Elect Experience

     Experience is the best teacher.
     I have over twenty years of experience serving our schools and school district in various volunteer positions. Besides working on the campus improvement teams of three schools, I have also been part of the PTA and a volunteer at various school fund raisers and student activities.
     Over the past eight years, I have served on more than a dozen district level committees, including Strategic Planning (twice) and the ill-advised Focus School. Through my work, Deer Valley High School earned well deserved recognition for a 30-year program of environmental teaching as they were recognized as the first K-12 school in the state by the Valley Forward Association in 28-years of presenting environmental awards.
     And, I attended the first five DV University programs, designed to teach community members, staff and parents on how the school district works. I went more than eight years without missing a single board meeting. Everyone knows about Deer Valley Support Our Schools and the massive fund raising for our schools that I did.
     I have developed a plan to expand and improve career and technical education for our students. I am proud of my involvement in Deer Valley finally committing to graduating every student.
     At the state level, I have participated in the Arizona School Boards Association Law Conference every year since 2002. Through that activity, I have a grounded understanding in Arizona education law and open meeting requirements. In addition, I have testified before the state legislature about education issues. A copy of Title 15 (Arizona Education Law) sits on my desk for frequent reference.
     We have to make a choice for the future of our schools on November 2. Vote for experience. Vote for those who have been leading the fight for so many years. With your vote, we can have integrity, leadership and experience.

Respect for Our Old Schools

   I attended an old high school in Louisiana, graduating in 1965. Today, that high school is still used for specialized education in science, math, and technology. This, in a town of only 15,000 people. What I learned from attending that old school is the advantage to a community that respects its old schools.
   Deer Valley has been educating students since 1934, with New River Elementary School. As the North Valley grew, schools were added and a school district was created. Decades ago, high school students in the far north end of the district would ride the hay wagons into Glendale to go to high school. It was an innovative beginning to a transportation system that now drives students about 3 million miles a year.
   The district started with K-6 elementary schools and middle schools for seventh and eighth graders. Our first high school, Deer Valley High School, was built in 1980 and our district became a "unified" school district. We had phenomenal growth for more than 25 years and now have 38 schools and nearly 36,000 students. Our high schools graduated nearly 2,500 students in May.
   For years, I fought with administration and the board in support of our older schools, mostly located in the southern part of our district. Unabated, administrators, teachers and staff transferred to the many new schools built in the growing northern portion of our district and academic and athletic advantages transferred to those schools. Most of the money for buildings went into the new schools.
   In 2008, we persuaded the board to dedicate effort to modernizing our older schools and the $148 million bond issue was placed on the ballot. With voter approval, money is now available for making our older schools better. Major work has been completed at Park Meadows and Deer Valley High School has major renovations in process. Even Mountain Ridge High School is having the old portable buildings removed and replaced with brick and mortar structures. It's a start to renewing our schools.
   But, the work is not over. Our board must balance budget issues with respect for our older schools. The most recent budget reductions disproportionately affected our K-6 (mostly older schools) schools.
   If elected to the board, I will commit my energies to protecting our old schools. Our family of communities deserves that respect for their schools.

DV Support Our Schools

    

     I chaired six different Deer Valley Unified School District revenue elections, including 2008, 2005, and 2004. In all, we raised about $450,000,000 for Deer Valley.

     The three elections in 2004 I was asked to run at the last possible minute, less than thirty days before election day and early voting had already begun. We created and gained brand recognition for Deer Valley Support Our Schools (DV SOS). We were to become the recognized authority on school district elections and voters learned they could trust DV SOS.

     The following year, Deer Valley Support Our Schools was able to solicit support for a bond election and an override election. Both the bond and override passed easily, the first time DVUSD had ever approved a capital override.

     In 2008, we took on the biggest challenge to have faced district voters: approve $148 million bond election. We won by an almost 2:1 margin. And, the Mountain Ridge Band and the Deer Valley Educational Foundation won, too, as DV SOS donated its excess funds to the two charities.

     In March 2010, politics began to seep into what had been a "non-political" political action committee. As a result, DV SOS did not run the campaign for the override election for the first time in six years. The result: for the first time since we started the Budget Override program twenty years ago, voters did not approve its continuation and expansion.

