Alisal School District implosion sets stage for tough County Superintendent of schools election.

It is T minus three school days before the yearly round of standardized testing as a roomful of second-graders at Bardin Elementary in Salinas’ Alisal Union School District puzzle over the most dreaded of math questions – word problems like: “There were 10 frogs in a pond. Each frog had four legs. How many frog legs were there all together?”

The kids jot answers to these sample standardized test questions on small white boards with handles and wave them in the air so that teacher Lori Samuels can instantly spot the students who know their stuff.

The pressure is on as County Superintendent of Schools Nancy Kotowski visits the school with Alisal’s brand-new Interim Superintendent John Ramirez in late April. The two have come to Bardin on a whirlwind tour of all 12 schools in the district, part of an effort to get the troubled school system back on track.

Earlier this year, state officials ranked Alisal dead last on a list of the state’s lowest-performing districts. All but one of the district’s schools failed to meet state targets on standardized tests at least two years in a row, while Bardin has missed the mark five years running.

The East Salinas district includes 8,000 mostly low-income kids, most of whom come to school speaking little English. Per-pupil spending is about average for the county at $8,000, but far less than in affluent districts like Carmel, which shells out more than $16,000 per pupil annually.

Still, a decade ago, Alisal was a star performer, considered one of California’s most effective school districts in helping English language learners and migrant students achieve academic success. A number of young men and women returned to the district as teachers, seeing the opportunity to educate kids in their community as a cause, not just a job.

But now, Alisal is notorious not only for its lagging academic performance, but also for brutal in-fighting. Parents bitterly denounced the district for failing their kids as school board meetings devolved into shouting matches so severe police were called to keep order, and district administrators have turned over faster than fry cooks at McDonald’s.

The state Board of Education considered Alisal’s situation so dire that in March, it announced plans to appoint a state trustee to run the district, and named Kotowski interim trustee, with veto power over the board until permanent appointee Carmella Franco, a former Whittier school district superintendent, takes the reins May 24. Alisal must improve, or it could face even more severe sanctions including defunding or abolition of the district.

Kotowski’s appointment highlights her biggest liability as she faces a June 8 election challenge from popular Salinas City Elementary School Superintendent Donna Alonzo Vaughan: Alisal is one of several deeply troubled districts in her jurisdiction. Along with Greenfield and a small Mendocino County district, it shares the dubious distinction of being the state’s first to be brought under state supervision because of poor academic performance. The King City school district is already under state administration because of financial troubles, while Monterey is tied with San Bernardino as the county with the second greatest number of lowest performing schools, right behind Los Angeles.

The county superintendent’s visit to Bardin, designed to signal a new beginning for the conflict-ridden district, has the feel of a campaign appearance. Dressed in a blue business suit with every platinum-blond hair in place, Kotowski reaches out to shake the hands of all who cross her path, from the school secretary to a volunteer tutor on the playground.

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Inside Samuel’s classroom, Principal Esteban Hernandez points out a small wall chart that lists 17 of Samuel’s most promising second-graders, and rates their understanding of key math and English concepts on which they’ll be tested. The school’s fate rests at least in part on the tiny shoulders of these students, because they’re the ones who are thought to have a good chance to move from basic or below basic to coveted proficient status on the state test. If 10 percent of Bardin students make that leap for two years running, the school can exit the state’s list of underperforming schools, where it’s languished for so long.

The development of such test-taking strategies is now a cottage industry in California, with about 20 percent of the state’s school districts under the gun for poor performance on standardized tests. Consultants – like the one Bardin used this year – show teachers and administrators how to win at the standardized testing game in the same way Kaplan and similar companies give college students an edge on graduate or law school entrance exams. “You have to be this sophisticated,” Hernandez says.

The grand finale to his meticulous preparations is a school-wide pep rally to psych the kids up before they grab number two pencils and hunker down for days of bubbling in multiple choice answers on state exam forms. Hernandez has even produced a video featuring Bardin kids at work at their desks, receiving student-of-the-month awards and suited up for sports – all set to the inspirational strains of R Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” and Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

“Their heads are really in the game,” he says.

Still, for all his determination to score big on the state test, Hernandez, a 20-year district veteran, seems to remember fondly the days before the 2002 No Child Left Behind law forced teachers into a rigid curriculum aimed at teaching a set of uniform standards – all designed to ensure 100 percent of American school kids are proficient in English and math by 2014 – as measured by standardized tests.

“Everyone’s prediction is the same – that’s an impossible target,” says Fred Balcom, director of district and school improvement for the state Department of Education. Every school district in every state will be considered a failure by that standard, he says.

