QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE VALLEY : Curtis Page, education advocate

“I see an increase in the kind of urban issues as the Valley becomes more and more urban. In a lot of ways that’s very exciting. It’s very exciting to see the mixed ethnicity, the kind of exciting city life that comes. But I also see the freeways more crowded. I certainly see a school district that’s more and more falling apart.

“Schools are failing-- failing our kids both literally and figuratively. The district is trying to carry an overwhelming bureaucratic mess, trying to respond to kids as though it is still 20-25 years ago. Teachers are weighed down by a giant bureaucracy. They’re trying to micro-manage the district from the top, trying to force a pattern on a city that’s no longer one kind of person.

“The Valley faces an even greater problem than elsewhere. Fourteen languages are spoken at my daughter’s school. On my street, people are from about seven countries. It requires dealing with education in a whole different way. Schools are no longer places where you can assume kids are going to enter in kindergarten and get out in high school, enter in September and get out in June. They’re going to enter at all kinds of different times with all kinds of different backgrounds.

“We need to use the creativity of our parents, of our teachers and even of our children. There’s a real mythology that parents don’t care. I think parents care an enormous amount about their children. It’s the bureaucratic system that tries to scare parents away and tell them they aren’t needed and they’re stupid. The school board hasn’t been willing to change its way of doing of things.

“The teacher my daughter had in first grade was horrid, totally incapable of dealing with the situation. I’ve been lucky, my wife has not had to work outside the home, so she’s been able to hang around the school and make sure things were OK.

“It’s gotten to the point it has because more and more white middle-class people have pulled their children out of the system and the system just doesn’t respond to the complaints of minorities. People need to get organized, they have to get organized to raise money. Politicians can do one thing: They can count. They can count votes and they can count money.”