Back when Scotts Valley Unified School District officials were charting a course for the 2023-24 school year, they figured they’d bring in $26.2 million in revenue and spend $21.3 million.
But when their financial minds recently broke down what actually happened, they discovered inflows had come to $27.8 million—$1.6 million more than anticipated.
They’d been almost on the money forecasting the outflow side. However, it appears they spent $200,000 less than expected (though these are unaudited actuals, so that could change somewhat on review).
That was the picture drawn for the Board of Trustees during the Nov. 12 meeting.
According to these figures, the District started this year off with $10.1 million in the General Fund, $1.8 million more than officials thought they’d be left with.
Board president Michael Shulman, who was defeated in the recent election (the Dec. 1 update had him trailing the top-three candidates by 212 votes, in the battle for three seats), took a few moments during the meeting to call out the way he believes tools from Silicon Valley technology companies are impacting students.
In responding to a math proficiency report, he opined on the difficulties facing learners.
“I think it’s just difficult for those who don’t find math fun to see it as relevant enough to put in the effort to really understand concepts that…can be quite abstract, difficult for them to find important,” he said. “I’m not sure that we have a societal level solution to that, and I’m really concerned. I started—over the last week or so—I’ve seen some commercials from, I think it’s Apple—very disturbing to me…They’re very proud of their product, showing people in business and professional settings who are asked a question and, you know, they’re not paying attention. They didn’t read the report. They’re not ready. And they’re asked to report on it, and they quietly click on their machine and an AI summarizes it for them—so they can be really smart and show how capable they are. That’s on the English language side. We have tools that are dumbing down our society. And companies who are promoting them. And people think it’s really cool.”
He described the issue as an “immense challenge” for the education system as a whole.
“We’re just going to atrophy our thinking skills,” he said. “This is a huge challenge, I think, for the teaching staff is, how do we make this stuff interesting for students, that they care?”
Shulman added that it’s not enough to focus on the broader picture, but suggested educators need to focus on the individual things that each student needs to work on to improve—much like with an athlete in training.
“You don’t just play the sport,” he said. “You have to do the individual drills that develop the muscles and the understanding of the individual movements that together help you to become a good athlete.”
Shulman said, when considering how to accomplish this, it’s important to not just teach “to the test,” which was a topic of concern a few years back.
“I’m really pleased to hear that our focus…is really on the benchmark stuff, on the things that we understand actually help them learn,” he said. “Now, especially with these societal forces, that are convincing kids, ‘Hey you can get by in life without knowing anything except how to use your little device’—that’s a problem.”
The way to match advances in technology is with innovations in teaching, he concluded.
