What do I offer as a candidate for the PVSD?

By David Morris

I will bring 10 years of teaching experience, a broad multi-cultural exposure through medical practice among disadvantaged populations, and experience in making tough budgetary choices to the PVSD governing board. Given the challenges faced and the strategic vision of the district, I will focus on cost-effective solutions to building a world-class school district.

2. Real world multi-cultural experience: After my residency in Boston, and before coming to UCSF for my fellow, I worked as a full-time primary care physician in the National Health Service Corps in Phoenix, AZ for two years. The patient community was primarily Spanish-speaking immigrants; often undocumented itinerant or migrant workers. I have continued to work closely with a heavily immigrant and economically disadvantaged community at San Francisco General Hospital. This work has been immensely rewarding + teaching me medical Spanish on the job and highlighting how much more of it I wish I knew! More importantly, these experiences have given me a deep respect and some real-world understanding of diverse cultures, family and social structures, values, traditions, and have highlighted, in very stark terms, the hurdles faced by many ethnic minorities, immigrants and the socio-economically disadvantaged in our society and worldwide. We talk about creating the global student in the PV strategic plan, but we need to make sure that global exposure goes beyond the Uffizi in Florence and skiing in the Alps. We need to make sure that our kids know about the major differences in opportunities that face many in our society and worldwide. They need to have a true understanding of the richness of cultures beyond their own. To be a global learner means being engaged in global issues.

3. Commitment to foreign language instruction in primary grades: As part of my commitment to the idea of developing a global citizen of the 21st century, I am committed to expanding foreign language education in the primary grades. Currently, at Ormondale, kids get 1 hour a week of Spanish. While that is an improvement over no instruction in the recent past, I think it is imperative that we leverage the natural tendency of young learners to pick up languages by increasing cross-language education. At last week's board meeting, Sra Mary Ann Henn showed a video of third-grade students studying multiplication and giving nearly instantaneous answers in Spanish, with native accents! This was remarkable and clearly shows the opportunities for creating efficiencies across topics by combining spoken Spanish exposure with learning in science, math, reading and language skills, and social studies. Learning multiple languages at an early age promotes further language acquisition and native fluency years later. Despite woefully inadequate state and federal attention to foreign language education, we should not deprive our children of an authentic and expanded elementary experience. Spoken language cross-topic education in primary grades creates the ultimate "win-win" for our students.

4. Commitment to science and math education: As a medical biologist and now a clinical researcher, I obviously have an appreciation for the need for deepening and enriching education in math and sciences throughout our educational system. This does not need to be at the cost of teaching communication skills, but integrating these areas and creating cross-functional educational opportunities requires creativity, support, and objective assessments of what's working and what isn't. I have written of this as learning to ask and frame answers to great questions. Showing kids the power of experimentation (at which they're naturals), drawing conclusions from data, displaying relationships visually + particularly in later elementary and middle school + teaches them abstract reasoning, and the power and fun of quantitative analyses. Just as we're enabling a generation digital natives by early exposure to computers, we can enable "science" natives by leveraging the enormous power of distributed computing and information processing to allow kids to learn to interact with and study the world in previously unimagined ways. Witness, for example, Google Earth. This is an ideal match for the investigative learning initiative and can be seen as a common thread in a number of excellent recent programs. Ormondale Investigative Learning

5. Experience managing limited budgets and resources and producing world-class results: The PVSD has been in the enviable position of passively rising revenues driven by substantial property value appreciation and associated increased taxes. The district also enjoys substantial support from a very generous and dedicated community through the Foundation and the parcel tax. Last week's exceptionally generous, anonymous gift of $200,000, accepted by the board in support of the technology plan is the most recent, breath-taking example of this peerless community support of public education. In many ways, this has made innovation easier, enabling "AND" decisions and postponing the more difficult "OR"s. Nevertheless, as an academic researcher, dependent on foundation, state and federal grants to run my lab, I became very familiar with "OR" decisions, innovative funding opportunities and the need to drive world-class scientific results on tightly constrained budgets. Managing this sort of trade-off without sacrificing quality is exactly the sort of experience that the school board needs now. Before considering using increases in parcel taxes as a way to manage this budget "crisis," the district needs to carefully and critically analyze every dollar spent and educational impact that each dollar has.

6. DA commitment to the environment: The impact of our civilization on the environment has created a crisis that will require our best scientific and technological innovation to solve. It also means that we must walk as lightly as possible on our planet starting today. Engaging our children's creativity and passion in solving this, continuing to make leadership in green, sustainable building a defining feature of Portola Valley and making sure our schools and our community partner in advancing these ideals are key priorities for me.