District OKs bonds for Marin City, Sausalito schools -Marin IJ - July 28, 2006 By Don Speich

District OKs bonds for Marin City, Sausalito schoolsMarin IJ
July 28, 2006
By Reporter
Don Speich


A new middle school in Marin City, the cornerstone of an ambitious program to improve academic programs, took a major step forward Thursday night when trustees of the Sausalito Marin City School District unanimously approved the issuance of bonds to finance the project.
The new Martin Luther King Jr. Academy school, along with the renovation of the Bayside Elementary School in Sausalito, will be financed by a $15.9 million bond measure passed by voters in 2004. Income the district receives under building-lease agreements with the city of Sausalito will provide an additional $1.3 million for the project, bringing the total to $17.9 million - an amount that just a few weeks ago appeared significantly less than was needed.

Earlier this summer, the board was told by engineering consultants that construction of the school would cost far more than expected because the site was unstable bay mud. Consultants said there were a variety of ways to stabilize the structure but that they were extremely costly - the least expensive was well over $1 million more than the district had.

The consultants and architects were sent back to the drawing board to reduce the costs. Hopes were not high. Trustee Shirley Thornton lamented at the time, "we'll be left with a tent."

But, explained Patty Swiss helm, the district's bond project coordinator, the experts turned the proposed buildings a little here and a little there, backed them up closer to the hard soil on Phillips Drive, the street that borders the school, and produced a modified design that will be constructed on a solid foundation.

The school will be located on the site now occupied by the Manzanita Child Learning Center.

She said the new design is better than the original.

The adjustment reduced the projected cost from the $10 million it would have taken to stabilize buildings on bay mud to $8.9 million for the new design, said Swisshelm.

Of the total $17.9 million, $8.9 million is for the construction of MLK with $2.3 million earmarked for Bayside. The remaining $6 million-plus is for consultant and architecture services, environmental and soil studies, temporary portable classrooms at Bayside, furniture and fixtures, she said.

Trustee President George Stratigos has stressed the middle school must give students an experience that, in setting, structure and curriculum, will be similar to that found in high schools. It is crucial, he said, to turn around a middle school program that too frequently graduates students who read, if they can at all, far below grade level.

Before the school had to be redesigned, it was expected that the project would get under way in August. But Swisshelm said the redesigning process could change the timeline.

Meanwhile, portable classrooms have been moved onto the campus of Bayside to house kindergarten through second-grade students during the renovation, which is supposed to be completed by late summer 2007.

The remaining four grades at the school will remain in the school's classrooms that are unaffected by the renovation.

Contact Don Speich via e-mail at dspeich@marinij.com


Article Launched: 07/28/2006 04:53:53 AM PDT

Sausalito Marin City picks new principal - Marin IJ - July 21,2006 by Don Speich

Sausalito Marin City picks new principal-
Marin IJ, July 21, 2006 by Don Speich

An East Bay elementary school principal with expertise in curriculum reform and improving test scores was named principal of the Sausalito Marin City district's elementary and middle schools Thursday.

Cherisse C. Baatin, an elementary school principal in Concord's Mt. Diablo School District, replaces Ruby Wilson, who retired in July as principal of both Bayside Elementary School in Sausalito and the Martin Luther King Jr. Academy middle school in Marin City.

Baatin, whose salary will be $100,000 a year, was unanimously approved by the district's Board of Trustees Thursday.

"I look forward to working with Ms. Baatin," said Superintendent Debra Bradley. "Academic success is the critical measure of our achievement.

"Cherisse is a dedicated professional with a proven track record of accomplishment in all areas in which we are seeking to improve our performance."

A resident of Berkeley, Baatin received a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's degree in special education from San Francisco State University.

She has held a number of teaching and administrative positions in Mt. Diablo since going to work there in 1980.

According to her resume, she "initiated, designed and implemented school-wide reforms" aimed at meeting the "specific needs of ethnically diverse students, families and community."

She coordinated programs to meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation and "supervised and evaluated the staff in the development and implementation of standards-based instruction and support programs to accelerate the learning of all students performing below grade level standards, English learners and special education students."

