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Public Education in Mendocino County

February 1, 2009

The public education system is a critical issue for any jurisdiction. In Mendocino County we have all the usual problems, but we also have some that are somewhat peculiar to us. There are also opportunities here that the community has not taken pursued yet.

For public schools the first layer of oversight is the district school board. I served on the Point Arena District School Board for close to eight years, ending with 2007. That covered kindergarten through 12th grade on the southern Mendocino coast. My service was an education in and of itself. It could be argued that local boards, and therefore local communities, have little real control of their schools. Money comes in from local real estate taxes, from the State of California department of Education, and from the federal government. Almost all of the money has strings attached. The strings are well-meaning, but uncoordinated and fail to take into account specific problems specific schools are facing. Yet every program needs to be executed, and by providing the leadership to execute programs well, a school board will end up with much better schools than it would have with poor execution.

I have found that citizens, both parents and voters, don't understand that local government runs in parallel with, and not atop, local school boards. City councils and the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors can do very little for public education. There is no money in their budgets for it; they have their own pressing responsibilities. For the local school districts the next step up the food chain is the Mendocino County Office of Education, which has its own Superintendent and Board. The county office helps administer California programs. Because many of our rural schools have few students and teachers, the county office helps arrange for services that individual school districts can't provide for themselves.

Next up the chain is the California Department of Education. This is a substantial bureaucracy. In theory it administers under the governor a set of laws enacted by the California State Assembly and Senate. I sometimes think the kids would get a better education if the Department of Education simply left the school districts alone. On the other hand, there are clearly school districts in the state that need some outside supervision. I think many men and women have gone to the State Assembly and California Senate with the intention of improving public education, but the sausage that has emerged isn't fit for the inmates of the state prison system, much less our precious young students.

As to the federal government, its practice seems to be to give local schools just enough money to have an excuse to boss them around. School board members occasionally talk about refusing federal money and all the paperwork and nonsense that comes with it, but there is never quite enough local money to get the job done without federal help. Of course that help actually comes out of taxes paid to the federal government by local citizens.

The list of changes needed to make our K-12 public schools, and the tax dollars spent on them, is far to long to even sketch out in this introductory editorial. Look forward to Mendoday editorials on more specific education issues over time.

When kids graduate from high school in Mendocino County, the choices for education within the county are not great. This is not because of a lack of effort by 2 year community colleges. But to create a truly outstanding culture that values education in our county, we need to be served by a four year institution, either a University of California or a California State University. This idea has been derided or neglected by our Board of Supervisors, by our state-level representatives, and by our federal representatives. They are happy to take tax dollar from citizens of Mendocino County and then spend them elsewhere in California for higher education. This is an issue I will address at length in future editorials.

Mendoday is not just about editorial opinions. As we gear up our news organization, you can expect to see substantial improvement of the coverage of education issues in this county.

William P. Meyers