BAKERSFIELD, Calif — Kern High School District Area 1 is the geographically largest area in the district, stretching from the boarder with Shafter, past Highland, and down to the border with Mojave. Area 1 covers Frontier, North, and Highland High Schools.
Public School Review gives the district’s average test scores a 4 out of 10, which puts it in the bottom 50 percent of public schools in California. Despite the district’s massive budget, a projected $750 million dollars for the upcoming year, Public School Review says Kern High Schools have an average math proficiency score of 21 percent compared to the state average of 40 percent.
Couple that with the recent rise in drug use, and many parents are concerned about the students’ future. Improving prospects is what’s at stake in these school board races.
So when current KHSD Area 1 Trustee Cynthia Breakman is asked about the biggest challenges facing district students, she puts low academic scores among her top three concerns.
“Always literacy. We have students coming in to the high school districts reading at the 5th grade level, sometimes even lower than that,” said Breakman. “That just really highlighted the work we need to do, and as a district we are working with feeder districts, but it’s going to be an ongoing district, especially with the county we live in. We have one of the lowest literacy rates in the country.”
Breakman points out that Kern County has one of the lowest literacy rates in the country.
Before taking on this role 4 years ago, Brakeman was a teacher for 20 years. She says she brings a teacher’s perspective, as every year educators get handed more and more responsibilities.
Brakeman’s challenger, newcomer Derek Tisinger, is a veteran and retired fire chief. He has also taught an Introduction to Firefighting course for the Kern High School District.
Tisinger shares Brakeman’s concerns about test scores and teacher burnout, and he says that what he saw during his time teaching on Zoom at the height of the pandemic pushed him to advocate for bringing kids back into the classroom, as well as what pushed him to run for the trustee’s seat.
“We took in juniors and seniors in the firefighter program and a real concern for me is that a majority of my kids were reading at the 3rd and 4th grade level, and I’m like; this is not acceptable,” said Tisinger. “We are not preparing these kids for the real world.”
Tisinger says that although his children and grandchildren attended private schools, he wants all kids to have the same opportunities and quality of education.
Gloria Najera, parent to a high school freshman, says fentanyl is part of her everyday conversations now.
“Every day, I tell them to be careful, not to take anything,” Najera said in Spanish. She says she has made it a habit to remind her children not to take anything, and has shown them images of what fentanyl looks like so they know what to watch out for.
Both Brakeman and Tisinger agree that fentanyl is a main concern, with Tisinger says he wants more Narcan on campuses. Brakeman says the district is already working on that, as well as training staff to identify when a child is having an opioid overdose.
Training and equipping schools also costs money. Since the role of the Board of Trustees is to adopt and monitor budgets, how each of the candidates plans to approach the fiscal needs of the area is important.
Brakeman says updating the schools should be a priority.
“We are a growing district. We have lots of schools who are… even Frontier is 10-plus years old, so we have a lot of schools that are ready to be modernized, so we need to spend money in those areas,” said Brakeman.
Tisinger says his budget priority would be educational personnel and staffing.
“My priority on the budget is to make sure we have enough teachers, enough counselors, enough safety personnel for our children, ad that is where my value and priorities would be as far as the budget goes, not hiring any more admin,” said Tisinger.
Tisinger also added that he would like to see both more law enforcement and more counselors hired for campuses while Brakeman pointed out that there are counselors on every campus, and KHSD already has the third largest police force in the county, noting that the board also has to consider those who want less police presence on campus.
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