. Mark’s forum.
The issue is how the federal government goes about overriding the will of Arizona voters and governmental entities. We should all care about this. The original finding of a segregated school district gives the federal court the authority to override the governing board. But the question is how does the federal court wield that authority?
Our state statutes give the governing board authority and obligations over the education of our kids and we elect those who serve on the governing board. It is a grave matter when a federal court takes away statutory authority from our elected government. It’s not about the substance of each disagreement between the parties, but rather how the court goes about overriding the governing board.
In this case, whenever the special master, who is not a lawyer or a judge, but a desegregation expert, disagrees with TUSD and wants to override TUSD’s plan, the judge in the case has said that he will not allow TUSD to present its position and supporting evidence in a hearing before he decides whether to endorse the special master’s position. TUSD has appealed this decision to the 9th Circuit.
Governing board members have an obligation to defend the office to which we have elected them. TUSD is not taking a “contentious” position here. Every board member should support the right to have a hearing and decision by the federal court before the court decides to override the authority given to them by voters and the State.
What do the candidates think about this?
Thanks for the knowledgeable discussion of the legal issues around the deseg plan. Very complicated and confusing for us non-legal minds. Most journalists, and bloggers like me, aren’t very helpful on these issues.