Helping Kids, in Sacramento and in the Classroom

Education has always been the game plan of state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), a former schoolteacher and Ventura College basketball star who has represented much of Ventura County in the state Assembly and Senate since 1982.

He has long been a champion of Cal State Channel Islands, the county’s first four-year public university now taking root in the former quarters of Camarillo State Hospital. Now he is turning his attention to a statewide ballot initiative to change the required margin for bond elections from two-thirds to a simple majority, which would make it easier for local districts to pass school construction bonds, among other things.

After the legislative session wrapped up recently, O’Connell met with Times editors to recap how it went. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

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Question: Give us your highlights of the just-ended session.

Answer: I would split this past year into thirds. The first third would be the special session on education, called by Gov. Gray Davis as one of his first acts. It forced us to focus on the issue and it elevated public attention. We passed four meaningful bills:

* One deals with accountability. You’ll be able to compare kindergarten through sixth-grade schools with other K-6 schools around the state; you’ll be ranked against yourself, with how you did the preceding year (based on test scores, student attendance and teacher attendance; and you’ll be ranked against schools of similar socioeconomic status, so you won’t have Beverly Hills K-6 being compared to Compton.

* The second was the peer review and teacher assistance bill. I’m a teacher, I taught here in Ventura County for five years and I’ve always thought that it didn’t make a lot of sense for the principal to come in, observe for 15 or 20 minutes a year and try to come up with a meaningful evaluation. It was asking too much for a principal to evaluate a chemistry teacher one period, a history teacher the next period, then maybe the wood shop teacher, etc. Instead, now we’re going to have teachers evaluating teachers, much like we do in higher education. I frankly think they’re going to be more critical than an administrator. And with the teaching assistance component, we’ll be able to improve the quality of that teacher, which is very important.

* The third bill is [for] more money for early reading, so people learn to read and read to learn. We’re putting more money in earlier. That’s going to be a good program, with almost $200 million.

* And the fourth bill is the high school exit exam. I was the author of that one. As a condition of graduation, beginning in the year 2004, you’ll have to pass the high school exit exam. The only downside, for me, is that our daughter graduates in the year 2004, so she wasn’t happy and neither were her peers. But I think it’s going to help us focus on what we need to focus on: language arts and math. It’s going to help us focus on those students who need the help, to get them into some of these tutorial programs, Saturday morning programs, after school programs.

And we’ve got some class-size reduction for the high schools.

Q: What’s your guess on how many kids who would normally graduate will now not graduate because of this test?

A: Looking at other states, the first time they took the test about half failed. The way we have it thought through, you can take the test as many times as it’s offered. You can start taking it in ninth grade. You must start taking it in 10th grade. And you can take it until you pass.

In Georgia and Texas, when they instituted exit exams, it began with about half passing and now they’re up to about 80%.

Q: What happens to the 20% who can’t pass?

A: They don’t receive a high school diploma but they can continue to take the exit exam even after their senior class graduates. You can go ahead and enroll in a community college, which is not dependent on having a high school diploma. But we think the exit exam will make the diploma mean more in the future than it’s worth today, and I think that’s healthy for the business community. I’ve always thought it was a good idea.

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So that was the first third of our session--January, February, March. Then we shifted into the budget. The budget passed on time (well, on time for us--just 17 hours late). On June 16 we sent the whole thing to the governor: $63 billion, with a modest reserve of almost a billion dollars.

Education was a big winner, with about 6.5% more money. It was $455 million that went out to school districts on a straight per-student basis, no strings attached, so there was considerable discretionary funding at the district level.

And then some of the programs that I worked on were fully funded. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that I’m the budget committee chair for education [grin] but class-size reduction is very important to me. For high school freshmen, there are now two periods where the school district will be reimbursed at a higher rate if they keep the class to 20 students. One class must be English and the other has to be a basic subject.

I mentioned the teacher shortage. It was my idea last year to try to put in place a mechanism to raise teacher salaries. And we also had $134 million that districts can use either for textbooks or to extend the school year by a few days.

Then we did $100 million, frankly as a result of the Columbine High School tragedy, for school security. Districts get a certain amount of money per student in grades 8 though 12 to use for security--fences, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, counselors, classes in conflict resolution or anger management--that would all qualify under our safety program.

Q: Do you expect we’ll be seeing more anger management classes in schools?

A: I hope there are some contracts let with counselors, assemblies. I think that would be a good use of the money. But it’s up to local school districts.

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So that was the middle third of the year. And I’d say the final third was the last month. It was a flurry of bills and now everything is on the governor’s desk--around 1,000 bills. He’s going to sift through them and decide what to sign.

