BYRON UNION SCHOOL DISTRICT Creating Excellence in Education
	NOVEMBER 2004

by Tom Meyer
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’m beginning my third year as Superintendent at Byron School District and as a resident of California. Before moving to Byron I worked for 11 years as Assistant Superintendent in Fruitport, Michigan, which was a unified district with about 3,600 students.

I figured that I had “served my time” in Michigan and grew tired of gray skies, snow, and ice. My wife and I loved water and had a house with a beautiful view overlooking Lake Michigan. Along with the beauty of our waterfront property however, came an ugly phenomenon called “lake effect,” which forced us to spend months on end with our sky, water, and world being displayed in varying shades of grey.

Eventually our eyes longed to gaze upon some oranges, reds, and blues. So we asked ourselves, “Where else would we like to live?”

Finding the Ideal Place to Live and Work
We had traveled around parts of the U.S. and particularly liked Northern California. Just about then a Job Posting providentially appeared referring to a place we had never heard of, called Byron, California.

We found on a map that Byron was situated in a central location with accessibility to the most scenic parts of California — such as Napa, Tahoe, Yosemite, San Francisco, and the Monterrey Peninsula.

We researched Byron and discovered that it was a community growing at a steady pace. I was attracted by the possibility of working with a manageably sized elementary school district rather than the relatively huge unified districts that I was familiar with.

I came into town for the interview and from the beginning was impressed by the beauty of the surroundings and the small-town feel of the local culture.

As the interviews and discussions progressed, I also became impressed with the evident commitment of the school board and by the hopes and visions they had for their school and for their community.

participated in three interviews in one day and at the end of the third interview was offered the job. I called my wife, we made the decision, I started house hunting, and signed a lease on a house in Discovery Bay before I left town.

We made the transition from being Michiganders to Californians in only ten days. We had planned on making a change for some time, but we surely did it at a pretty dizzying pace when the change actually happened.

We were glad for the whirlwind nature of the move, however. We had a lot of friends and roots back in Michigan. Sometimes these transitions are like pulling a piece of tape off your arm. No use trying to make it painless by slowing the process down, just grab a piece of it and give a yank.

We‘ve surely met a lot of good people in Byron. This is a solid school district populated by parents, board members, and staff members who are committed to continuous improvement. I’ve always sensed a lot of good energy here that can be channeled into making positive changes.

Crowded Conditions at Excelsior
Our little district is comprised of three schools — Timber Point Elementary School, Discovery Bay Elementary School, and Excelsior Middle School.

Timber Point opened its doors two years ago. The original Discovery Bay School was built in 1985 and the build out was completed in 1995. However, the original portion of Excelsior Middle School (old Byron School) and its core facilities, were built in 1949 to accommodate 195 students. Our current census is just under 500 students, which means we are enormously overcrowded. A few of our students today are crowding into the same cafeteria, library, labs, and gymnasium that their grandparents used.

Visitors to Excelsior Middle School immediately understand how great the need is for expanding our facilities. The bleachers in the gym, for example, are marked for 100 people. During an assembly, therefore, we are forced to cram 200 students into them and seat the 300 remaining students on the floor.

For another thing, our food-service facilities are terribly inadequate, with no communal area of any kind available for the students to sit while they eat their meals except in an outdoors area beneath a shade structure.

Any inclement weather forces the students to spread out all over campus while they eat.

The library is so ridiculously small that 30 kids with their backpacks on can hardly sit down there. Shelf space for books in the library is equally limited with nowhere near enough space for the number of books that ought to be available in a school with the number of students that we have.

The computer lab is also cramped and inappropriate for the number of students that should be using it.

Another currently pressing need at Excelsior School is ensuring safe access for traffic entering the middle school grounds. Right now this is a dangerous situation. An adequate solution will include getting more land and putting up a traffic light.

Other urgent needs include addressing sanitary and wastewater issues, plus changes we must make in compliance with requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A Plan to Address the Need
It’s clear that we need to dramatically increase the size of our middle school facility. We’re hoping to do that by means of a $14.3 million dollar bond proposal that will address the huge needs at the middle school that I’ve been talking about. It will also address access, safety, and playfield development issues at the Discovery Bay Elementary School.

Best of all, the $14.3 million bond measure would become eligible for state matching money. Any new projects will be matched one-to-one. Even better than that, however, for projects involving the renovation of existing structures, the state matches sixty cents for every forty cents that will be raised through the bond measure.

In other words, $40,000 from the bond measure allocated for refurbishing any of our buildings would yield $100,000 in funds that would actually become available for any remodeling effort.

There is a caveat in this, however. The amount of matching funds we will actually receive from the state depends upon the eligibility of the school district. The state computes eligibility based upon enrollment projections using a formula to determine the level to which matching funds will then be made available.

There is another way for us to even further increase our revenue. We’re revising our school board policies to align them with the recommendations of the Coalition of High Performing Schools.

The coalition is very interested in energy conservation and environmental protection. Their requirements focus on building design that emphasizes functionality and durability.

The coalition looks at such things as lamps specified in light fixtures, glazing for windows to assist the heating and air systems, and the percent of land planted in grass rather than covered in concrete.

A mandated citizen's oversight committee will ensure that these objectives are met. If the State Department of Education and the Department of the State Architect confirm that our plans and specifications meet the recommendations of the Coalition of High Performing Schools, we become eligible for an additional five percent matching funds.