The list includes many of the things the trustees are hoping to either strengthen or implement in their quest to improve education at Martin Luther King, where many students now read below grade level and half of the graduates fail to complete high school.

Board President George Stratigos said, "The board of trustees is very excited Ms. Baatin will be on board at the start of the school year.

"In order to achieve our goal of Vision 900, we must do everything right," he said. "Having a strong administrative team is essential to our success."

Vision 900 refers to a board goal of achieving a district Academic Performance Index of 900, a goal that rivals the best districts in Marin as well as the state. Currently, the district's API is 695.

In April, the board named as superintendent Bradley, a specialist in raising test scores and improving curriculum in districts where students are predominantly minority and from low-income families. She replaced Rose Marie Roberson who was ousted by the board in one of its initial steps in changing the direction of the district.

Baatin completes the administrative changes the board hopes will result in a new approach to learning in the district, one focused on mastering basic skills and improving test scores.

The district's test scores are among the lowest in the state.

Contact Don Speich via e-mail at dspeich@marinij.com

Frustrated Sausalito Taxpayer - Friday Reader Forum - Marin IJ - July 21, 2006 By Reader Linda Martello, Sausalito

Friday Readers' Forum
July 21, 2006

Staff Report
Marin Independent Journal

Frustrated Sausalito taxpayer

Am I the only angry parent in Sausalito? Is anyone listening to the frustrated Sausalito residents who can't send their children to a school in their own neighborhood due to its disgraceful performance?

This is despite the fact that the school receives three times the state average in per-pupil funding, which, of course, comes out of our pockets. And now the Sausalito Marin City School District is going to spend more than $12 million on a middle school in Marin City for 60 students. That's right - 60 students.

The district Board of Trustees' reckless spending, including exorbitantly high administrative costs, coupled with paying ineffective and worn-out teachers the highest salaries in the state, should have all of us storming the district doors.

In the meantime, why are the trustees neglecting the only glimmer of hope we have for our children - Willow Creek Academy?

Willow Creek is surviving despite the board's attempts to choke off its funding. It seems to me that the trustees are deliberately trying to set Willow Creek up to fail despite the wishes of many Sausalito residents to have an alternative to Bayside.

The board seems committed to continuing the decades-long legacy of failure in providing a public school for all Sausalito residents.

Linda Martello, Sausalito

Bill Evers and Paul Clopton: Spending without achievement - Marin Voice - Marin IJ July 12, 2006 by Bill Evers and Paul Clopton

Article Launched: 07/12/2006 04:17:00 AM PDT

Bill Evers and Paul Clopton: Spending without achievement
Marin Voice
Marin IJ
July 12, 2006
Bill Evers and Paul Clopton



THE SAUSALITO Marin City School District spends more than $22,000 per pupil and pays teachers an average of $71,000 a year. Based on 2004-05 figures, per-pupil spending is three times the state average, and teachers are the highest paid in Marin. Sausalito is the top-funded urban school district in the state.
But according to 2004-2005 California test scores, only 25 percent of Sausalito sixth-grade students are proficient or advanced in English and 13 percent are proficient or advanced in mathematics. Out of 1,025 districts in California, Sausalito is ranked 724th, which is at the 29.4th percentile. Why aren't students succeeding academically in a school district whose wealth makes almost every other district in California green with envy?

Decades of a different curriculum in every classroom, ineffective and unevaluated teaching practices and teacher training, overemphasis on student self-esteem and low academic expectations created an academic deficit that has been hard to repair.

Teachers who were in Sausalito in the 1980s said money was lavished on fancy cars and exotic trips. An audit in the 1990s found conflicting payroll lists that could not be reconciled.

The 1997 Marin civil grand jury report depicted a district in which large numbers of its elementary and middle-school students were out of control. The grand jury said that teachers were afraid to turn their backs in the classroom. Auditors said teachers and administrators were unwilling to hold students accountable for misbehavior. These problems made the school system a high-dollar heaven that has been at the same time a dysfunctional-district hell.

