Letter: Problems with creating a community schools partnership program
To the editor,
– One of the items on the agenda for the PRJUSD school board meeting this Tuesday night is Item I4, the approval of the next steps in forming a community school.
The question that should be answered prior to approving the next steps in creating a California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) is why do we even need another community school? We have a community school now. The Paso Robles Joint Union School District has a number of community schools that currently spend thousands of dollars annually on each student and provides all the educational opportunities that are necessary in science, math, English skills, history, language arts, civics, and so on.
So why do we need additional curriculum when we are failing our students now in our current curriculum with such low proficiency ratings in math and English?
Why it does not make sense to spend millions of additional dollars creating a whole new bureaucracy when the monies could be better spent solving the academic problems that we have now in our schools?
Well, surprisingly, community schools in the CCSPP grant are not intended to solve these problems.
Community schools are, and I quote from a website on community schools, …”community schooling is a decades-old model that envisions public schools as hubs for wraparound social services like medical and mental health care, food assistance, job programs, and legal aid. And they use it to justify bringing in affirmative trans health care”.
Not surprisingly the schools are supported by the United Nations, by the World Health Organization, by the CDC, and most importantly, the CTA (the California Teachers Association) of which the Paso Robles School District is part.
According to David Goldberg, the Vice President of the CTA, the CTA is “all in” for community schools.
Cindy Long of the National Education Association (NEA) noted that community schools don’t only address students’ health, but much more.
The NEA describes a community school as a network of partnerships offering services for trauma, hunger, homelessness, and a myriad of other problems.
And she also noted that these services should be expanded to address the needs of a student’s siblings, parents, grandparents, and neighbors.
Well, excuse me, but these services are already offered statewide now in the private and public sectors and don’t need to be recreated in our school system.
So now you know why the education establishment and the CTA support community schools. They establish a huge expansion of an already bloated bureaucracy which continues our long march towards socialism and the destruction of our meritocracy.
Regards,
Peter Byrne
Paso Robles
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