“Do you really think every child in the country can reach proficiency by 2014?” Hernandez asks.

“I used to teach everything through science,” he says, sitting at his desk dressed in a gray Bardin Chieftains sweatshirt. He would design reading, math and social studies lessons around a theme, say the ocean or earthquakes. Now, he says, some teachers feel that rigid adherence to state standards has robbed them of creativity.

Still, Hernandez, like many district veterans, offers no single explanation for Alisal’s fall from the top of the educational charts to bottom of the barrel. One answer is the standards have changed. Ten years ago, he says, English language learners took high-stakes tests in Spanish, but that’s no longer allowed. Now, they can’t show enough of what they know because of the language barrier. What’s more, every year, the standards get higher, and it’s tough for kids who are only beginning to learn English to keep pace.

Add to that a district administration in disarray with no one in charge of curriculum or student assessment. Teacher training has been lacking, too, says Jeanne Herrick, a county assistant superintendent who headed the district’s curriculum department in its heyday.

“You’re working with a challenging student population,” she says. “Your skills need to be at the level of a surgeon.”

“We found out how deep the problems were,” Kotowski says of her first days as interim trustee.

Then a couple of weeks into her temporary trusteeship, State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell and a handful of state education officials presided as hundreds of parents and teachers gathered at Jesse Sanchez school to again drive home the message of just how troubled the district is.

Mitchell got more input than he asked for – on what kind of person should serve as trustee, how long they should serve and how much power they should wield.

“We’ve never been asked what we think of all this chaos. Why haven’t you taken the time to listen to us?” demanded third-grade teacher Cecilia Sanchez, as she, like many others, urged the board to appoint a permanent trustee who isn’t related to anyone in the district.

Activist parents, who for the past two years protested the district’s poor performance, poured out grievances about how school officials allegedly harassed and intimidated them when they tried to get involved in school affairs. After participating in the successful recall of one school board member and pressuring two others to resign, the parents urged Mitchell to give the new board members a chance to govern before disempowering them. A number of parents and teachers on both sides dove into a still red-hot debate over bilingual education in a district that was once nationally known for excellence in the field.

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“The reason we’ve stagnated is the erosion of bilingual education,” said Francisco Estrada, a second-grade teacher at Jesse Sanchez school and a 30-year classroom veteran.

Inside his classroom, a large, airy space painted in decidedly non-institutional shades of green and yellow, some 20 second graders sit at kid-sized tables, their sneakered feet swinging underneath.

“What does the word ‘irregular’ mean?” Estrada asks one student.

Think about it – irregular – he says, slowly enunciating the word in Spanish.

“Let Luis think,” he says, as hands fly up around the room. “You can bet this word is going to be on your English test.”

He runs through a few more tough words, then touches on antonyms before the kids take turns reading a story about a blue gnu. “The G is silent, like the H,” says one little boy, borrowing a concept from Spanish, to help a classmate who stumbles over the word gnu.

As class winds down, Estrada announces, “No homework tonight,” because he wants the kids to be fresh for the test.

And no novelas either, he adds. Be in bed no later than nine, no one be late, and have breakfast.

The kids file out, and Estrada laughs. About those telenovelas, it’s hopeless. “They’re all going to watch them,” he says.

But he thinks they’ll do fine on the test, and part of the reason, he says, is that he uses the kids’ first language as a foundation to teach English.

Look, he says pulling out the evidence.

When they entered second grade, just two of 21 students could read English. Now, testing shows of 20 students still in the class, 15 are considered fluent readers.

Back at the meeting, Estrada issued a challenge to state education officials, who are thought to oppose bilingual education.

“Give us one, two, three schools,” he said, “and we’ll show you what we can do.”

One question that didn’t arise at the meeting: What can state officials do that locals can’t to raise student achievement? Perhaps not much, says David Plank of Policy Analysis for California Education, a think tank run jointly by Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley and the University of Southern California. The state can make the trains run on time, Plank says. “But whether they can encourage teachers to teach better or students to learn more it’s hard to see.”

That’s his job, says Alisal’s Interim Superintendent Ramirez, a 38-year-old Salinas native. He says he was hired to raise student achievement, and he plans to do so.

Ramirez, who’s served as principal at both El Sausal Middle School and Salinas High School, and who recently left an administrative post in Visalia to return home, says he’s open to the idea of bilingual magnet schools, like Estrada suggests.

But he cautions that bilingual instruction is not a one-size-fits-all panacea, offering his own experience as an example. As a kid, his language skills (in both English and Spanish) were so limited that he did time in special ed classes – that is, before he went on to prove his academic chops by earning a master’s degree from Harvard. Extra English instruction would be a better path for kids like he was, he says.