We’ve done everything we can do with our board policies to qualify for the funds and to be good stewards of our environment, as well.

We are planning to build a “Cafetorium.” As its name implies, the building will do double duty both as an eating facility and as a multi-purpose room.

We’re also planning a gym that will finally provide adequate space to meet all of the school's needs for sports and physical education, with real lockers and a wrestling room.

We also have plans for a building that will house a computer lab and a shop. We hope to combine the two in creative ways. For example, the computer lab might be joined to a production lab that would permit us to develop an Applied Academics Lab set of exploratory classes. Kids would design things in the computer lab and build and test them in the production lab.

I’ve seen this before in middle schools that I’ve formerly been involved in. It’s awesome to see kids able to perform at this level.

Another exciting possibility is a joint-use agreement with the County Library Board. If that is executed, the school district will become eligible for $1.5 million additional funds for library development.

Managing Change
Depending upon available resources, as part of the bond measure we’re planning to address technology needs across all three schools. We plan to increase student accessibility to computers, provide computer projection systems, upgrade the telephone system, etc.

We will set all the items on this “wish list” in rank order, beginning with the ones we agree to be most important, and then work our way down the list as long as our resources hold out.

Because of our growth, we’re negotiating for a territory transfer of properties from Knightsen District into the Byron School District. I’ve been working with Vickey Reinhart, Superintendent of the Knightsen School, exploring possible scenarios for unification or contract for services for specified grade levels.

We had a number of committee meetings about the topic and met with representatives from the State and County offices of Education to make sure both districts understood what was involved with those options.

The superintendents and school boards finally agreed that the boards would transfer from the Knightsen district into the Byron School District as many as 700 homes that will be built in Village 4 and Village 5.

The transfer is a reasonable thing to do for all parties since the two areas under discussion are currently within the political boundaries of the Discovery Bay Service District. The change, therefore, will have the effect of aligning school districts with political districts.

Besides being an eminently reasonable thing to do, the transfer will be a win-win-win, since it will serve the best interests of both school districts and will help the developers, as well.

For the Byron Union School District the transfer will generate 300 additional students, which will, in turn, provide for increased annual state aide. We plan to use the increase to hire more specialized teachers in such areas as music, fine arts, performance arts, foreign languages, and technology.

An additional benefit will be to provide a more optimally sized school enrollment so we can afford to offer specialized exploratory classes in middle school. These exploratory classes serve the useful function of assisting children in making decisions about what they want to do when they grow up — or even help them make decisions about what subjects they want to concentrate on when they go to high school.

Channeling Development Resources to District Needs
By carefully planning growth and expansion we are able to work with area developers in trying to determine the needs of educational infrastructure ten years from now. Passing this bond would be a great help. We will then be able to maximize resources using the matching money from the state.

At that point we can begin to talk rationally with developers — working with them on such questions as “Will we need another elementary school?” And “What kinds of improvements in computer labs will be required?”

Developer funds can be made available to help us with these and other needs. State formulas set developer fees at a standard level, which can be increased by negotiation and mitigation.

Byron currently has one of the lowest fees in the county, set at $2.14 per square feet. Fees assessed by other area school districts are nearly five dollars. This means that some area school districts might receive more than twice the revenue for a house as we would if that same house were built here.

We want to be able to tell developers, “Here are the district needs for the next ten years. Some of these will be met by a general obligation bond and matching funds. Here are the others that are needed.”

We need to get that message straight. For one thing, we might actually need another school, which could be built by developer revenues. That’s how the Timber Point School was built. Rather than simply paying a per-square-foot fee, the developers built that school before the children moved into the area.

Sharing the Vision and the Need
In March 2003, we began to contribute four pages a month, called “Byron Union School News” in the Delta Navigator. This four-page monthly feature serves as our school district newsletter. We are hoping that the publication will build support with all of our people including those without children.

After all, good schools are important to us all. Property values, public safety, economic viability — all these indices of quality in a community, and many others, diminish if the quality of public education is allowed to decline.

One big ongoing challenge that is facing both the school district and the community is to bring people together so their activities can be channeled for the greater good of our district schools. We should avoid petty infighting and turf-protecting kinds of behaviors. Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder for the good of our larger community — and for the benefit of our children, above all else.

I’m encouraging people to begin pulling together, so there’s more system-level thinking. Since the district serves both Byron and Discovery Bay, we’re trying to be the locus to serve both these communities. It’s a situation offering both opportunities and challenges.

I’ve set as a goal the development of a clear, shared vision. This can be most easily built on trust based upon integrity, respect, performance, and accountability. That’s the way I try to operate; those are the values I live and work by.

We’re grateful for the area people who pitch in to help make us successful. The Lyons Club, for example, has been a long-standing helper in promoting specific programs such as providing dictionaries to fourth graders, sponsoring water safety classes, and conducting fund-raising activities.

Parents organizations in all three schools have been active in supporting the program of the schools and providing assistance of all kinds.

The not-for-profit SEED Foundation continually organizes fund-raising events of all kinds to support our libraries, purchase curriculum materials, and classroom supplies — meeting all kinds of district needs.

Teachers and staff members often work beyond the call of duty without complaint.

The dictionary meaning of “excelsior” is “More lofty; still higher; ever upward.” Excelsior is a good name for our middle school; it’s a good standard for Byron Union School District as we move into the future.

Passing the bond measure will be a wonderful first step in moving ahead on our “more lofty,” “still higher,” and “ever upward” course towards our excellent future.