Fillmore Unified School District

The short November 5, 2013 Fillmore Unified School District (FUSD) Board Meeting was very somber as Education Services employee Gary Mayeda along with last year’s Teacher of the Year Raina Arellano, now a Teacher on Special Assignment, gave a Common Core State Standards Update presentation titled "A Systemic Approach to Writing Strategies Districtwide."

The presentations main focus was on the relationship of FUSD's Task Force Program (TFP) that began gathering study plan data district wide the beginning of the 2011 school year and where the TFP is today with the implementation of Common Core Standards Language Arts that is scheduled to begin statewide in 2014.

The three main text that TFP will use in English Language Arts are: information/explanatory, opinion/argumentative and narrative. These texts have been in use at Fillmore High School since last year with Fillmore Middle School and the elementary schools starting this year.

Examples of the TFP progress included such things as "anchor papers." These anchor papers will originate by gathering all student writings throughout the district and then each class level's work is compared. Those papers that are considered examples of the writing quality all students are expected to achieve are set aside and used as guides for other students in that grade level. A great deal of emphasis is put on teacher input and teachers are playing a major role development and that it will be teacher driven.

FUSD Board Member Tony Prado addressed the emphasis of teacher-input by stating that in the past teachers complained of having too much work and that teachers wanted the curriculum given to them instead of them having to deliver it. He then asked if it would really be a teacher driven collaboration or "spoon fed to them."
Assistant Superintendent Michael Johnson responded, "I think is has to be both...it has to be both to make sense."

Prado then responded that all this should not be anything new to the teacher and that this is what has been emphasized as far back as the 90's maybe longer. "I don't see it as taxing.....it's not revolutionary," Prado responded.

Throughout the presentation there was a great deal of explaining of what seemed to be busy work added on and what needed to be done to prepare for Common Core.

Throughout the country there is controversy regarding the implementation of Common Core. School districts country wide have complained of the added cost along with parent complaints saying they consider the program an intrusion by the federal government regarding the education of their children with little to no input by the families. Common Core will have a great impact on those families that home-school their children by creating barriers to the grade/test validation process for college.

There were no parents at Tuesday night's presentation, which used a great deal of teacher/education jargon and acronyms to explain TFP's task at hand; jargon the average parent who might attend a meeting may not understand.