Ramirez’s future is murky despite his recently inked three-year contract with the school district because Franco, the newly appointed trustee, has been granted full authority in Alisal, and it remains unclear whether she will sideline Ramirez and act as superintendent herself.

Kotowski says she is attempting to clarify Ramirez’ role with state officials, while also working in the district, and battling Vaughan in the June 8 election.

Vaughan charges that Kotowski didn’t act quickly enough to stop the downward spiral in Alisal – or in King City and Greenfield.

“She should have been there when the board started to go dysfunctional,” Vaughan says. “She was a ghost. I’m hands-on and she is not.”

Kotowski says stepping into the conflict-plagued district with no authority but the superintendent’s bully pulpit would not only have put her on shaky legal ground, but it would have been like trying to calm a child in the middle of a tantrum.

“I would have just caused a three-ring circus,” she says.

Kotowski says she monitored the tense stand-offs and angry shouting matches that erupted at Alisal school board meetings. She conducted a training session for the fractious board, and wrote a letter offering additional help. She watched warily as local board members – backed by many parent activists – issued pink slips to all of the district’s principals, a morale-busting move, Kotowski says, that bypassed the superintendent. The board’s sudden firing of former superintendent Esperanza Zendejas (whose iron-clad contract requires the district pay her until 2012), followed by the equally hair-trigger hiring of Ramirez, both caught her by surprise, she says, and was the final straw for state officials as they eyed the district for takeover.

Ramirez was a great hire, Kotowski says, but the process was wrong. The board left the public out by failing to announce it was hiring or firing, and saddled taxpayers with the bill for two top administrators.

Vaughan, an avid horsewoman with a Texas twang and a big personality, seemed to dominate a recent League of Women Voters-sponsored candidates forum at Hartnell Community College, where on more than one occasion Kotowski prefaced her own remarks by saying she agreed with Donna.

The two share similar professional backgrounds and similar positions on the issues. They even appeared at the forum wearing similar blue suits. Both are former teachers who worked their way up through the ranks as principals, administrators and school superintendents and earned Ph.D.’s in the process. Kotowski also served in the Peace Corps, directing an education project in Cameroon, and has sewn up the lion’s share of local political support, including endorsements from Rep. Sam Farr (D-Carmel), State Superintendent of Schools Jack O’Connell and Sylvia Panetta, wife of former congressman and current CIA Director Leon Panetta and director of The Panetta Institute at CSU Monterey Bay.

Vaughan, who enjoys widespread labor backing, jokes about the endorsement meeting where California School Employees Association members asked about skeletons in her closet. “Well,” Vaughan remembers answering after a pregnant pause. “I am a Republican.” She hastens to say she is a non-traditional GOP member, who is open to bilingual education and critical of No Child Left Behind. And, she adds, she makes independent choices in the voting booth. The race is non-partisan, and Kotowski says she is an independent who has registered Decline to State. She leads Vaughan in fundraising nearly three to one as of the latest campaign disclosure report.

The county Office of Education, usually a low-key, down-ballot race, takes on greater significance this year with so many school districts in economic and academic hot water, and because the county superintendent is the only local education official that voters in King City, Alisal, and Greenfield can hold accountable now that their local school boards are sidelined by state takeovers.

But parents and teachers will be taking an even closer look at the woman who will hold almost absolute power in the Alisal District for the next three years: Carmella Franco, who most recently served as interim superintendent in Yolo County’s Woodland Unified School District and has worked as an education consultant. (Franco was unavailable for comment by the Weekly’s deadline.)

Franco faces a tough slog as she attempts to make peace and quell district chaos, while also raising student performance.

Jose Ibarra, a spokesman for local parent activists, promises more protests as long as they think kids aren’t challenged to achieve. He says not only are parents angry about the state takeover; they feel slighted because state officials failed to consult with them, even as they interviewed others to take the pulse of the district.

What’s more, Ibarra says, the State Board of Education made the same mistake it has condemned the Alisal school board for: making quick decisions and sudden hires behind closed doors. By law, Ibarra argues, the board should have announced its choice of Franco as trustee 10 days before the meeting at which she was appointed to allow for public comment. Ibarra says he’s exploring the possibility of legal action against the board.

Board of Education spokeswoman Regina Brown Wilson says the board’s public posting of its meeting agenda, including its intention to name the Alisal trustee, was sufficient. “We did what we were legally required to do,” she says.

But, legal issues aside, Ibarra says the activists will keep making waves as long as the district lags academically. “The problem is not what our kids can do. It’s what the professionals can’t do.”