Active Involvement - March 7th Meeting Recap

This time of year is a hard time to keep our momentum up. But we have a few things that really need attention.

Author Event - Due to the fact that we're having difficulty getting our newsletter out to parents, I don't think it makes sense to focus on organizing a parent education workshop. The majority of PTA presidents aren't forwarding the newsletter to their membership. We were able to figure out how to post the newsletter in PeachJar in EUSD without paying a fee and hopefully, we can do the same in DMUSD and SBSD. Other methods we can pursue are including the newsletter in principal emails and potentially the Superintendent's emails. It makes the most sense to focus on infrastructure - namely getting our website set up and having more of a social media presence - so that more people know about us. To that end, we're trying to find someone who can teach how to post on social through a FB and IG Posting 101 tutoring zoom call. Please help if you can!

SDUHSD Superintendent Search - Related to that, SDUHSD has released a survey for community input on selecting a new superintendent. Please fill it out before it closes March 15.

There are also two community town halls scheduled. If you can, please attend:

• March 7 at 6pm at San Dieguito High School Academy (Spanish translation provided)

• March 14 at 6pm at Pacific Trails (Chinese/Mandarin translation provided)

You can find the survey and all information here: Superintendent Search (2023) Even if your kids don't attend SDUHSD yet, if they are in a feeder school, they likely will be affected by who is chosen as the new Superintendent. PLEASE MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD and pass this info on to other parents. You DO NOT need to have a child in the district to attend a Town Hall or complete the survey.

Consider the following priorities in your survey or engagement at the town halls: (credit to Kathy Stenger, parent and teacher, for putting this list together)

1. Addressing disparities in funding, support, suspensions, honors and AP tracking, etc. for Black, Latinx, homeless, socioeconomically challenged, and SPED students especially in our majority wealthy white community.

2. Support for ethnic studies courses—training teachers, developing curriculum, and starting pilot classes before the state mandate kicks in.

3. Training for teachers to develop culturally responsive pedagogy and restorative practices.

4. Commitment to fostering an environment of trust in teachers, academic freedom and decision making in the classroom.

5. Commitment to protecting marginalized students from discrimination and hate and to fostering acceptance of difference and developing racial literacy in our predominantly white schools.

6. Commitment to building a strong leadership team that understands and prioritizes anti-discrimination, equity and inclusion.

7. Ability to negotiate political agendas and culture wars and guide and heal divisions generated by the current fear mongering spread on media and social media.
   

Community Gathering - We'd like to have one in May, possibly in conjunction with Palomar JEDI. We need to brainstorm some ideas for how to draw more families to attend on a low budget. If you have any experience with assisting with PTA events at your school, we'd love to get your thoughts. What activities have been popular?

Some suggestions were to have food trucks and do some type of book event. Maybe we can combine the two for a Saturday afternoon with a 'Celebrating Diverse Books' theme. We've reached out to some contacts regarding book donations, with the hopes that we can have every family leave with a book. Perhaps we can get a local author to do a Story Time event. What are people's thoughts on this? Let's put together a separate taskforce to organize this event.

Social Media - The reality is that to get families to know about us and our work, we need to post on social media more often. Are there are a couple of people who'd like to help with this? We can brainstorm some ideas for posting - monthly events, reposts from other groups, action items, etc. and set a schedule so that it becomes more routine. If there are 4 of us then we can each take turns posting once a month. We've split up the newsletter duties recently amongst 4 of us and it's worked really well. Let's try to do something similar with social media. Thank you to those of you who could make it!