ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Parents Give High Marks to Public Schools : From college-level courses to homeless programs, officials are seeing that students’ needs are met. Poll shows effort is noticed.

Orange County schools are the best in the state, according to the parents--those who know their schools more intimately than anyone. As president of the Orange County Board of Education, I can think of no better news to announce during April’s Public Schools Month.

Questioned by the highly regarded Field Poll, 60% of our parents with children in school gave A and B grades to their public schools. When C grades are added to the numbers, more than three-fourths of our parents indicated their satisfaction with the K-12 schools their children attend.

Surprised? Those of us in the business of educating our 402,000 students in the county are not. If you are among the thousands of visitors to our schools every month, you know the quality of education our students are receiving. Have you observed a fourth-grade class of 35 children, watching them absorbed in mathematical studies far beyond anything you and I learned a generation or two ago? Math reasoning, logic and probability have enriched instruction beyond the times tables and eclipsed the “invert and multiply” role learning.

We have more high school students in Advanced Placement classes than ever before, and more are passing those exams to gain college credit. More of our students are enrolling in college--possibly because they found out in high school that they could do college-level work. For those high school students more work-bound than aspiring to post-secondary education careers, our department is working with and committed to Vital Link, a unique school-to-work program designed to better prepare students to fill the needs of business.

More than 400 business and professional leaders in Orange County were principals for a day last month in a program organized by our County Department of Education. Asking busy VIPs to give up a day to learn the challenges of being an elementary or secondary school principal is asking for a significant time commitment. But I wish you could have heard the comments at the debriefing in the Anaheim Union High School District boardroom. If any CEO had harbored misgivings about public education before that day, they were gone. They visited with students, participated in algebra/geometry/trig classes and served with the administrators on “yard duty,” arriving by 7:15 a.m. and leaving for the final meeting at 4 p.m. Incidentally, the principal-for-a-day program began four years ago with about 60 CEOs; the growth has been phenomenal. I would estimate closer to 600 will participate next year. The good part is that the public schools will have a large number of community leaders much more aware of the quality of education in Orange County.

Most of Orange County’s K-12 students can list their street addresses, but there are many children attending our classes who come from no identifiable address--the homeless children of homeless parents who live from park to park, day to day or week to week, and they may need public education most of all.

Without an adequate education, they could be a lifetime burden on society. Our Project H.O.P.E. (Homeless Outreach Program for Education) includes a classroom-on-wheels van traveling with computers, textbooks, a credentialed teacher and everything else found in a local classroom, with one exception: a telephone with an 800 number that allows the parents and the teacher to keep in touch, wherever their location.

California’s compulsory education law requires children to be in school from age 6 to 18 or high school graduation, and it does not exclude children who have no home. The Orange County Department of Education is doing its part to educate the next generation in this nationally cited program, and we’re proud of it.

Among those students most of the public never hear about are almost 20,000 in our department’s special programs. Many are the severely disabled and the hearing impaired, others fill the Juvenile Court schools at “the hall,” community day schools, and places such as Los Pinos and Joplin, supervised by the probation department and taught by our credentialed teachers.

Patience Project helps children from birth to age 3 prenatally exposed to drugs who, with their parents, have been referred by social service agencies as directed by the courts. Our longitudinal studies will give us enough data to learn the ongoing impact of the drugs on these children as they grow up. Right now, it is too early to tell.

Many other young children enroll in the department’s child care preschool program at our 12 sites. Add to these young children the students who school districts refer to us, the adolescents who have lost the right to attend regular high schools, then transferred to continuation high school and still don’t fit. Many, given one more chance, ultimately graduate from Horizon High School, a series of storefront locations scattered throughout Orange County.

The Outdoor Science and Environmental Field Study are OCDE programs as well, and we opened a whole new world to more than 46,000 elementary children last year alone.

We’re good, but not good enough. But our public schools are making measurable progress. It is Public Schools Month. Visit a class or two, and learn for yourself the high quality of education in Orange County.