Together Helping Education

Hello! My name is Ziona Friedlander. My husband and I have raised two wonderful children in Agoura Hills since we moved here in 1996. My daughter just graduated from CSUN and my son will be graduating from Agoura High School this June.

I will be blogging about the ways our community comes together to support our local school district.

After "retiring" from my position as a managing partner in an educational consulting firm, I became a full time mom and started my volunteering career. I am the Co-President of the AHS Parent Faculty Club, Co-Project Manager of the 2011 Every 15 Minutes Program at AHS, Co-Founder of C.O.R.E. (Californians Organized to Rescue Education, a grass roots group formed to protect Prop 98 education funding when it was threatened recently), and the President of a newly formed education foundation called T.H.E. Foundation for Las Virgenes Schools: Together Helping Education, whose mission is to provide direct financial support to LVUSD from the five communities it serves.

I am an ardent supporter of strong public schools, which I believe are the cornerstone of a thriving democracy. When relocating to southern California, my husband and I chose to move here so that our children could attend a great public school system like LVUSD.

When Proposition 98, which guarantees minimum funding for public schools, was threatened with suspension by Gov. Schwarzenneger (a second time!) I formed a grass-roots group, with other likeminded parents across the district, to mobilize our community to protest this action. It was very exciting to see communities like ours across the state rise up to say, “No – do not balance the budget on the backs of our children and their future.” We prevailed, but we are not out of the woods yet.

The headlines about the crisis in public education funding and its impact on the quality of education are unsettling.

The political wrangling that goes on in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C. would be entertaining if our children’s lives weren’t hanging in the balance.

This is why I lead a concerned group of community members who came together to form T.H.E. Foundation for Las Virgenes Schools: Together Helping Education.

T.H.E. Foundation wants to bring all sectors of our communities together to provide direct financial support for Las Virgenes Unified School District. Communities like ours around the state are waking up to a “new” reality: 1) that our state government  is not funding our schools adequately, 2) that the caliber of our schools has a huge impact on our community  and 3) that our children’s futures are being compromised by the squandering of their education.

Quality public education is no longer free. It needs to be financially supported at the local level, where it has the most impact.

If you have school-age children, how would you answer this question: How Many Years of Your Child’s Education are You Willing to Sacrifice until Sacramento Gets it Right?

If you don’t have kids in school, or if you have kids in local private schools, ask yourself: How much loss of your lifestyle and property values is acceptable?

If the answer is a resounding NONE!, then read my blog to find out how you can make a difference. Prepare to challenge your thinking about public school funding, and decide what you can do to support what we say we value most: the future of our children and our community.

May 3, 2011

Thank you to the Parent Faculty Association at Round Meadow Elementary School in Calabasas for inviting me to speak at their monthly meeting this morning about T.H.E. Foundation.

It was a good meeting. Parents at this school are passionate and generous with their time and wallets. Excellent qualities! They listened while I described the current situation of public school funding in CA and the “new” normal, the way communities like ours are responding.

Generally speaking, education foundations, like T.HE. Foundation, are raising money directly from parents and other community members and businesses on behalf of their local school district to fund specific budget items. This could include positions, such as teachers and counselors, and/or programs.

Parents are mostly concerned about what is happening in their school while their children attend. Understandable. However, we are a unified school district, and eventually our little ones will go to middle school and high school, where we’ll expect them to receive high quality services such as they had in elementary school. The truth is, if we focus only on supporting our school, we might find that our children will not have what they need when they move up to higher grades.

This is why it’s important to support one’s school AND the district.

Round Meadow’s PFA, under the leadership of co-Presidents Cory Esters and Beth Schores, is setting an example by making a donation to the LVUSD Save Our Schools Donation appeal in the amount of $10,000. This is in addition to contributions made by individual parents at Round Meadow. They have accepted the “new” normal and can see beyond their own school. They want to save their teachers, but they also want their children to have a fully functioning middle school and high school to attend. They know that if they don’t support that now, it won’t be there for their children later.

On Friday morning I will be speaking to the Lupin Hill Parent Faculty Club. I’ll let you know what happens!