On March 18th, the Alameda Education Foundation launched its “Step Up” public awareness campaign. There’s a method to our madness.
I remember when Kevin Lee, owner of Wrecking Ball ad agency, first showed me the concept boards for the campaign last September. I had just taken the Executive Director position at AEF. I knew it would take the commitment and passion of an entire community to make this campaign happen.
I wasn’t wrong – it did, and Alameda didn’t let us down.
This campaign is about putting a face on what is lost when we make cuts to public education. Governor Schwarzegger is proposing a suspension of Prop 98 – the CA constitutional guarantee that secures funding for our public schools. He’s also proposing cuts to the money we need to spend this year.
Our Alameda schools have already suffered $7.7 million in budget reductions and cuts in the past 7 years. Now we are being asked to suffer $4.5 million in reductions in one year’s time.
These cuts are impossible to sustain without significant damage to our community — damagefrom which we may never completely recover.
We face the loss of our athletic programs, elementary music education, loss of small class sizes and Advanced Placement programs, loss of teachers and staff, and closures of our treasured neighborhood schools.
There must be another way. I refuse to believe that the state budget crisis is to be born on the backs of our children.
The “Step Up” campaign aims to put a face on what is lost when Sacramento talks about “budget line items.” When we take away school funding we lose real coaches, real teachers, real futures for our kids.
Despite constant funding stressors, our district had managed to have a $1 million surplus as of last December. Our community has high performing schools that win awards on the state and national levels. It has teachers and staff who have continued to work their hearts out while being paid much less than surrounding districts. And it has students who come to school daily and do their personal best, only to be told by their state that it is acceptable for their per student funding to be 17th of 17 in Alameda County.
We at the Alameda Education Foundation say enough is enough.
By using our community as an example, we seek to ask the broader questions of our state and nation: What are we doing when we throw away our public schools? What do we lose when we throw away the futures of our children? Who are the real people in our communities affected by these cuts? What does it say of a society when it is willing to gamble on its future? What kind of a workforce are we producing for ourselves?
It may be that access to public education returns us to prior days – and becomes once again, the leading civil rights issue of our time. While today we fight what might seem like an uphill battle, coming together, as we have, gives us power.
Yesterday’s launch of the “Step Up” public awareness campaign was the result of hundreds of volunteers – their time, their talents, their treasures. There are too many to thank here.
But thank you, all, for helping Alameda find her voice.
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