League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Santa Clara County, CA November 6, 2012 Election
	Melissa Baten Caswell Answers Questions Candidate for Board Member; Palo Alto Unified School District

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of Palo Alto and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. What steps need to be taken to foster better communication among the school board, superintendent's office, and the local school communities?

Over the last decade, PAUSD has become more than a public school district: ours is a public-private partnership. We can be proud of the deeply held community values that have made this possible.

With so many stakeholders, however, our School Board trustees must--and do-- work tirelessly to oversee regular, clear, and transparent access to information. Regular, clear and transparent access to information is critical for an effective and efficiently run district.

The Board must set policy and channel investment to support 1) school to school sharing of best educational practices, 2) information sharing about student needs and supports, and 3) the importance of clear, meaningful, two way, home to school communication.

All stakeholders deserve clear information about our schools and District. Yet not every member of our community desires or looks for information in the same way. Current channels include Board meetings, staff meetings, community meetings, parent meetings, memos, websites, emails, community newsletters, Infinite Campus, and our new Schoology program. Over the last five years, I have consistently consulted with our superintendent to ensure regular and effective use of all available communication channels and a constant re-evaluation of their effectiveness.

I strongly support a culture of collaboration, within our schools and across our District and community. PAUSD includes some of the most talented educators in the Bay Area. We need to help them thrive here. In addition to encouraging cooperation and the sharing of best practices, I am an advocate for the communication of clear pathways for professional advancement at all levels of the organization.

Finally, over the last five years I have also made myself as available as possible for community questions, input and discussion. In addition to being a sworn Board Trustee, I am, after all, a PAUSD parent, Palo Alto citizen, neighbor, wife, and mother. Whether I am participating in a PAUSD Board meeting, attending official forums, visiting schools, shopping at the grocery store, or watching my children play soccer, I am here to listen and to serve. I look forward to continuing that work over the next four years.

2. What approaches would you support to help all students achieve their educational goals, whether they are college bound or not?

As your Board Trustee, I want every child in Palo Alto to receive an outstanding education, plain and simple. A good education is not just a privilege; it's a civil right! This crucial mission requires us both challenge our students AND to support them, so that they can all thrive.

Challenge: I believe in strong, well-sequenced curriculum taught in creative and effective ways. We need to use our resources creativity to engage students and ignite their passions for learning in many different ways, while delivering on our commitment to academic excellence. Our District has steadily moved into greater alignment with California State Standards and public university entrance requirements. To this end, over the last five years I have consistently encouraged staff and supported their efforts clarify our expectations at each grade level while continuing to challenge those students in our District who are ready for even more challenge. Taken together, this clarifying work forms the foundation of our District's next phase, as it moves toward the Common Core State Standards and beyond.

Student Support: I also believe that students must receive the academic and emotional support they need to help them make good choices and handle stress, and to that end I have supported District-wide review and overhaul of both academic and psychosocial intervention strategies from kindergarten through high school. I have also pushed for broader, more cohesive strategies for further reducing our District's achievement gap. We have made some progress, but we must do even more, and my last five years on the board have given me clear views of how we can keep moving forward.

Over the last five years, I continually supported and encouraged an investment in effective staff development to address student challenge, support, engagement, and the sharing of best practices. Teacher collaboration has advanced on many campuses, and I am committed to further supporting District-wide staff development work to extend best practices in all aspects of curriculum and pedagogy.

Finally, I also believe that we can extend our technology use to further support and enhance classroom learning and support our teachers to effectively serve every student. Our staff has seen promising early results from a range of technological innovations, and I support work to help our District use technology to support great teaching, curricular reinforcement and enhanced student learning opportunities.

3. How should PAUSD address potential budget cutbacks?

Sustained excellence requires the highest standards of fiscal stewardship even in the best of financial times. Because of this, I support ongoing conservative management of our District's budget.

As I learned both my MBA program and in more than 14 years as an industry executive, all effective budgets must first be built on clear values and strategic priorities.

Over the past 5 years, we have done our best to soften the impact of operating budget cuts on the classroom experience of our students.

We employed a values based process to gain alignment on our budget priorities. Then we used this to work collectively and collaboratively with the PTA, PiE, employee groups and the community to prioritize spending and resolve budget challenges.

This process worked well in the face of faced with major cuts from Sacramento over the past 5 years and it is the process that I support to address future budget cutbacks.

Despite our efforts, faced with major cuts from Sacramento, over the past 5 years we were forced into a position where we needed to significantly reduce spending. As a Board member I encouraged staff to explore every avenue of cost saving through out the District. Maintenance, energy use, transportation, use of copiers, School Lunch program, etc were all scrutinized and cost savings strategies were employed. Our values based process and clear community priorities helped clarify our decisions and helped us to protect our well rounded educational program (including electives like art, music and foreign language), avoid staff furloughs and school year reductions.

Our commitment to building a reserve (the result of conservative budgeting) and our community's additional funding provides time to make thoughtful and community supported tradeoffs. In addition to state funds and property taxes, our schools are blessed with community supported operating funds from a Parcel tax, Partners in Education Foundation funding, our PTAs and booster groups. These funds provide much needed additional funding to our educational program and have helped us avoid draconian cuts when state and federal funding has fallen so dramatically.

I believe that I have demonstrated my commitment to strong fiscal oversight and transparent decision making about all of the federal, state, and local community funds that sustain excellence in our schools.

In addition to a focus on the management of our operating funds, I am committed to careful management of our community provided building funds. Over my term in office, I worked successfully with our community and school leaders on a bond measure that funds our current school facility renovation and building expansion program. Out of respect and gratitude for our citizens' generous funding of this important funding measure, our Board has an ethical duty to carefully oversee all aspects of this spending.

I am particularly proud to report that our District's ambitious facility renovation and expansion program is on time and on budget across the District, and that our recent acquisition of land adjacent to Cubberley gives us the ability to further expand to meet student enrollment needs.

Should cutbacks prove necessary, you can count on me -- and on my long record of executive experience and community leadership -- to make ethical choices based on conservative and effective fiscal principals. Clear, transparent and judicious oversight of our District's finances is fundamental to my work as your trustee.

4. Do you see instituting a pre-school program for children younger than the "early 5s" age, as desirable for the PAUSD, and if so, have you any ideas on how it might fit into the K-12 structure?

Yes I believe that a pre-school program for children younger than the "early 5s" is desirable for the Palo Alto Unified School District.

Studies have shown that well executed early childhood education is critical for successful later success academically and socially. It also does produces indirect savings by reducing the chances that students will be ill prepared for kindergarten and later get held back a grade or end up in special education programs.

In fact, PAUSD provides an excellent, longstanding, pre-school program and curriculum through the PreSchool Family program at our Greendell site.

PreSchool Family is a parent education program serving families with children ages birth through five years. The program began in 1946 and is part of the Palo Alto Adult School under the auspices of the Palo Alto Unified School District. The program is designed to offer parents an opportunity to learn about parenting and to actively participate in their child's education. For children, the program offers a developmentally appropriate, play-based, educational program.

During my first term on the Board, our District also began the "Springboard" kindergarten readiness program to serve students who had not attended preschool. Data has shown that these students have shown decisive gains in their ability to adjust to kindergarten expectations and to perform at grade level through early elementary school.

I have supported and will continue to support these kinds of innovative, supportive, results-oriented programs in PAUSD.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' statements are presented as submitted. Direct references to opponents are not permitted.

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 3, 2012 16:15
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