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To make sure winter vacation is a genuine vacation for Palo Alto’s students, tonight the school board will discuss school calendars for the next two years. To lessen student stress, district staff has proposed including a message instructing teachers not to assign homework during the break.
An earlier discussion of the anti-stress calendar effort left the board divided on the best way to organize dates, with some members advocating finishing exams before the break, others in favor of the no-work policy and some noting that teens occasionally work during the break to lessen stress once school resumes.
“It’s a tough thing to construct. There is no perfect solution,” according to board President Dana Tom.
Also up for discussion is adopting a new school-size policy. While committing to favorable staffing ratios and comfortable facilities, the proposed policy lacks something the current one contains — numbers.
As enrollment swells, the district has gone over school-size targets set in 2006 and is poised this year to exceed the 900-student goal at Jordan and JLS middle school and the 1,950 goal set for Gunn High School. Board members urged district staff to revise the policy, saying the district shouldn’t have a written target to which it does not — or cannot — conform.
The new policy eschews numbers-based goals to frame school size as arising from a variety of factors, including play space, acreage and boundaries.
It also calls on the superintendent to ask principals to “promote student connections” in their ever-larger schools.
School size is one of the problems that is coming from all the new housing. Not one of our schools at any level (with the exception of Barron Park and Briones) have space for new residents. Allowing the schools to get larger is not the answer. More schools have to be found. We need Greendell and Ventura as well as Garland for our elementary and middle schools and we need to use space at Cubberly to relieve the pressures at the high schools. Reopening Cubberly as a fully functioning high school will not work, but having some classes there for both Paly and Gunn students as well as middle college classes has to be looked at.
Innovative solutions are going to be needed, not just allowing the numbers at our already overcrowded schools to grow even bigger.
Since the Weekly’s report on this meeting only mentioned the discussion about the school calendar, did anyone watch or attend the meeting and can report on what was said about the school size policy? I was able to watch some of the meeting, but did not see that discussion.
Thank you.
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For more information on the school calendar issue, read this article on The Paly Voice at:
http://voice.paly.net/view_story.php?id=7153