Immersion Program needs answers

To whom it may concern,

 

     First and foremost I am not fast at typing, so this will take me a while, couple that with the fact that this is my last day to be here with my family before I depart to Alaska for the summer, should show that this is important to me.

 

I attended Naselle School K-12.  I attended Kindergarten roundup here recently because I now have a child, Jason Gardner, who I intended on sending to Naselle K-12.  The main reason I attended was because, to my limited and fresh understanding, my wife and I need to now make a decision on an alternate form of education that is going to be offered, that I knew nothing about a month ago.  I had heard about it in the past, but was under the impression that the program was “dead in the water” quite a while ago (1 year ago).  Please understand that even though I have lived here in Naselle nearly all my life, my interaction, and involvement with the School district has been zero for the past 22 years since I graduated in 1991.  I can see that needs to change.  This resurgence of the immersion program was brought to my attention just prior to the school board meeting that passed the immersion program.  I worked 87 hours the week that the meeting was, and from 8 am to midnight in Astoria shipyard the particular day the meeting was held, and was not able to attend.  I believe that there are a few people who are blindly pushing this program forward, who are inadvertently so wrapped up in promoting this program that they forget to spend any effort to communicate what is really even going on at the school to all of those who it will affect.  They are self serving in a public domain.  I found it somewhere between comforting and disturbing that there were a handful of parents who were completely blindsided by the immersion program at the Kindergarten roundup.  Comforting in that at least I was not completely behind the curve of information, but disturbing in that such a stark change to such a longstanding status quo went so unadvertised especially to those it will directly affect.

 

    The kindergarten roundup presentation on the immersion program I felt was a complete disaster.  My wife Crystal, who is in support of this program, agreed.  It was choppy, non-informative, and there were no answers to any questions, just vagary and confusion, with a blind message attached “this is a good thing”.   With the marine repair job behind me that will sustain my household, I was able to attend the school board meeting May 31.  Being so far behind the curve, as I Am, I expected to attend as an informative session for my own education as to what is going on.   What I experienced is another thing altogether.  Below are some of the things I gathered.  At the time, I was gathering information and had no real time to process and voice a clear opinion.  I was disturbed to find out that the very school board that had given the green light on this program had made that decision on misinformation, and were unaware of logistics or cost.  My child is not a guinea pig and if there is not a well thought out fact based plan that has clear and achievable logistics and approved funding I believe that a failsafe status quo should be reinstated.   Supporters of the program, will say “you can opt out".  Very true, but this does not mean my child's experience will be unaffected.  I have given a lot of thought to the long term psychological effects of splitting children and educating them differently, and to be quite honest, I don’t believe that anyone knows how that cause will effect the individuals psyche.  It would seem to me that our culture has been pushing away from “class based” segregation for a long time now and this seems to go against that train of thought.  If implemented, there will be two classes of the same kids.  Will one become the “gifted”, and the others the “dumb”? Will one group be the “oddballs” and the other the “regulars”?   I don’t know the answer and would not believe anyone who claims to.... but time will tell, and I believe it could have longstanding negative effects on the children on both ends of the spectrum.  That will come term a decade from now as these kids begin to become adults.  Once again, my child is not a guinea pig.  I would really like to see him receive the quality education that I believe Naselle has been offering for a long time (Status Quo).

 

    At this Friday's meeting, I heard public voice “selling” the program with the pitch “this is the kind of thing that will draw in students, and that’s what we need here”.  The school board members’ Eyes turned into dollar signs as their heads ever so gently agreed in a slow but noticeable nod.  I believe this to be nothing more than a misguided enticement.  I Agree that this probably would bring in some students from outlying areas.  Having that said, it would make the class larger, thus minimizing the impact or interface my child will have with an educator.  I’m not going to waste the time to research, and am going to go out on a limb and make a bold assumption.  I would be willing to bet that there are studies that show that test scores go down as class size goes up, pertaining to the class sizes we are talking about here.  This whole program is being sold to the public as  “all studies show kids through these programs outscore kids that don’t.  I wonder how these two factors will offset one another? Net gain? or net loss?  I don’t know.  If I had real numbers to work with, I could calculate with my non emersion schooling.  This brings me to my next thought.  Real numbers, it seems as though there seems to be a lack of.

 

     I am not one hundred percent against this program.  If I am going to be for it, I need to be reassured that we, at Naselle, can and will take the commitment necessary to see this thing through.  I don’t remember the exact words, but I heard Karen Wirkkala state that if this program is not followed through with that it will be a handicap or a detriment to their learning curve.  It is one thing to plant a seed, and set back and hope for the best.  I of all people understand never “holding back in fear” and “reaching for the stars”, and “take the chance” train of thought.  But having that said, what I experienced at that meeting is ludicrous at best.  It seemed to me that the board was looking to the Administration for answers to logistics and cost for next years implementation...... of something they had already approved.........................................  Talk about the cart before the horse............. and that’s not the real alarming part.   I cannot believe that everyone in that room is so short sighted as to not be asking the questions that really need to be asked.  Questions like:

1)  Can we logistically manage having at bare minimum three new class rooms, a total of nine for K-5 in six years?

