I will pull the Ravenswood City School District out of the educational catastrophic downturn, morass, stagnation and failure

By Marilu L. Serrano

I will pull the Ravenswood City School District out of the educational catastrophic downturn, morass, stagnation and failure by the current school board to provide the students of Ravenswood with an education that will allow them to achieve future highest of national and international professional development yet undreamed of by the Ravenswood school district community

With the right superintendent in place, the right superintendent hired and the removal of the present, and with an enlighten, apolitical school board, I remain optimistic that the Ravenswood City School District will make a name for itself nationally for the high achievement of its students. Mark my words!

If elect I will put my efforts and energies + with the help of the community -- into making sure that we have the best teachers and principals, teaching and leading, our preschool, K-3rd schools.

If elect I will work to prioritize like a laser beam our $39,000,000 revenue for our 3,500 students to fund our preschool and K-3rd grade students because not to do so we dome our students to what East Palo Alto Chief of Police Ron Davis so eloquently warns us of: "It is shocking to think that a child who can't read by the third grade is a prime candidate for becoming a prison inmate. But looking at the reading levels of elementary school students might very well become a reliable way to predict the number of potential criminals in the future."

We leave a lasting print on the education of a child in the early years of its life: most importantly from birth to 3rd grade. Every parent intuitively knows.

Ravenswood is blessed with so much goodwill and so many donors and philanthropist who want Ravenswood and its students to succeed; even as these individuals see the educational and the political dysfunction of Ravenswood they refuse to give up on Ravenswood, but hold on to hope that things will change.

If elect I want to create a vibrant and energized after school, in school tutoring army of volunteers for all our students.

Even the best laid out plans without parent buying into it and fully engaged in their child's education, and believers in the future benefits and potentials of their children acquiring a powerful education will be like traveling uphill instead of running downhill. Jaime Escalante, the Latino math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angles and whose inspiring story a movie was made "Stand and Deliver" proved it to me.

If elect I will energize our parents to be believers in their child's education. My ability to cross cultures, make myself a part of that culture, my biculturalism and bilingualism as a Spanish-speaker, as a Latina woman will open doors to me to touch families with my inspiration, my vigor, my undaunted belief in the potential our students. I know it is there:

If elected I would work with the school board to begin a vigorous campaign to encourage parents to volunteer time at their children's schools and to find revenue sources to reduce the fees involved in becoming certified as a parent volunteer. I would love to see an army of parent-volunteers at Ravenswood. The process of becoming a parent volunteer at Ravenswood is not as parent-friendly as it should be. There are fees that many of parents cannot afford them. Parents are not encouraged to volunteer with the vigor that it should be done.

If elected I would seek greater collaboration and partnership with Ravenswood and East Palo Alto charter elementary and high schools. Here is an example of the magic that can happen when public schools and charter school create a partnership: Rhode Island's the City of Central Falls' school district of mostly Latino students and the new 2007 District Superintendent Dr. Frances Gallo. CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. -- Nancy Chenard's second-grade classroom is ready for reading: Her library is stocked, the phonics kits are prepared, a colorful bulletin board lists literacy learning activities and the rug is rolled out.

Though the classroom at may seem like any other, it has one key distinction: Chenard, like other kindergarten through second-grade teachers in the district, is part of a rare charter school-traditional school partnership that has led to strong improvements in literacy in this impoverished Rhode Island school district.

"It's built a community of readers," Chenard said, referring to the "Growing Readers Initiative" created by The Learning Community, a public charter school in Central Falls, specifically for the school district. "There is so much partner work and partner talk, and reflecting and sharing, and the learning that's taking place ... is very, very visible to us."

The initiative has four components: professional development, quarterly assessments, a safety net run by reading specialists for struggling readers, and the "Reading Workshop," a model popularized by Columbia's Teachers College that ramps up peer-to-peer and student-teacher interaction in the learning process. The Learning Community also provides a crafted curriculum that includes daily teaching points. The partnership had its beginnings in 2007, after the new district superintendent, Dr. Frances Gallo, learned about The Learning Community's academic success.

The Central Falls students had low marks in reading, and Gallo, who saw literacy as a key step to improving student performance and helping to end the cycle of poverty in this city near Providence, visited the charter school to see what they were doing to develop strong readers.

