Q&A from Noozhawk

By Edward "Ted" Urschel

Excerpt from Q&A posted on Noozhawk.com

1. What motivated you to run for the Montecito Union School District Board of Education? Explain your decision process.

Montecito Union is very important to me. I grew up in Montecito and attended Montecito Union School. My daughter attended Montecito Union from kindergarten through sixth grade, and my son is currently in fourth grade there. In the past eight years, I have chaired and participated in numerous PTA events over the years, served on the school site council and volunteered in the classroom at several grade levels.

The school board recently hired a new superintendent. This really is an exciting time for the school district, and there are many wonderful opportunities available to us. I want to help set direction for the school by serving on the school board. I also want to bring stability to the school board and provide support for the new superintendent. I intend to use my perspective about the school and the community to help bring a collaborative style to the school board, one that takes into account the views of all stakeholders, including parents from all grade levels, school staff, and community members. By doing these things, I hope to help move the school forward and continue the tradition of excellent education at Montecito Union.

2. What unique experience or expertise do you have that will make a difference on the Montecito school board?

My experience growing up in Montecito, and having been a parent at the school for eight years, gives me a unique insight about this wonderful community. I believe it's important to remember that the school board should be listening to, and understanding, all residents of the Montecito community in making its decisions. The residents of Montecito are rightfully proud of our town, and the school board needs to be mindful of all of the different points of view in the community.

Other than my history with the school and the community, I believe that my experience as an attorney will make a difference on the school board. As the only attorney on the school board, I will bring a valuable perspective that will make a difference to the Montecito Union School District governance team.

It's very important that school board members have a healthy respect for, and strive always to practice, good governance. As a corporate attorney, I regularly counsel my clients on matters involving corporate governance. The rules that apply to school boards and school board members are, while different from corporate law, nonetheless similar. I am mindful of a school board member's obligation to help remind one's fellow school board members, and the public, about the rules that apply to how the school board acts and how school board members communicate. I understand these rules, and look forward to abiding by not only the letter but the spirit of these rules.

There are also other ways in which being an attorney is helpful to the school board. My perspective will help the school board when addressing confidential personnel issues, litigation by or against the school district, and laws that affect the school district, as well assisting with collective bargaining. There are also less obvious benefits such as being able to think critically about the issues before the school board, or being able to understand and, when appropriate, question the advice the school district's legal counsel gives to the school district.

3. The Montecito Union School community has had its share of drama recently. Is that behind you? Is the new administrative structure an improvement? Why or why not?

We must put it behind us. Montecito Union is simply too important to the community, and our children's education too important to us as parents, to allow bitterness and division to divert our attentions. This is one of the reasons I decided to run for the school board. I do not want to revisit and argue about the past + instead, I want to move us forward.

We have hired a wonderful new superintendent who is an impressive professional and a great communicator, and she in turn has hired an excellent administrative staff. One of my main goals as a school board member is to support the new superintendent and give her the support she needs to be successful in her new role. I do believe the structure is an improvement over the past, particularly with respect to clarifying the roles and responsibilities of members of the administration. I have seen a positive difference already, and I certainly sense that teachers and parents have as well. I would like to evaluate the new structure over a reasonable period of time, perhaps three to four years, so that we can learn whether it has been effective and fiscally responsible.

4. The Montecito Union School District has embarked on an ambitious and comprehensive project to strengthen and expand the academic opportunities and accountability for its students and community. Do you agree with the direction of this new vision? What do you see as challenges with implementation? How will you personally judge its success?

I agree with the direction, and the strategic plan that was adopted by the school board is a good start. I want to focus on the educational experience of our children and give the teachers the support they need to be successful. The better aspects of the strategic plan challenge us to create a thinking environment where our children not only master the state standards, but also develop a deeper understanding of what they are learning. Through understanding, our children will be able to apply their knowledge to analogous situations, think critically, and generally be better prepared for junior high school and beyond. Another worthwhile goal of the plan is for teachers to have the resources and time that they need to develop further as professional educators. They should have opportunities for professional development that are valuable and in keeping with the school district's goals. They should also be able to spend time with one another in peer reviews, and have access to the superintendent and the administrative staff to share ideas and information with one another. The administration and the teachers seem excited about the changes we have instituted thus far, and I look forward to building on that momentum and supporting the vision of the school.

