State Superintendent Tom Torlakson visited two of Fountain Valley School District’s better performing schools Wednesday during a visit to Southern California for an education summit.
Torlakson toured classrooms and spoke with teachers and students at Cox Elementary, a low-income school with high test scores, and Talbert Middle, which began a technology pilot program this year that supplies students with laptop computers.
“It’s fun to visit and see how some schools are thinking about the future and investing their dollars wisely,” Torlakson said after visiting the STEM pilot program at Talbert.
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, four pillars of the new Common Core State Standards that take effect next year.
Torlakson was escorted from classroom to classroom and school to school by his Fountain Valley counterpart, Superintendent Marc Ecker, who tweeted photos and updates about the visit throughout the day.
“It’s been hard because no one’s following me,” Ecker said of mastering the social media platform that his administration has been touting as an educational tool. “But now that Tom’s following me (on Twitter), I’m getting millions of followers.”
Torlakson’s visit to Cox concentrated on fourth and fifth-grade science and math classes, including the school’s spatial-temporal math program, which takes a more visual approach to math learning.
At Talbert, the superintendent observed science classes, a typing class and a STEM history class where students were learning how to filter information on the Internet and to identify reliable sources.
Torlakson was particularly impressed with Talbert’s STEM pilot program, which he said “exemplifies where we’re going with the Common Core skills.”
Despite the $1.25 billion dollars in state funds (or about $200 per student) that California schools received this fall to help them implement Common Core, which involves testing students on computers, a digital divide between wealthy and less privileged schools remains.
“That’s where we have equitability issues,” Ecker said. “Because we’ve got schools that might have vibrant PTOs, like at Courreges, which fund all these (programs). But then you go to a school like Oka and they don’t have the capacity to fund” one-computer-per-student programs like at Talbert or buy smart boards.
Smart boards are digital chalk boards that allow teachers to project videos and save and retrieve notes they write on the wall during lessons.
Talbert’s parent-teacher organization raised the funds for its school’s smart boards. Title I funds, which go to schools with high percentages of students that come from low-income families, paid for most of the smart boards at Cox’s 30 classrooms.
Torlakson said he hopes to secure another billion dollars to help California schools gear up for Common Core and hopefully reduce the gap between the schools that have and those that have not.
“We’ll find ways with the state budget,” Torlakson said. “Some districts are going to local voters and getting voter-approved funds to buy the devices.
“I think the digital divide will naturally close.”
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