She liked what she saw: "I said, `Well, I want that success in my schools,' and we began to build a bridge."

Test scores chart the improvement since the partnership began: From October 2009 through June 2012, the percentage of K-2 students in the district's elementary schools reading at or above benchmark on the state's Developmental Reading Assessment grew from 37 percent to 65 percent.

Though Gallo met some resistance from staff wary of charter schools, she said the process helped to dispel some of the myths about those institutions, including that they simply cherry pick the best students. At The Learning Community, they hold an annual blind lottery.

"We had anticipated a long road of trying to convince superintendents to partner with us because at the time that would be very risky on a lot of fronts and so when she approached us it was ... really wonderful because it just helped us to meet our mission of really actively supporting other public schools," said Meg O'Leary, one of the co-founders of the charter school.

"Everyone knows that it's a political hot button to think about charter-traditional school partnership and so some superintendents see that as really risky in terms of them being able to get the support of their unions," she added.

If elect I will enlist the help of our local East Palo Alto two charter and one public high school students through their respective principals as Math, English, Science and Technology tutors for students.

These and yet unthought-of of strategies is how we will turn Ravenswood's preschool to 3rd grade levels quickly and urgently around and our other grade levels+ because our students can't wait. Their education has suffered long enough. A quality education is a civil right for Ravenswood students and all students. And Ravenswood educational neglect is tantamount to child abuse.

As I have said before parents are critical in our goal to provide Ravenswood's students with an education that will compete to that being received by East Palo Charter School or East Palo Alto's Eastside College Preparatory elementary and high school charter school.

We are doing a very poor job of engaging parents; our stagnant and dismal academic scores prove it. The superintendent stated at a school board meeting responding to my suggesting that the superintendent should take the lead in engaging Ravenswood parents -- on creating an educational environment in which parents to be completely sold and energized in educating their children for a greater future, -- that it was not her responsibility, but that of the principals to fire up the parents of our school district for be engaged and sold on achieving high and undreamed of educational aspirations for their children.

If elected I will push to fire or not extend the contract of the current superintendent's contract another year. Extending the contract of the superintendent for one more year, was dragged out through eight meetings and completely turning it into a political football, bringing the kind of unwanted controversy to the school board that only tarnishes its image. But most tragically the final decision to retain the current superintendent did put our students' education first and it was our students who suffered the consequences of the school board's decision.

Because we need a superintendent as the Rhode Island's City of Central Falls' school district are fortunate to have: Dr. Frances Gallo, was inspired, courageously thought out of the box, went to unchartered territory, ignored the possible political fallout from the teacher's union to form a partnership with a the local charter school to increase her students' very low achievement gap, especially her students reading skills, which after the partnership, went from 37 to 65 in the Development Assessment Testing.

If elected I promise that our Ravenswood students will equal Rocketship Education in academic achievements.

Rocketship Education, on March 24, 2011, was denied a school charter to start a school in Ravenswood by the school board in its infinite wisdom. For Rocketship Education the STAR Testing API Scores for the 2011-2012 academic year were as follows for its two schools in East San Jose (the birthplace of his farm-workers' struggle): Si Se Puede and Mateo Sheedy. Si Se Puede Academy (556 students, K-5) went from an API score of 859 in 2010-2011 to 861 in 2011-2012 academic years, a 2 point API gain. Mateo Sheedy Elementary (512 students, K-5) went from an API score of 893 in 2010-2011 to an API score of 924 in 2011-2012 academic years, a 31 point API gain.

If elected will ask that Malcolm X's school holiday that gives Ravenswood students a day be eliminated. I read Malcolm X's autobiography and he is one of my most cherish civil rights leaders, but we have enough school holidays that keeps Ravenswood students out of school. Malcolm X in his autobiography spoke about his respect for education and he, I am sure, would rather see our students in school talking and writing about him award winning essays with a $50.00 prize for the best essay.

If elected I focus with a laser beam on the Core Programs for our students: Math, Science, (ELA) English Language Learners, Social Studies and PE + from preschool to 3rd grade, from 6th, 7th and 8th grades, and the grade levels in between -- to eliminate Ravenswood serious achievement gap.

I ask for your vote. Please elect me, Marilu L. Serrano, to the Board of Trustees of the Ravenswood City School District.