To All MBUSD Employees,
I hope you all had a restful and safe spring break. We are finishing week four of distance learning here in MBUSD. On Wednesday night, we held our second Board meeting via Zoom. I’d like to review some of the major discussion points, as they deal with big questions for the remaining seven weeks of the school year.
EXTENDING THE DISTANCE LEARNING TIME FRAME
Prior to Wednesday’s meeting, we were slated to return to school on May 5. Recently, the County extended the
Safer at Home
order through May 15. At the meeting, every single Board member expressed the hope that somehow, some way, we might find a way to get our teachers and students back together on campus before the end of the school year. All of us know the odds are increasingly against that. But as John Darcy, one of our outstanding student representatives on the Board said, “I would much rather just keep hope for another two weeks. I want to go back, and I know we are waiting on a miracle, and I don’t think it’s going to hurt if we hear the news in two weeks any more than it would hurt hearing it today.”
Recently, Governor Newsom started talking about how we
might
resume school next year. Although specific details were not provided, he alluded to having limited numbers of students being on campus at one time (no gatherings of more than 50), and still maintaining some form of social distancing protocols. Both are almost impossible conditions for reopening schools in the near future. For now, the Board agrees that MBUSD will remain closed at least through May 15, and indefinitely after that date. I will update you all again after our May 6 meeting.
STUDENT GRADES
One of the biggest questions for schools, particularly for high schools and colleges, is grades. Assessing our students becomes much more difficult during this era of distance learning. Across the nation, there are issues of internet access, access to digital devices, and other personal, professional, and family pressures where stress might impede a student’s ability to succeed. We are not immune to these challenges in our community.
Our teachers have been asked to change almost every aspect of how they teach practically overnight. While many have adapted extraordinarily quickly, others are progressing steadily. I have reminded parents that our educators are real people who face the same challenges and issues that the other citizens of the world face. I am convinced all of our community members are working to the best of our abilities, but everyone has a unique set of personal circumstances that could be affecting how they learn or how they demonstrate what they are learning. All of this can make it difficult to assess students and assign grades in a way that is valid, equitable and fair.
With that said, the Board is planning to revise its grading policy for the duration of this distance learning time, which is at least for this semester/trimester. The Board will be looking at two main questions. First, how do we “hold students harmless” for grades issued during the challenges of this stay-at-home era? There are two ways that districts are ensuring students do not receive marks that unfairly penalize students for challenges they might be facing: (a) A requirement that grades may not drop below the point where they were on our last day of regular school, on March 13; and (b) No students will receive an F as a final grade for this grading period. Other districts have recently adopted this as part of their Board policy.
Second, are we going to keep a traditional A-F grading scale, or will we move to a Pass/Fail or Credit/No Credit system? Across the nation, elementary and middle schools are overwhelmingly moving to a Pass/Fail or Credit/No Credit system. High schools are debating this more (most colleges have said that Pass/Fail grades will not hurt students in the application process, but we have not heard from all of them and questions about the short and long term effects for students still don't have clear answers) and it is still a question we are considering.
We will be recommending a simplified report card for our elementary students based on input from stakeholders. At this point, I am looking for feedback on this issue from middle school and high school employees. I will be reviewing stakeholder survey results and will bring a recommendation to the Board for their consideration on May 6.
THE 2020-21 BUDGET
We received over 500 public comments at Wednesday’s meeting. I’ve never seen so many. Civic participation is certainly alive and well. Almost all of them were about staffing reductions for the 2020-21 school year. The Board and the Administration agree with the sentiments of nearly every email submitted. We have issued layoff notices to outstanding MBUSD employees who are making an incredibly positive impact on our students and families. It was powerful to hear the stories of how these educators have changed our students’ lives. However, as much as we agree with all of this, it does not mean that we are able to agree with the requests to rescind these layoffs. We made those hard decisions in March because of the
budget challenges
that I have been writing to you about for a while now. And from what we heard at the Board meeting, the economic repercussions of this stay-at-home era will make our budget problems significantly worse.
State tax revenue has declined because many people have lost their jobs, and purchasing has slowed dramatically. At this point, we are bracing for an additional loss of $1 million to as much as $3 million in next year’s budget alone. Unfortunately, as painful as all of the reductions we previously voted on are, they may not be enough. If you would like to see the full presentation, click
here
. There is a lot that we do not know yet, and though we are encouraged by the discussions to slowly reopen our economy and get back to normal, the road to normal appears to be long with lots of uncertainties. There are some worrisome warning signs, and we need to be cautious. We would love nothing more than to keep all of our tremendous teachers and remarkable programs intact, but we do not anticipate that our state funding will provide for this. We will continue to seek opportunities to increase our revenues locally and hope that our state’s economic trajectory does not put us in a position where we need to make even more drastic reductions.
TEACHING AND LEARNING
We have come a long way since I first wrote to you about contingency planning for school closing back on March 4. Through communications with employees, principals, and union leadership, we now have a much better understanding of what works during this time. Those beliefs are reflected in our
MBUSD Distance Learning Objectives
. Katherine Whittaker Stopp and I reviewed these objectives with the Board on Wednesday night. These objectives describe what we are looking for in our online world. The district is not prescribing a certain amount of time or requiring any particular teaching method or platform. Instead, we are focusing on teaching critical standards and maintaining connections between teachers and students and among students themselves. There are many ways to achieve these objectives, and I ask our parents and all of us to remember that we all need to be flexible, patient, and kind.
This is a unique time in our history, and we will get through the educational and budgetary problems we currently face. Back in high school, I found a
speech
that William Faulkner gave when he accepted his Nobel Prize. He was reflecting on living in fear during the age of nuclear proliferation. It made an impact on me then, and I think it still rings true for different reasons today. Faulkner ended his speech with, "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
As we lay sheltering, let’s all do our best to live up to Mr. Faulkner’s high expectations.
