SANTA MONICA-MALIBU PTA COUNCIL
President, Rebecca Kennerly
June 2007, SANTA MONICA - Thank you so much for offering me the opportunity to lead the Santa Monica Malibu Council of PTAs. I look forward to getting to know and working with the hundreds of community parents, residents and, yes, activists who contribute thousands of hours to help our schools, their students, and indeed our communities by constantly pushing to protect and improve the state of education in Santa Monica and Malibu.The Santa Monica Malibu Council of PTAs mission is to advocate for the health, education and welfare of all children, and during the years I’ve worked in Council, I’ve learned many lessons about advocacy from the great parent, education and community leaders I have worked with over the years.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from these great leaders is that nothing about education is easy. I seems like it should be. Children are so hungry to learn. But the complex task of educating all of the students in our state with their many different backgrounds and educational needs, particularly under the constraints of one of the most bureaucratic and inadequate funding structures in the nation is anything but simple. And it’s incredibly hard for me to grasp that California, one of the most prosperous states in the country, is failing to provide an adequate education to all of our students. With all of our wealth and all of our resources, we are failing our kids. How is that possible?
Yet here in Santa Monica and Malibu, the story is different. We have something special. Something rare. A working system. A perfect system? No, of course not. And we all need to be mindful of constantly striving to improve. But we do have schools that actually provide an excellent education to our children – and that is something worth fighting to protect.
The difference in our schools, the bridge between excellence and inadequacy is local funding. Our schools receive upwards of 20% of their total funding from local sources. That local funding pays for programs, teachers, administrators, librarians, custodians, individualized instruction, intervention, technology, music, arts, staff development and much, much more. During the time that local funding has increased, so too has the achievement of all of our students – particularly those from underserved populations. That is something worth fighting to maintain and enhance.
PTA is an activist organization and, as such we actively campaign. We actively watch. We actively listen, and we work actively to protect all children. We represent the widest, most broad-based constituency in our school community, and we are a constituency that intends to take an active role in this issue as well as all issues concerning the health, education and welfare of our students.
But in order for us to be effective activists -- in order for we parents, students and community members to credibly and effectively protect the quality of our schools, we need to look at our schools with clear eyes. We need to understand what makes our schools click and let our friends and our communities know what works and what needs work.
To see and to illuminate; that’s our mission. To refuse the easy answers and the knee-jerk reactions, but instead to search for what is real. Our job is support our kids, their teachers, their schools and all of our futures with our activism, our efforts and our vision.
What PTA does, matters. What PTA says, matters. Because we are bipartisan and unbiased, people listen to PTA. That’s why we PTA leaders must continually strive to see clearly and to illuminate.
I am excited to work with you to protect and enhance educational excellence for all of our children; something they so desperately need in this challenging world, and which they so richly deserve.
And remember, PTA is always open! I look forward to hearing from you. Send your thoughts, concerns and ideas to president@smmpta.org.
Rebecca Kennerly
President
Santa Monica - Malibu Council of PTAs