Desert Sun Academy is a Microcosm of What Plagues Cave Creek Unified

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."

— Mark Twain

The recent Cave Creek Unified governing board decision allowing the administration to expand Desert Sun from a K-5 to a K-8 will prove to be meaningless as far as achievement. There appears to be no plans to increase rigor or achievement or expand Core Knowledge beyond social studies and science. In the 2 years of CK at DSES, there has been no move to replace Everyday Math which the Core Knowledge Foundation frowns on. There has been no move away from the district reading program and its emphasis on quantity and whole language to Core Knowledge’s recommendations of content and decoding.

The proof is in the test scores that the district’s use of CK has not been good for achievement (and likely poorly used) as Desert Sun was the worst performing elementary school in the district last year.

Implementing the Desert Sun K-8 CK school is window dressing which will fool some incoming parents, but not the parents and students that the district needs. Even district parents were not beating down the variance door to get in at DSES. Additionally, with surrounding schools having Official Core Knowledge offerings, Primary\Middle School IB, Singapore Math, and STEM, implementing K-8 CK is just a drop in the bucket that will not stem the flow of students out of the district and will do little to improve achievement. Heck DVUSD just announced it is implementing preschool CK and expanding CK to three school.

So what is it about? This discussion is about how the this K-8 Academy represents everything that is wrong with the district and how nothing has changed despite new leadership and new governing board members.

Community (and Parent) Input is Not Welcome or Needed

So how did the administration arrive at its three ‘innovative’ solutions that included the K-8 academy. Well the district claims that it was done via a survey sent out by the School Size committee. We later come to find out that this survey was only sent to district parents (with a valid email) and select community cheerleaders. Additionally, the survey was posted for only about 5 days and it was never promoted outside of the district. Mr. Ledesma from the school size committee even stated that this survey was a starting point for discussions, not a decision making tool. It seemed like the school size committee had more work to do until…

Once the administration ON ITS OWN came up with its three ‘innovative’ solutions, which it then presented them to the governing board, this time with no promotion at all to parents or the community. It was just buried in the governing board agenda and packet. Nothing on the district web site , in the local media, on twitter and not even in the district or school newsletters and flyers. At the board meeting where the final approval was given we come to find out that it was intentionally kept secret from the parents AT DESERT SUN. Unbelievable. If you can't get information about significant changes like this to the parents and community, is it any wonder that elections don't pass and that the Sonoran News walks all over you. Sorry, but the district has lost all credibility on its community and parents relations and the board let it happen. How do we know the board let it happen? Because we emailed the board to complain about the lack of disclosure of these changes. One member replied that they agreed with out point and one emailed back to defend the lack of coverage, as if it was defensible.

Do the Minimum to Keep the Status Quo

Of the three solutions we of course predicted that this would be the one chosen, because it involves the least amount of work and maintains the status quo. CK is already in place and Desert Sun has plenty of room. Speaking of room, we advocated that DSES be closed due to it low enrollment. Now the K-8 academy takes DSES off the chopping block even if it would have resulted in bigger cost savings but of course it would have involved more work and more headaches for the administration having to redo boundaries and dealing with complaining elementary parents (middle school parents are a more docile and jaded bunch).

But the real proof of the status quo is in the selection of the K-8 Academy principal. If the administration really wanted to implement CK at DSES to its fullest and for the benefit of the students, it would have moved the BMES principal to DSES. This principal was a CK coordinator at Grayhawk and Pinnacle Peak and is a CK expert. Why isn't the district CK expert in charge of the CK school? So instead of doing what is best for the students, politics and the status quo rule (or should we say rue) the day.

Finally, the larger question that no one seems to ask is if Core Knowledge is so good and so inexpensive to implement, why not do it all of the district schools? Doesn’t every student in our district deserve the CK Four S’s? Every student does but, 1) it would be more changes to the status quo and 2) This academy isn’t really about student achievement. It is really about…

Follow the Money

Board meeting after board meeting the superintendent of district now sits in front of the board and declares that Cave Creek Unified is losing students and we need to get them back. The superintendent makes statements to the effect that these students (who are leaving) belong to the Cave Creek Unified District (our state given right!) and we must get them back. We hear about the district forming secret marketing committees and even hiring a new high school AD with a marketing background to help stem the losses. We can’t fathom how one of the board members won’t speak up and remind the superintendent that her job is to focus on the students we have, not the ones that are not here.

Of course the bottom line here is not achievement or excellence or rigor or college prep or mastery. The bottom line is money. With each student comes $5,000 to $7,000, and a bigger the empire. Money eases the burden and pressure to challenge the status quo. This K-8 academy solution is strictly a money grab to keep the money from flowing outside of the district and out of the reach of the administration. Even the netbooks promised to the (highly unlikely to open) prep academy students this fall smacks of a bribe to keep students here and to not lose them to FACP.

This isn’t new by any means. The governing board approved last year to continue to allow open enrollment into our already overcrowded high school, proving that our district is chasing dollars over serving our current students best.

Sound and Fury

So go ahead and call us district haters who never satisfied or call us terrorists like a governing board member did, but don’t say we didn’t offer solutions, suggestions, and options for improving our district. What is more likely is that you have a student in the district and this affects you more than us. You need to demand excellence from everything that this district does. Our district used to have the goal of being the best schools in the southwest. Now we don’t even have the best schools north of Bell Rd while some surrounding schools compete on at a global level. The K-8 academy will do very little to change this or to keeping highly motivated families and students from a different or better choice.

Like our broken record keeps saying, if the district demanded excellence and achievement in everything that it did and followed it up with a challenging and rigorous curriculum, parents would be beating down the doors and the community would be singing its praises on the golf course and at the ballot box. No marketing would be needed, elections would pass, but above all students would be challenged and achieve.

Smoke, Mirrors, Sound, Fury,…

Post Script

We don’t think that the individual board members are idiots, but it is clear that as a collective they do not dig deep enough or try hard enough to affect real change that would benefit the students. This is idiotic.