A 1998 recall campaign changed the makeup of the school board and the administration. While some academic improvement has been made since then, Sausalito remains a chronically low-performing district.

District leaders have recently improved the coherence of the curriculum and adopted a high-performance reading program that emphasizes phonics first, rather than the district's previous whole-language instruction. District leaders also reduced the proportion of children designated as learning disabled. Much of the students' learning problems had been the result of the district's poor teaching of reading, and over-designation of students as disabled had contributed to the alienation of parents from the district. These recent changes have led to some gains in student test scores - principally in the lower grades whose students have benefited from recent changes.

Despite these improvements, the district is still being held back by a legacy of Progressive Education and a reliance on inadequate and misleading districtwide tests. Sausalito has a long history of using Progressive methods of project-based learning and student self-discovery in mathematics and other subjects. Teaching in the district's regular schools and, in particular, in its charter school is heavily influenced by ineffective Progressive methods.

In another guise, these Progressive Education attitudes are found today in the Southern Marin educational establishment: the Education Task Force, the Buck Trust and the Marin Community Foundation. This establishment belittles Sausalito's phonics-based reading program and fails to support training of Sausalito teachers in effective use of that program.

As one of its functions, the task force produces tests used for diagnostic purposes, to guide instruction and to stimulate the creation of Progressive Education teaching strategies. However, after having looked at the publicly released test questions in reading and mathematics, the authors of this article have found that the reading test questions neglect word-attack skills and word recognition and the mathematics test questions are below grade-level and poorly written.

If the Sausalito Marin City schools are to succeed, the district needs to abandon these misleading tests, and it needs to discard the fads of Progressive Education in favor of effective teacher-led classrooms.

The recipe for Sausalito Marin City's success is: High-quality teachers teaching a solid, coherent curriculum in well-disciplined classrooms.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Evers is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and member of the institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. Paul Clopton is a research statistician at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego. This column is drawn from their research that will appear this year in a book edited by Eric Hanushek and published by Education Next.

Teachers need to work with district - Marin IJ Editorial - July 6, 2006

Teachers need to work with districtMarin IJ Editorial
July 6 2006

IT WAS UNFORTUNATE to see a representative of teachers in the Sausalito Marin City School District unload on its school board.

Some teachers were upset by the IJ's three-day series on the troubled district, claiming the stories blamed them for poor academic performance by students.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but reversing the district's pattern of poor academic achievement is going to take less fingerpointing and more collaboration.

A representative of the teachers said the faculty has been shut out of attempts to improve classroom instruction, including the school board's "Vision 900" plan that calls for academic achievement on a par with Marin's top-scoring schools.

That's an ambitious goal for this small district.

Trustee Whitney Hoyt, who stepped down this year as middle school principal in Mill Valley, pointed out that the Sausalito Marin City School District should not have students reading far below grade level while also having such small class sizes.

She is right.

District teachers bear some of the responsibility. So does the school board and district administration. So do the parents of the students and district residents.

Vision 900 is a lofty goal, but one that is meant to push the district and student performance in the right direction.

There's no question that district trustees have deliberately set the bar very high. Now they need to work closely with the faculty, parents and the community to make methodical progress toward that goal.

Casting blame rather than taking responsibility and working together is going to keep the district from making headway. Everyone involved needs to stay focused on the most important objective - improving the academic achievement of the district's young students.

Consultants to Develop Options for New School - Marin IJ - July 1, 2006 - Staff Report

Article Launched: 07/01/2006 04:30:39 AM PDT

Consultants to develop options for new school
Marin IJ
07-01-2006
Staff Report

Unexpected money problems are forcing the trustees of the Sausalito Marin City School District to reconsider the size, location and layout of a new Martin Luther King Jr. Academy middle school in Marin City.
At a meeting Thursday night, district trustees revisited the issue after learning last month that the proposed location was on unstable bay mud.

Stablilizing the school could cost millions of dollars more than planned.

Trustees are considering a plan to relocate the school on areas of the property where the soil is more stable.

Engineering consultants were asked to return with new options by the middle of the month.