One big challenge is time. There's never enough of it. This problem will hopefully be solved to a great degree by the creation of the Chief Academic Officer position with the new organizational structure. Another challenge, which the administration and current school board have already identified, is how we can effectively measure the effectiveness of the changes we make. Our children already perform very well, generally, on California's standardized tests. We must devise a way to measure quantitatively whether or not the changes we implement actually make a difference in a student's ability to think and learn. You can't do that by just comparing performance on STAR tests from year to year. It will also be important to measure, from a qualitative standpoint, whether the teachers and administration find, in the long run, that any changes have been worthwhile.

5. Public school funding in California seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. As a basic-aid district in one of the country's wealthiest communities, Montecito Union would appear to be somewhat sheltered from the worst budget pressures. True? Why or why not?

It is true that the Montecito Union School District has fared pretty well compared to many other districts in the state, although we, too, have taken a financial hit. Our financial position, however, is relatively secure only for so long as the state continues to permit the Basic Aid style of funding. The Basic Aid, or community-funded, model kicks in when the revenues from local property taxes are enough to fund the school. Only about ten percent of the elementary school districts in the state are Basic Aid districts + the rest are what are called revenue limit schools, which are additionally funded from state sales and income taxes because local property taxes aren't adequate to do the job. The benefit of Basic Aid, at least for Montecito Union, is that our local property taxes provide a great deal more revenue than if it were a revenue limit school. Some school funding experts note that, even if our property tax revenues were more equivalent to a revenue limit school (as is the case with the Santa Barbara Secondary School District), it is still better to be under a Basic Aid model because the revenue from property taxes is generally more stable than the revenue from state sales and income taxes, which tend to vary more with the ups and downs of the economy.

As the state budget crisis continues, there is bound to be greater scrutiny of Basic Aid, particularly in cases where there is such a great disparity between the amount of revenues realized by school districts like Montecito Union and revenue limit ones. As a school board member, I will be committed to continually educating our elected state representatives, and the public, about importance of maintaining our Basic Aid status and the effect on our school if Basic Aid were lost.

It is also important, in my view, to aggressively build our financial reserves, and to curb spending on programs that do not have a valuable impact on our children's educational experience. While I give high marks to the former administration with respect to building reserves, I think there are many more opportunities to examine how our revenue is spent. One of the proper roles of the school board is to approve the budget, and I look forward to being involved in that process.

6. What do you see as the most pressing issue the Montecito Union School District will face in the next five years?

The long term viability of Basic Aid, the potential development of the property next door to the school, and the Open Enrollment Act are all at the top of my list. Other than these three things, I think the next big issue that the school district will face is collective bargaining with the teachers. Collective bargaining is a process that traditionally occurs every three years between the school district and the teachers, who are represented by the Montecito Teachers Association. The current collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of June 2011, so negotiations for the next agreement will begin this spring. The MTA's objective is to negotiate the best possible terms and conditions of the teachers' employment, including both financial and nonfinancial terms, and the school district's objective is to negotiate a fair set of terms and conditions to simultaneously incentivize the teachers and protect the financial interests of the school district. It is a complicated and prolonged exercise and the school board must prioritize its objectives and act as a cohesive unit throughout the process. As a corporate attorney, I regularly negotiate contracts, including employment contracts, on behalf of my clients, and I look forward to helping the school district in negotiations this coming spring and again three years later.

7. The Montecito Union School District owns property adjacent to the campus. How should it be used?

When the school district acquired the property next door, it was restricted from any development of the property for a number of years. That time restriction will lift in the next few years. A number of ideas have been floated for the use of the property, including building a junior high school, an auditorium, a gymnasium, teacher housing and an expanded organic garden. In my view, while some of these uses bear examination, I don't necessarily think we as a school district should be in a hurry to do anything at all with the property other than continuing to collect rent from tenants of the house on the property. We must consider carefully whether there is a need to develop the property at all, rather than just assuming that we will build "because we can." Furthermore, when deciding what we might do with the property, we must consider the impact on the neighbors, the impact on the roads and traffic, and the need to abide by the letter and spirit of the Montecito Community Plan. As a long-time Montecito resident, I am committed to not only doing the right thing for the school, but also doing the right thing for the community.

