Registration for Nipomo’s New Tech High School opened a little more than two weeks ago, and the Lucia Mar Unified School District already has applications from enough students to fill its freshman class.
The school, which boasts a curriculum built on technology and project-based learning, is poised to become a beacon of innovation on the Central Coast. Some of the district’s teachers and parents, however, are concerned New Tech will drain funds and resources from other schools already suffering the effects of statewide budget cuts.
District officials created a proposal for New Tech earlier this year after visiting several other learning sites across the nation, including Napa New Tech in Napa, Calif. New Tech schools bring in local community members to present real-world problems to students. Under a teacher’s guidance and instruction, the students solve those problems in teams and then present their findings to the class using current technology.
The Lucia Mar New Tech will operate autonomously on the Nipomo High School campus, with classes held in a handful of retrofitted and newly constructed buildings.
The district’s Board of Education approved the New Tech proposal in April, followed by a facilities budget in June. The initial cost for construction and the first two years of operation (2012-13) is estimated at $2.5 million. That money will come from developer fees and $500,000 left over from a low-interest loan originally taken out for renovation projects at Arroyo Grande High School.
The Lucia Mar Foundation on Innovation, a newly formed nonprofit, is expected to donate $87,000 to pay for curriculum development and consulting fees from the New Tech Network.
“We’ve had teachers and people with the union who have said, ‘Well, you kind of snuck that through in the night,’ but that was a publicly posted meeting,” Superintendent Jim Hogeboom said of the June meeting. “It was in the middle of the summer, but that’s our big budget meeting. No union person spoke about New Tech at a board meeting until September.”
Hogeboom acknowledged the concerns that New Tech would channel per-pupil funding and other resources from Nipomo and Arroyo Grande high schools. However, he said having New Tech in the district would make up for those losses.
“Schools like New Tech are incubators of innovation,” he said. “[The curriculum] isn’t just for those students. The whole idea is that we’ll be able to share that curriculum with the rest of the district.
“Having models is important,” he continued. “If New Tech wasn’t replicable to other schools, I wouldn’t be so interested in it. I mean, that’s great for those 500 kids, but what about the rest of the district?”
The school will open in fall 2012 with 125 freshman and add a class each year until all the grades are filled.
Some teachers and parents are asking that very same question: What about the rest of the district?
“I want my kids to be tech savvy, not just the 100 kids at New Tech,” said Cathe Olson, a parent in the district and the librarian at Nipomo Elementary School. “I’d like to see [district officials] putting energy for innovation and getting grants into the current problems at the other schools.”
Some of the problems Olson mentioned specifically included cuts to library and computer lab funding, which have limited students’ access to books and technology and reduced the number of librarians and lab technicians available to assist them.
Olson said she’s noticed a significant difference between her own daughters’ typing skills—one’s a seventh grader and one’s a fifth grader—and overall aptitude for technology.
“It seems there is such inconsistency among schools,” she said. “Some schools use their own [discretionary funds] to reinstate hours for library and computer techs, and others don’t. It’s the luck of the draw.”
Olson said there’s also a lack of training for the remaining librarians.
“You have to get your library certification like I did, but there’s no training for even basic programs … like the library database,” she said, adding that the only reason she’s able to operate the database is because she received training from a previous librarian.
Superintendent Hogeboom and Raynee Daley, assistant superintendent of business services, said the district is planning to assess these positions in the future and perhaps combine them to create a library technician capable of serving in both roles.
“We frankly don’t have the money to restore the budget for librarians or lab techs,” Hogeboom said, “and the money for New Tech can’t be used for that purpose.”
He explained that for the past few years those positions have been funded temporarily with money from the federal stimulus and the federal job bill.
“The question is: How are we ever going to move forward in education in the midst of these financial times?” he continued. “I’m not going to sit around and wait for times to get better, because I’m not sure if they’ll ever get better.”
New Tech, he said, is a major component of this goal, but the district is working on technology curricula for other schools as well.
“Education needs to do a better job of offering parents choices. One size does not fit all,” he said. “My hope is that people will see those programs [New Tech and the Teacher and Student Advancement program] as complementary and not supplementary. They’re not coming at the expense of other schools.”
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2011.