     Today, I can't run the November election effort because of my illness. Running these campaigns is very time consuming, much more so than running for office. They require terrific energy levels. I don't have it. Not anymore. The doctors are changing my medical regimen and I'm not sure when my energy levels will return.

     It is time for another parent to step-up and create a political action committee to help motivate voters to approving the needs of our schools. Your school district needs you. Our students need you. Our teachers need you. Even our voters need you. Together, we can accomplish anything.

Promoting Changes is not for the Pusillanimous

     If you want change, you can't be timid. Authority has a way of leaning on you that forces you to question your own power. They usually do this by telling you that as the experts, they know better than you. In regards to education, the administration usually does know better. But, they don't know your child or your school like you do. And, they aren't always right.
     Outside of Deer Valley Support Our Schools, one of the most rewarding experiences I ever had with education was changing the cancellation of a program at Desert Sky Middle School. After twenty years of a successful woodshop elective course, the district cancelled the very popular program about five years ago.

     They were very "kind" about it, explaining that the teacher was retiring and there was no one qualified to continue the course. (That's district office speak for "don't bother me about my decisions.") Never mind that 500 students a year went through the program or that children had learned shop safety, how to draw a straight line and how to cut pieces of wood to create a useful item for the home. How often I was told, "Programs like that are teacher driven and when the teacher leaves the program goes away." We were expected to bow our heads and walk dutifully away.
     But, a dear friend of mine wasn't about to give up on saving woodshop. And, neither was I. We peppered the board with e-mails and phone calls, we spoke at board meetings, and we went to board study sessions to express our outrage at the reduction.
     For, you see, in our investigation of the cancelled class, we found three qualified applicants had applied for the job. It wasn't being cancelled because of the loss of the teacher. It was being cancelled because of a decision up on 15th Avenue. The highest qualified candidate came to a board meeting with us and was publicly identified in front of God and everyone. The person making the decision to cancel woodshop no longer had a place to hide.
     Today, when I meet students from Desert Sky Middle School, I always ask them about woodshop. They love it. For me, that is the best thanks I could get for the summer of work put into saving the school from a bad decision. And, I have to thank Christy Agosta, Ron Bayer, and the three former board members for their support in restoring a valuable class.

Garden of Stone

    

     Memorial Day is a day of remembrance. I remember.
     I never go to Washington, D.C. that I don't stop by Arlington National Cemetery and the tombs of the unknown soldiers. I remember.
     I come from a military family. My father was a retired Army colonel. My grandfather was a retired rear admiral. My family has fought in every war ever waged by America. My mother used to tell me that I couldn't throw a stone at Arlington and not land close to a relative's grave site. I remember.
     However, when I am at our National Cemetery, the people I think about most are not there. They are not home, either. We don't know where they are because they are missing in action. But, they are not forgotten, because we remember.

     If elected to the Board, I will work with our other Board members to honor our Missing in Action (MIA) by approving the installation of the official MIA flag on the empty flagpole at the District Office. We will send a message to our young men and women who choose military service, should they become missing while defending our country, that we will never forget them. At the same time, we will honor the memory of those already missing and extend our prayers for their families. The dedication ceremony of that flagpole to our MIAs will remind us that some have paid the highest price for our freedoms. We will remember.

     The military training classes at Deer Valley High School and Sandra Day O'Connor help build leaders. I would like to see other such programs on the campus of our other high schools.
     I deplore those who, by word and action, demean the work these students do. Sometimes, in our eagerness to demolish the reputations of our elected board members, some of us think it's "cute" to make fun of the honorable actions of our JROTC students, such as their sabre salute to open a board meeting. It's a military tradition and deserves our respect. Using it as a ridicule of others was shameful.
     We should encourage that training for our students. Leadership will build our country, our state, and our school district to new heights.
     This Memorial Day, for those who gave all, let us remember.

Highly Qualified Candidates are Good for Students

(Shelley Rosas, a parent in DVUSD, used Twitter to ask about my relationship to Valley Schools and my opinion of Tom Boone and Valley Schools. My response is below.)    

     While I can understand the advantages of throwing mud through innuendos, most people know that I am only a part-time worker for Valley Schools and am not directly involved in any request from the Office of Attorney General. I only work a few hours per week for a small salary.