Q: Why is the land conservation bill proving so hard to pass?

A: My biggest disappointment was the failure of that measure, SB 680. I have great support--I mean the world is in support. But the chair of the appropriations committee [Carole Migden, D-San Francisco] is against it, and she’s been able to defeat me on it every year. She doesn’t understand it, and I don’t think her staff understands it.

It would save the state money. For every million dollars we spend to purchase land, this would save the state 45% because it’s just not enough of an incentive, having a 35% federal deduction available. If we could leverage that with a 55% tax credit, we could buy the land for 55% of the actual cost. . . . But I haven’t been able to get the appropriations committee staff in the Assembly to fully understand that. I’m very frustrated. The Farm Bureau has been great [in its support]; the builders want it. . . . The governor’s a strong supporter, and I suspect you’re going to see this in the governor’s budget come January.

In terms of accomplishments, we’ve done some significant HMO [health maintenance organization] reform. We passed a bill requiring mental health parity, a mandate for insurance companies to provide mental health coverage.

Another bill: Women historically are paying over 60% more out-of-pocket costs associated with health care than men, and so there are requirements for insurance companies to cover contraceptives, to try to reduce those costs for women.

And lastly, there will be four general obligation bonds on the ballot: a park bond, over $2 billion; a safe drinking water and flood-control bond measure, about $1.9 billion; a bond for veterans homes, and Ventura County is in line to get one of those in the next couple of years; and a bond measure for crime labs.

A couple of weeks ago we handed in 1.2 million signatures calling for a simple majority vote for school bonds. This is designed to change the way we build schools. We have a $40-billion need in California over the next 10 years for school construction. We’re expecting 100,000 more students, and 60% of our schools are 30 years old or older. And so if we’re going to accommodate growth, modernize our schools and [be able to] do more class-size reduction, then we desperately need the simple majority vote.

It’s going to be a nuclear war on the ballot in March. A friend of mine who works for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. thanked me for increasing their membership 20% already--I don’t know if I should laugh or pull the chair out from under him. That measure would solve the school facilities problem. You could build schools to your own unique educational needs, with local control.

Q: On Cal State Channel Islands, what do you see now as the major challenges for you personally, and how important is it that you’re now dealing with Gov. Davis?

A: It’s great having Gov. Davis there. He is a strong proponent of the further development of the campus, no question about it.

For me personally, the challenge is making sure that the resources are going to be there. They’ve talked about as much as $10 million in the budget. I don’t know if we’ll get all of that but we need to make sure we get the majority of that to continue the development and prepare for that campus to be a free-standing, degree-granting university in 2002-2003. I keep pushing the envelope. They had initially talked about 2004-2005; we have them now up to 2002.

Q: Looking ahead to the coming year, what are your major goals?

A: My first priority is going to be the ballot initiative changing the margin for bond elections from two-thirds to simple majority. In Sacramento, we do a lot of tinkering. We spend time on budget things that affect only one year. But the most fundamental reform we’ll see in a decade will be the simple majority vote measure for school bonds.

And then I want to continue our work on class-size reduction, try to improve the quality of the teaching force that’s out there. We had 30,000 teachers last year in the state teaching without a final credential, so we need to address that. And we’ve started, with an increase in pay. We have some loan forgiveness programs.

We need to utilize our school facilities better. I’ve always been critical of the schools for not having more preschool and after-school at the school site. The kids ought to be able to stay at that site in the morning, early--7 a.m., 6:30, especially in L.A. with long commute times.

Q: What do you think is the biggest weakness right now in the schools?

A: It’s hard to say but I’m so committed to facilities that I would have to point to that. Not only are our schools old and in disrepair many times, but I’ve seen restrooms that I would no go into.

They’re not preparing kids for the next century, with enough computers and access to the Internet. There’s a school in this district that I took [state Supt. of Public Instruction] Delaine Eastin to last year--Paso Robles, a good school district--and they told us it’s an old building, 100 years old. Upstairs, if all six classrooms use the electrical outlets at the same time they blow a fuse. We’re not talking about computers, we’re talking a TV or a projector. So I would say facilities.

But then, also, all teaching approaches don’t work for all kids. We need to have a more individualized and personalized instruction. We have to know that inner-city kids have more challenges than kids in Beverly Hills or Ventura.

Some of the services that are available to these kids should be broadened: mental health tests, appropriate counseling. If you want to see statewide test scores go up, that’s where we have to focus, on the bottom 50%. And we’re doing that too.