Schools and Cities Must Work Together

By Tobin Brinker

Home values, Crime and Jobs are all tied to the quality of schools. Cities and School Districts must work together to improve our community.

I believe that the city and school districts must work together to improve our city. Home values are tied to school quality. Education levels of citizens play an important role in our ability to attract certain type of businesses to our area. Dropout levels are correlated with crime and welfare. For all of these reasons I have focused a lot of my energy as a city councilman on developing connections with our local school districts.

I started an education bridge committee so that elected city leaders and school leaders would meet regularly to discuss issues. I organized a dropout recovery conference at Valley College in 2008. It included participants from three school districts, three cities and the county schools and community college district.

I demanded that the city of San Bernardino begin doing regular truancy sweeps with our local school police. Attendance rates are improving, Juvenile crime is down, dropout rates are decreasing and more kids are graduating. In the last four years every district in my ward has seen improvements in reducing the numbers of dropouts. here are the stats:

Colton had 660 dropouts in the 06-07 school year a 34% dropout rate but last year it was down to 231 dropouts and only 13.8%

Rialto had 534 dropouts in the 06-07 school year a 22.9% dropout rate but last year it was down to 357 dropouts and only 15.6%

San Bernardino city schools had 1334 dropouts in 06-07 school year a 31.1% rate but last year it was down to 1132 dropouts and only 25.2%

There is still much work to be done on this issue. I am proud of my advocacy and attempts to partner with our schools to work on the difficult issue of dropouts.

Going forward I think the city needs a policing plan for our lowest performing schools. Kids that live in violent neighborhoods cannot focus on getting a good education. Last year eleven San Bernardino city schools were named to a list of the worst schools in the state. Several of them are in high crime neighborhoods. We need a proactive approach that insures our schools are the safest places in our community.