Looking Forward to a Better One for Antioch

Many things occurred in Antioch this past year, some good, some not so good, and some bad.

We’ll start with The Bad – 12 murders. Five in December. Not a way to end off the year. Of course, I believe there’s a direct correlation to the 22 vacancies for sworn police officers, as well as the 23 Community Service Officers who were all laid off, in addition to the six officers recently given layoff notices, but who for now still have their jobs.

City revenues continued to decline. More budget cuts had to be made and more staff members laid off.

More people lost their homes to foreclosure, and more people were in need of food and clothing in Antioch.

Then there was The Not So Good. There was no 4th of July celebration or fireworks due to the lack of city funds. So the Council canceled them before seeking private funds. By the time a private group starting raising the funds and pursuing the effort, many of the police officers who would normally be in town that day and night had made other plans to be out of town. So it wasn’t to be this year.

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I want to thank everyone who voted in our last election. As a first-time candidate, I was impressed by the turnout. We all need to remember that voting is essential for our freedoms. Even if you didn’t support me with your vote, you supported our basic freedom to choose.

The school board has a task set before it that we all need to keep watch on. It is never enough to vote someone into office, but we must watch and question when those ideals we voted for are not put into practice.

Thank you, Antioch, for keeping freedom alive.

Jack Yeager

The signs of UC Berkeley’s relative decline are clear: Cal tumbles from 2nd best in the world. In 2004, for example, the London-based Times Higher Education ranked UC Berkeley the second leading research university in the world, just behind Harvard; in 2009 that ranking had tumbled to 39th place.

When UC Berkeley announced its elimination of baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse teams and its defunding of the national-champion men’s rugby team, the chancellor sighed, “Sorry, but this was necessary!”

But was it? Yes, the university is in dire financial straits. Yet $3 million was somehow found to pay the Bain consulting firm to uncover waste and inefficiencies in UC Berkeley, despite the fact that a prominent East Coast university was doing the same thing without consultants.

Essentially, the process requires collecting and analyzing information from faculty and staff. Apparently, senior administrators at UC Berkeley believe that the faculty and staff of their world-class university lack the cognitive ability, integrity, and motivation to identify millions in savings. If consultants are necessary, the reason is clear: the chancellor, provost, and president have lost credibility with the people who provided the information to the consultants. Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau has reigned for eight years, during which time the inefficiencies proliferated. Even as Bain’s recommendations are implemented (“They told me to do it”, Birgeneau), credibility and trust problems remain.

Bain is interviewing faculty, staff, senior management and the academic senate leaders for $150 million in inefficiencies, most of which could have been found internally. One easy-to-identify problem, for example, was wasteful procurement practices such as failing to secure bulk discounts on printers. But Birgeneau apparently has no concept of savings: even in procuring a consulting firm, he failed to receive proposals from other firms.

Students, staff, faculty, and California legislators are the victims of his incompetence. Now that sports teams are feeling the pinch, perhaps the California Alumni Association, benefactors and donators, and the UC Board of Regents will demand to know why Birgeneau is raking in $500,000 a year despite the abdication of his responsibilities.

The author, who has 35 years’ consulting experience, has taught at University of California Berkeley, where he was able to observe the culture and the way the senior management operates.

Milan Moravec
Chief Executive Officer
Moravec and Associates
http://www.Moravecglobal.com

Walnut Creek PD Sgt Tom Cashion’s 5 year old daughter is fighting cancer. She has already had surgery at Kaiser and is now taking chemotherapy. She has been referred to Stanford Medical Center for follow up.

The out of pocket expenses for the family have reached crisis stages not to mention that they have 4 kids and only one income. We have put together an event to assist the family with those expenses. Could you please help us pass the word?

Also if you want to participate the family would greatly appreciate it. To purchase tickets or make a tax deductable donation please go to: http://www.ismcnorcal.com/ISMC/Events.html. Some businesses and POA’s are purchasing an entire 9 seat table for the event. We really need to sell this out, the family really needs our help.

