8 EDCAL January 28, 2019
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assistant/vice principal
✪ Soledad Unified School District—Assistant Principal, High School Soledad Unified
School District Seeks qualified applicants for the following certificated management
position for the 2018/2019 School Year: Title: Assistant Principal (9-12) Work Year: 205
Work Location: Soledad High School Site Enrollment: 1,441 Deadline to apply: 2/15/2019.
✪ Yuba City Unified School District—Assistant Principal (K-5/K-8) Pool Yuba
City Unified School District (YCUSD), is seeking a strong administrator with excellent
leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills. Salary: $79,521 - $109,980 per
year (plus $1,800 for MA degree and $5,000 for Doctorate) 8 hrs per day/200 days per
year. Deadline: February 4, 2019. Please apply online at www.edjoin.org. Completed
application must include a cover letter, resume, and three letters of recommendation.
Contact information: Michael Reed, Assistant Superintendent-Human Resources. Yuba
City Unified School District, 750 Palora Avenue, Yuba City, CA 95991. (530) 822-7630
[email protected].
coordinator
✪ Martinez Unified School District—Coordinator, Technology Services Salary:
$113,269-$133,321 plus MA/PhD/Mileage Stipends Work Year: 225 days(12 months) ADA:
4132 County: Contra Costa Grades TK-12 Closing Date: February 8, 2019 Contact: Alex
Birdsell, HR Coordinator 925-335-5912. [email protected] Apply online at:
www.edjoin.org
other
✪ Small School Districts’ Association—SSDA Executive Director Responsible for
overseeing administration, implementing programs, and following the strategic plan/
mission of the organization. Salary: Competitive and negotiable. Deadline: February 28,
2019 - 5:00 p.m. More information: Debra Pearson (530) 415-1152 (cell); (916) 662-7212
(office); [email protected]; www.ssda.org/jobs.
District turns the page on empathy with innovative book club
The Hermosa Beach City School
District, serving the small beachside city
of Hermosa Beach, has created a unique
program to focus the fostering empathy
throughout the entire community via an
innovative year-long book club concept.
“Faced with the challenge of a nation-
wide landscape that is often focused on neg-
ative aspects of social behavior, we started
thinking about what we could do to teach
the children in our district a healthier way
to approach and understand the world,”
said Superintendent Patricia Escalante. “We
believe that the best way to support all
children is to shift the thinking across the
whole community by cultivating a culture
of empathy.”
The district partnered with Beach Cities
Health District to form a Social Emotional
Wellness Committee populated with parent
organization leaders, community represen-
tatives, educators and HBCSD administra-
tors to brainstorm how to achieve that goal.
The result is The Hermosa Beach
Empathy Project, an idea generated by a
parent, that evolved into a book club for
adults and children that brings the com-
munity together for insightful reading and
fruitful discussion on the topic of empathy.
UnSelfie, authored by Michele Borba,
was selected as the first book for the pro-
gram. It explains how parents, educators, and
students can combat the growing empathy
crisis through a nine-step empathy-building
program with tips to guide kids from birth
through college and beyond.
“We invited everyone in our city; civic
leaders, residents, parents, business owners,
educators, and children, to consider the
book as their summer read,” Escalante said.
“We let everyone know we would be gather-
ing as a community throughout the 2018-
19 school year to discuss the ideas in the
book and how to shift away from the ‘selfie’
culture to work together towards a more
compassionate and accepting perspective.”
Discussion guides were provided to help
parents jumpstart the conversation with
their little readers at home. Margot Parker,
an educational leader with more than 20
years in counseling and school adminis-
tration was selected to lead the book club
meetings, which were open to the entire
community.
The first of these meetings took place
on a Tuesday evening in October in the
Hermosa Valley School library. The event
attracted a strong turnout who were led in
discussions and activities related to the first
four chapters of the book, which focused on
the concept of developing empathy.
“You could tell the gathering had an
impact with attendees because when it ended
nobody headed for the exit,” Escalante said.
“Instead everyone stood around together
and continued the conversation deeper into
the night.”
It is HBCSD’s hope that the conversa-
tion will continue to spread throughout the
community. Visit HBCSD.org for more
information on the project, events, and
where to pick up a copy of UnSelfie.
This article was submitted by Hermosa
Beach SD.
How do students and parents perceive school safety?
By Jack McDermott and Won Suh
for Panorama Education, an ACSA
Partner4Purpose
In recent years, bullying and violence
have been at the forefront of media coverage
on school safety. Yet for the vast majority of
our nation’s schools, the learning environ-
ment is likely very safe.
Creating safe schools is becoming espe-
cially important, as a growing body of
research underscores that students learn
better when they feel safe.
How safe are our schools?
We decided to put this question to the
test. Our platform supports thousands of
schools through data analytics and feedback
surveys. Many of these surveys focus on key
topics of school climate like safety. With
tens of thousands of data points, we can
gain a broader and more quantitative view
on the perceptions of our school’s stake-
holders.
For our analysis, we chose to look at per-
ceptions of school safety between parents
and students.
In doing so, one might expect to find
that parents would respond to survey ques-
tions about school safety less favorably than
students since parents engage with more
media than their children.
After analyzing more than 59,000 sur-
veys, here’s what we found:
Through statistical analysis of survey
data in 117 schools nationwide, students
perceived school safety 9 percent less favor-
ably than parents. This figure indicates a
gap between how students feel about safety
in their schools, and how parents feel about
safety in these same schools. This trend
continues across 62 percent of the schools
in our study, which represent a mixed socio-
economic, geographic, and racial composi-
tion from both urban and suburban com-
munities.
If students perceive school as less safe
than parents, then how do individual stu-
dents compare with one another? We
might expect to see differences in percep-
tions between female and male students.
However, based on our analysis girls and
boys viewed school safety virtually the same
(88.3 percent and 88.2 percent favorable,
respectively) in those schools where gender-
specific data exists. Interestingly, where a
statistically valid disparity exists between
genders, male students felt school was less
safe than female students.
The good news is that both students and
parents perceive their schools as being very
safe. Taken together, students and parents
view school safety as favorable 91 percent of
the time. Yet there’s still significant room to
improve the safety of our schools.
Why does it matter?
This analysis of school safety survey
questions raises several important questions.
For one, it suggests that parents may not
always share the same perceptions of school
safety as students. But it also tells us that a
smaller, yet sizable number of students don’t
view school as safe – despite the favorable
ratings of the parents and students around
them.
What percentage of parents and students respond
favorably to survey items on school safety?
Above all, if we truly want to develop
safe learning environments for all our stu-
dents, then it’s vital to start a conversation
about how students and parents view ques-
tions like school safety.
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