2)  Can we afford at bare minimum three new teachers a total of nine for K-5, six years form now

       a) with grant assistance

       b) without grant assistance

     It seems irritating to me that the questions that are being asked are all about next year and that decisions are being made only thinking of next year, when we know that it comes with a high risk of harm to the participants if the program cannot “come to bloom”.    It is easy to get a seed to sprout, and it seems like that is all anyone is concerned with.  Blissfully ignoring the fact that if that sprout cannot take root and be nurtured it will wither and die.  I believe as the “gate keepers of this garden”  that the School Board look long and hard if they have the resources available to do this program justice, anything short of that would be dereliction of duty.  Does this seed belong in this garden?  Is this program sustainable??  The impact will be negative if it is not.  Sustainability, hmm... my next thoughts...

 

     I keep hearing these quaint catch phrases associated with the program like “wonderful opportunity”.  When spoken they are really attractive, magnetic, they draw people like a bee drawn to a flower.  The reality is when spoken they are opinion even though most the time they are presented as fact.....  “this will be a wonderful opportunity”  in this case it is inferred, but not spoken that this is ones belief.  It is clever.  It is manipulation.  It is not factual.  I believe our society is filled too much with this political rhetoric and wish people would look more to fact based catch phrases like “Sustainability”.

  For the most part things either are or are not sustainable.  I hear people pitch “China is where it will be” “China, China, China”, “We need to be able to trade with China”,  therefore we need programs like this.  Fact:  Our trade today with China is bankrupting this nation.

         Fact:  Our trade with China starts with borrowed money and ends with an IOU.

         Fact:  Our trade with China is unsustainable, we cannot really even afford the interest payment on that debt anymore, let alone principal.

         Fact:  Our dollar is not worth what it should be as a direct result of this debt.  Thus devaluing the dollars I have earned with my life.

My extrapolated conclusion is that our habits of being engaged with trade with China has ripped me off, along with everyone who owns a dollar, or any form of it.  If I were retired or near it, I would be really mad about this.  But for now I do the hustle keeping up with inflation along the way.  

The Question I ask is should I condone, or stimulate this cancerous activity between us and them with my own child's education?

It is very surprising to me that it seems that the majority of the individuals who are blindly in support of this program are also for the most part the same “buy local”, “shop local”,”think local not global” types, as it seems a grave contradiction.  The only thing that is fueling this Global economy that we find ourselves amuck in today is cheap non-renewable energy, without it the think local will once again  emerge as a way of life.  Its what we do between now and then that will make the difference, how much is left here for us to bless our future generations with.

 

     Thinking locally.  Its really hard for me as a parent to sign my child up for something that could if fully fledged make him smarter, but leave him innately handicapped by learning about the physical, mechanical, biological world he exists in in metric.   I know that thirty years ago the USA and Burma, (a third world inward facing country somewhere) were the only two places not using the metric system.   There was a big push to convert the US to metric.....  I can remember hearing our president of the time making proclamation that by a not so far off date “we were switching”.  Well, that came and went.  If you buy Bananas today its in lbs., lumber its in inches and feet,  and thus pressure is in PSI across the industries and trades.  I do not relish to be a dinosaur, I just am, right along side each and almost everyone else here that lives in the USA.  I fear that the majority of these kids we are talking about will need to integrate into this society and our quirky way of measuring our surroundings, and that they will not have a sound understanding of what we all take for granted... being able to fluidly talk about these fundamental measures of our surroundings.  I may be wrong, but I have never seen a metric fraction.   It may be contrived as selfish on my part and I may be guilty, but I do want to be able to fluidly communicate with my own child, and as he gets older about the things that I and possibly he will deal with on a daily basis.

 

      I believe Naselle is not a good match for this program, not because it its where I live, but because of our school size.  The way I see this program working even with its inherent handicaps I have mentioned, is with full implementation.  This requires enough students to fill the opt in and the opt out classrooms.  In a school with a not full classroom to start with, it just is financially unsound.

That’s great that this works in large schools.  The reason why is it fits better, economically. Here is why -  If you have 95 kids in one class or 195 kids in one class you take the opt ins and the opt outs and divide each set into classes of appropriate size,  you end up with the same (within one) number of classes as you would have if they were all in or all out.  Same is the same, no extra financial burden, no extra logistical burden.  Now having that understood as the total kids per grade falls the (within one) aspect begins to shift to “more than likely plus one”, and as soon as a school has less than one full classroom of kids it becomes a certainty of the plus one, in our case plus one half, as the room and the teacher can be “ recycled” to serve another grade for 1/2 the day.   This is so painfully obvious to me and I wish it were understood, that yes other places are doing it, but I highly doubt any other public school of our size is, just due to the sheer logistics and economics.   If it were a mandatory program, these problems would go away, but it isn’t, and these are real problems in the real world we exist.   

 

    Feel free anyone to pass this along to anyone interested, or reference in any way, public or private, I believe that there are a majority of people out there that feel intimidated to say “no this is not desirable”, for fear of offending someone else.  I urge everyone to speak their mind, only with full disclosure (communication) can we be the community that makes sound choices that are good for our future.   Reach for the stars, but keep solid footing and most important look before you leap.

Luke Gardner

 

PS 

an apology goes out to Mr. Wise on my grammar.