     I have spent nearly 20 years building a reputation in Deer Valley on the basis of my commitment to the students and voters in our district. I am proud of the things I have accomplished, including removal of the previous superintendent, restoring wood shop to DSMS, helping to protect the de-annexation of part of our district, opening superintendent committees to the public, helping to insure God is not closed out of our schools, and raising more than $450 million for our schools. I even contracted for the brick on the wall at the Anthem library that reads, "God Bless Our Deer Valley Schools." I am proud of the long heritage I have built with DV Support Our Schools along with the numerous other services to our district, such as the weeks I invested in writing a nomination for DVHS which won the first-ever K-12 Environmental Award from the Valley Forward Association (photo above). The award is proudly displayed in the lobby of Deer Valley High School.
     Over those years, I have been a working member of more than a dozen important committees, including the Calendar, Strategic Planning, and Bond/Override committees. I have done volunteer photography for our schools for many years. I attend a multitude of school events all over the district.
     As to Valley Schools, I have the highest respect for the irrefutable savings they bring to the member school districts. I have never talked to a single school district that was not aware of the money they saved by being part of VS. Those savings directly help our teachers and, thus, have a direct affect on our students' classrooms. I have witnessed the careful process that VS uses to protect member investments and assure insurance coverage for our school employees at significant savings to the worker and the district. I have seen how hard the Valley Schools administrators work in each area to help school districts protect their insured properties and workers.
     As to Tom Boone, I have known him since 2001. I know he committed his life to public service, first as a district administrator during some very difficult times in DVUSD and virtually helped keep the district together. Few people know how perilous those times in the 1990s really were for DV. After he retired, Tom became a legislator for the people in LD-4 where his peers elected him to be the House Majority Leader. Later, he wanted to do more to help the school district and became a board member. I have respected Tom Boone and his accomplishments with Deer Valley from the day I met him. His service in the Legislature was admirable. I don't think the issues surrounding his management of VSMG even hint any personal gain for him, while his efforts have benefited over twenty state school districts.
     Over the years, and long before I agreed to part-time employment with Valley Schools, I came to know Tom and his family well. That does not mean we always agree and have strongly debated many issues from opposite sides.
     The issues Shelley Rosas has raised are being reviewed and decided at levels way above my pay grade. If changes need to be made, I'm certain that Tom and his staff will make them. His growing organization has been good for our schools. Any required changes that may be made isn't going to change that.
     I already have a track record of speaking my own mind at pubic school meetings, sometimes to Tom Boone's consternation. But, he realizes that I have the best interests of our students in my heart and tolerates my critical remarks because of that. Most of the members of the board agree with each other on about 98% of everything that comes before the board. I expect that as a board member, I would be pretty close to fitting that mode.
     Many people know, due to my health, that I will not have another chance to serve our district. If you review my list of qualifications on this blog, you will notice that I have earned my claim to being highly qualified to run for the Governing Board. Some people don't like my assertive tactics, but they don't argue with the results. I hope to continue the trust with voters that I built over the past two decades helping our students, teachers and staff.

Losing Our Minds, Gifted Children Left Behind

    

     One of our gifted students just won the state finals of the Geography Bee. He is a student at Greenbrier Elementary, a school with several remarkable brains. But, that is true for most of our schools. According to experts, we have the right socio-economic climate to create a brain-trust of creative learners, at least at levels one through three. Of course, calling such students "gifted" creates its own problems.

     "In our egalitarian society, you have to be brave to describe your child as 'gifted' with its suggestion of elitism and status-chasing. Many people will tell you that all children are gifted, which is true, but not in the sense that the term is used in the field of education." - On Living by Learning

     The Deer Valley Unified School District claims to embrace "gifted education." We even have a gifted academy at Esperanza Elementary School. But, the embracing we give such learners is more like getting a hug from Vito Corleone. Look at the recent budget considerations for our gifted students.
     With the potential risk for deep budget cuts, some of the budget for gifted education was included in the various reduction plans forwarded to the Governing Board by the district administration. By the time the final budget proposals were presented for a vote of the board, gifted education had already been reduced by the superintendent. So, when taxpayers approved the increase in sales tax, the programs that might have been cut were salvaged. But, not gifted education.

     Why the cuts? Simple. It was a case of blame the students rather than the district. Seems that math scores for gifted students weren't any better than the scores for the normal classroom. I guess, it never entered the mind of the administration that maybe we had missed the mark on teaching math to our best students.

     We've lost something with that decision and we need to recover it. We don't want to lose our best minds.