8. San Ysidro Road is one of Montecito's busiest streets. Is it safe for students? What improvements would you like to see?

Too many cars and trucks speed up and down San Ysidro Road, and too many people disregard laws and common sense concerning cell phone use while driving. As a result, San Ysidro Road is unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists alike. There are a number of measures that I would like to explore to help alleviate the problem, including increased enforcement of the speed limits, better signage for crosswalks and speed limits, expanded use of our school bus, and more carpooling by parents. I would like to work with the Sheriff's Department, the Highway Patrol and the Department of Public Works to see what can be done to make this area safer for the children of our school district and the community at large. There are also some more intangible things that I would like to see occur, such as less cell phone use and greater awareness of safe driving practices, particularly on the part of our own MUS parents. The current school board passed a resolution in support of a walking path along San Ysidro Road below the school, which might make a difference for pedestrians and allow students to walk more safely to school. But the issue of traffic on San Ysidro Road has been chronic problem for years, and there are no clear fixes.

9. Earlier this year, the state of California implemented the Open Enrollment Act, which allows students from "low-achieving" schools to enroll in a high-performing school, including single-school districts, without regard to residence. How will this affect Montecito Union School?

This new law could affect Montecito Union in a number of ways, and it is important for the school board to be proactive in its approach to this new law. We must strike the proper balance between appreciating the intent of the law and also realizing that our greatest obligation is to the children who live in the school district. We will likely see some transfer applications, and we will need to have specific written standards in place for how we accept or reject these applications. Although school districts are still waiting for the State Board of Education to adopt implementing regulations that should give some guidance to schools that are drafting policies in response to the Open Enrollment Act, we have seen that a school district may consider the capacity of a class, grade level or building, and it may consider the potential adverse financial impact on the school in accepting transfer students. As you might imagine, raising an objection on these grounds could be challenging for us. We will need to formulate a policy on transfers, and as part of that policy set several benchmarks regarding acceptable and historical per pupil spending and class sizes to support the policy.

As far as how the new law will really affect Montecito Union, it is too early to tell. The most obvious effects could be increased class sizes and/or decreased spending per student, although it appears unlikely that the Act would compel Montecito Union to have to hire new teachers or dramatically increase class sizes. As of now, the bigger problems for MUS seem to be those of a logistical nature. We currently have very small class sizes of 20 or fewer children per classroom. Every spring our school board tries to predict the number of children per grade for the next year, and makes hiring decisions accordingly; this process can already get tricky because it's impossible to predict with certainty how many new families will move into the school district over the summer. Under the new law, it could be very difficult to evaluate transfer applications based on how much room we have in any particular class when we don't yet even know how many children will be living in our district as of the start of the new school year. If we later find that we underestimated the number of new families moving into the school district, we may experience larger than normal class sizes. All this having been said, it's not clear to me that we will have a huge number of transfer applications, both because the law is very complex, and because the logistics of bring a student to Montecito from another school district are too great for many parents. But we certainly need to be prepared.

10. Do you support Measure Q, the $75 million school bond for Santa Barbara High, Santa Barbara Junior High and other secondary schools in the Santa Barbara School District? Why or why not?

I support Measure Q, as does our current school board. Measure Q provides desperately needed funds to modernize, renovate and update the aging and outdated school facilities throughout the Santa Barbara School District campuses, including the schools where our children go after graduating from Montecito Union. As a school board member at Montecito Union, my commitment to the children of the school district should not abruptly end after sixth grade, and therefore I support Measure Q.

11. Which teacher has had the biggest impact on your children, or yourself? How?

This is just too hard a question for me to answer. Over the last eight years at Montecito Union, my daughter had seven classroom teachers and my son has had five. This does not include a number of fantastic specialists in many areas, including especially (for both of my children) math and music. There are even some teachers at Montecito Union who were there when I was a student (and they know who they are), and they too have played a significant role in both my life and the lives of my children. I am grateful to all of the teachers at Montecito Union + they are truly a fine group of professionals.

12. How can voters learn more about your candidacy?

Please visit my website at http://www.tedurschel.com. There you can see a list of my supporters, including 15 current and former Montecito Union school board members, four of the current Santa Barbara school board members, and many long-time residents of Montecito. Also, feel free to call me at 805-695-0596 or email me at ted@tedurschel.com.