Mike Schneider
mcschneider@comcast.net

Has political correctness run amok? Consider the secular battle cry over Yuletide expressions; ‘Christmas tree’ or ‘holiday tree’; robust ‘merry Christmas’ or neutered ‘happy holidays’? Folks are cussing, not kissing, under the mistletoe over nomenclature, caught in a wintry cultural war swirling around innocent holiday semantics.

Call this a tyranny of the minority as, tellingly, 84% of Americans are Christian and 96% celebrate Christmas. Mr. Retailer, freely call your trees whatever. That’s your merchandising right. It’s also my consumer right to take my business to a vendor unembarrassed by the word Christmas. Pointedly, what elitist would likely drag a pine to the top of their ivory tower? Heaven forbid, the act might interrupt their incessant whining and cause a dreaded momentary spell of light heartedness.

As for calling out happy holidays, Hannukah, Kwanza or Ramadan, be my guest; indulge me my ‘merry Christmas!’ I’m also continuing with ‘happy New Year.’ Following the Roman tradition isn’t affronting the Babylonian, Baha’i, Balinese, Chinese, Coptic, Islamic, Mayan, Persian or, for that matter, Sports Illustrated calendar. Graciously, then, spare the sanctimonious indignation. My cultural links, family roots, and even plain common sense, scream bah humbug! to toasting an emotionally productive, disease free, economically advantageous, environmentally conscious, gender, race, religion and ethnicity neutral passing of the winter solstice.

Amidst shrill secularism, we forget Harry Truman’s words to Pope Pius XII in 1947; “this is a Christian nation”. America was, in truth, founded on Biblical principles. The genesis of the Bill of Rights is found in the teachings inspired by Exodus, Saint Matthew, Isaaha and Saint Paul. The Ten Commandments still rest on the wall behind the sitting Supreme Court Justices. Our coins still display the motto, “In God we trust”. The President still swears his oath of office on a Bible. Congress is still convened with prayer.

Though nobody is imposing a public religion, that doesn’t exclude faith from our resplendent national tapestry.

Friends, appropriate parting sentiments from Charles Dickens ‘Christmas Carol’; “I don’t know what to do! cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. I am as light as a feather. I am happy as an angel. I am as merry as a school boy. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world.”

Walter Ruehlig

I am amazed at the glaring differences between our city and the city five miles west. That city’s government and chamber of commerce is innovative and progressive.

The amount of events and activities for the citizens of Pittsburg is amazing, considering the current financial crises that we are experiencing. Subscribe to Pittsburg’s website and be enlightened.

Pittsburg manages using ideas, opportunities, significant citizen input (not ignored) and action to improve its environment.  The community is a bit smaller than Antioch but it is much more aggressive on improvements embracing change. If you attend a function in that city you will experience the impact of how they manage by asking any active citizen; and they are active. I applaud their Council and Chamber  for the work being done. Good job, we should all give them a hand!

The city of Antioch might think of working closer with Pittsburg’s management to discover how they make things happen while we remain stagnant and regressive. At least regressive in respect to city-sponsored, supportive events and our Chamber’s active campaigns to attract more business; example, the Wal-Mart expansion fiasco. Where is our management’s push for improvements?

I realize that our budget is not something that will not be simply solved overnight or perhaps for years. What I have not seen is any action to raise money other than a failed sales tax measure. We are now applying event charges on non-profits, which is a slap in their face since their events supplant city-sponsored withdrawals. From my perspective when funds are short we head backwards.

Why not increase events with reasonable cost for attendance, instead of taxing our citizens? That would be  giving our citizens something for their money and offer more community participation. Too much cost to manage? Ever think of volunteers or the Chamber of Commerce ? The folks to the west are good at that! 

Fred Hoskins

A contingent of Antioch leaders, representing our school, city council, business and community sectors, recently returned from a grant-funded trip to Nashville, Tennessee to see first-hand a city that has come together full-bore for career-based education. Our delegation, which included Superintendent of Schools Dr. Donald Gill and Mayor Jim Davis, toured some of Nashville’s academies and heard details of a successful blueprint from a Mayor who walks the reform talk. He stressed that a city really has three main priorities; education, safety and economic vitality and that engaging youth can affect all three. Good schools keep kids off the streets. They help real estate prices. They attract businesses, industry and the well to do.

The take away was two-fold; we realized that in many ways we are already doing things in Antioch that are ahead of the pack regionally and nationally. We also realized, though, that we can push yet further and broader. Nashville’s model is intriguing and provocative. They have a ‘wall to wall’ concept. There’s is a city-wide alliance of school, council and business partners. They offer no opt out as every student has to elect a pathway. Lest you consider that restricting, consider that this City-County of 600,000 offers an astonishing 49 academy choices. There is, then, literally a seat at the table for every student. The proof, as always, is in the pudding. Strikingly, Nashville test scores, graduation rates, college admissions and attendance all confirm a positive direction.

Obviously, Antioch is not the size of Nashville. We have unique needs and different funding mechanisms than they. Nevertheless, the trip stirred ideas. We here have, of course, come along ways on our current path of what is now called linked education and was, in previous incarnations, called vocational education, career tech and alternate pathways. We have medical, law and criminal justice, performing arts, EDGE (Environmental Design for Green Energy), business and space and science academies.

The exciting thing with these theme-based schools is that we have gone beyond just throwing into the elective mix some vocational class. Firstly, the curriculum at our Academies is rigorous. We are University of California, A-G requirement, driven. Our goal is to prepare all of our students to have the option of either transitioning to college or to entering workforce training.

Also, our curriculum is integrated. For example, a Law and Criminal Justice Academy student might study “To Kill a Mockingbird” in literature; write legal briefs or essays in composition; discuss or debate constitutional law in history; and use algebraic formulas to determine a driver’s speed by the brake marks.

Originally, our intention was to build out to where 50% of our student body could elect academies. Nashville has us thinking, though. It’s a heady venture we’ve been on with the sky the limit. Attendance is up at our academies; the Dozier Libbey Medical Academy hit 820 API last year; and the Delta Performing Arts Academy shot up an incredible 78 points. An emphasis on unstinting expectations, targeted interests and smaller learning environments is working. Of course, this is part of an overall reform movement which emphasizes parent involvement, teacher morale, aggressive staff recruitment, standardized curriculum objectives, early-on interventions, best teaching practices, teacher mentoring, pacing guides and periodic data-driven assessments,

Rigor, relevance and relationship is, after all, the paradigm of the future. This is the information age and critical thinking and collaboration skills are crucial objectives if we are to not lose out to our global competitors. We have been losing ground for decades as places like South Korea, Singapore and Finland outpace us. Thirty percent of our kids drop out. We score 17th for industrialized nations in math-science scores and ninth in overall college readiness. For those lamenting the good old days, remember that even in the ’30s and ’40s 70% of our kids didn’t graduate; in the ’60s our educational crisis bannered ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read?’; in the ’90s a Presidential Commission called us a ‘Nation at Risk’. The problems have been there; it is just higher stakes now.

This is certainly a race we can’t afford to lose – not in Antioch and not in America. The agricultural and factory-based educational system developed in the Henry Ford days, where 10-15% of the students (generally white, male and middle class) were educated for business leadership, the rest for basic citizenship, won’t work in this global, tech-driven economy. It takes a new seed to raise a new crop. Linked education has shown that it can play a major role in that break-through promise. As a unified community, committed to our youth, we can make this happen. Antioch can have parents knocking on the door to get in to our community. We can blossom into a true destination point.

Walter Ruehlig

Vice President, AUSD Board of Trustees