Analyze

“SAUSD is committed to providing each of its students with a high-quality education, rigorous and advanced programs, and a nurturing, safe environment with state-of-the-art facilities, 21st century learning and technology, and a direct pathway to college upon graduation. Our district proudly boasts one of the highest graduation rates in the state of California.”

Vision Statement

We will work collaboratively and comprehensively with staff, parents, and the community to strengthen a learning environment focused on raising the achievement of all students and preparing them for success in college and career.

Mission Statement

We assure well-rounded learning experiences, which prepare our students for success in college and career. We engage, inspire, and challenge all of our students to become productive citizens, ethical leaders, and positive contributors to our community, country and a global society.

The majority of recent articles (as of February 2022) are about the impact of the Omicron surge on teacher and student absences and instruction. In general, I think it’s hard to tell how a school district is perceived through news coverage–I don’t think they reflect community opinion very well.

Article about the district missing paychecks at the beginning of this school year: https://abc7.com/santa-ana-missing-paychecks-sausd-stalled/11036323/

Potential changes to governance structure, including term limits:

https://voiceofoc.org/2021/10/ocs-second-largest-school-district-moves-to-reshape-voter-representation/

Various unions, including but not limited to:

• Santa Ana Educators Association
• California Teachers Association
• California Federation of Teachers
• Association of California School Administrators
• American FEderation of School Administrators

Community organizations:

• Santa Ana Public Schools Foundation

The annual operating budget for the district is about $710 million, plus $177 million in "other funds." This needs to be double-checked by someone who has a better understanding of budgets than I do--the 2021-22 budget also has a table that says that total expenditures are just over $1 billion.

California state funding makes up 79% of the budget and likely comes with less strings attached than in a more conservative state. California has a complicated Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that makes it harder to separate state/local funding than in many other states--this is another thing I need to do more research on, I currently don't fully understand it. 85% of the district is low-income, so most (if not all) of the schools receive Title 1 funding from the federal government.

Enrollment has declined for the past 18 years and is projected to continue to decline, so funding is declining. COVID-19 has exacerbated the enrollment decline--the district has lost more than 5,000 students in two years. However, this was compensated for by increased federal funding. The last of that funding must be spent by 2024.

The school board is elected, so they are at least somewhat accountable to residents of Santa Ana (although the boundaries of SAUSD are not coterminous with the boundaries of the city of Santa Ana--need to look into how ballots are organized). School board meetings are televised and minutes are posted online, but only in English (45% of students are English language learners and far more than that do not speak English at home).

There are two resolutions posted on the district website stating that they do not assist immigration officials or allow them on SAUSD campuses.

The district emphasizes Family and Community Engagement as a practice, not a program. Part of this is the provision of Wellness Centers, which provide family events, classes on physical/mental health and academic support, and connections to other resources. There are also supposed to be FACE staff at every school, but many of the positions are empty. The website also has a resource newsletter, list of food resources, and a "resource support line" that seems to be available in both English and Spanish.

From the website:

Who is invited to engage with the Wellness Centers?

All families are invited to participate in the Wellness Centers. If you have a child in SAUSD, you are invited. And, if you do not have a child and are a community member, you are invited to participate, too! Remember, it takes a village.

This was representative of a general trend of making school facilities and resources available to all community members, not just students and families.

SAUSD has 5,000 total employees, including but not limited to: teachers, school administrators (principals), school staff (counselors, librarians, nurses, paraprofessionals, janitors, lunch attendants, etc.), and central administrative employees.

The district is led by a superintendent, an executive cabinet made up of deputy/assistant superintendents, and the school board. The district is also subject to some control by the Orange County Board of Education.

There is an assistant superintendent for Facilities and Governmental Relations who is likely one of the most relevant officials for environmental governance. The Facilities and Governmental Relations division is "responsible for the planning, construction, and maintenance of all schools and ancillary facilities within the Santa Ana Unified School District." They're responsible for the condition of school buildings and school grounds, but it's unclear if they have any control over environmental hazards outside of school grounds that affect the school. It's also unclear what the "governmental relations" part of the division does.

Schools are a key organization for environmental justice because they (can/should) provide students with the skills necessary to recognize and challenge environmental injustice when they see it. They can also serve as community hubs, contributing indirectly to environmental justice through the development of community social capital and political capacity.

META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

Resilience is a term that is widely embraced by many in city management and planning. It holds the positive gloss not just of recovery but bouncing back better. To my ears, it has become one of many anthems of the Anthropocene, a kind of restrained tempo thrumming along through communities that will adapt to climate change (or seasonal-to-subseasonal climate variability post Trump). They will mitigate, innovate, transform, strategize in order to endure unanticipated shocks, both chronic and acute.

NOLA is one of 100 Resilient Cities named by the Rockefeller Foundation sometime in 2013. Like others selected across the globe, the city of New Orleans would benefit from the resources of a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), an expert in resilience to be hired to work within city governance to develop a strategic plan; NOLA's was published in 2015. Selection of the cities for the "100 Resilient Cities" initiative was difficult, a competitive bid for resources based primarily on a city's recent experience with disaster, usually connected to a weather or climate extreme (e.g. hurricane, flood, etc). Resources were provided via the hierarchy of the CRO, sometimes to hire staff, develop training for the community, and create working groups and to write the stratetic plan. As one former directer of NOLA RC said of this opportunity provided by Katrina, the disaster that qualified NOLA for Rockefeller monies, it demonstrates the need for an the age of resilience. In what ways is resilience measured, accounted for, adjudicated and managed through or in spite of this strategic document? 

The language of resilience includes many terms that I think of as a collective imaginary of utopian preparedness, a vision for a nation that is--in the parlance of the weather prediction community in which I work--weather ready. Through the filter of resilience, then, vulnerability (another problematic term) is eradicated through individual action, community engineering, and adherance to strategic policies like 100RC. Yet how does this image of NOLA, one of "mindful citizenry" engaged in "partnerships" around the city (terms used in their summary video), match with the realities of living in NOLA, today and in the everyday future?

Resilience is also a term widely critiqued in STS and the broader social science and humanistic disciplines. For good reason. Common questions in this literature: What counts as resilience? Who decides? At what costs? Resilience against what? What does resilience elide? How has the discourse of resilience reframed individual and community accountability? What is the political economy of resilience? I'm interested in the discourses of preparedness and planning, and "the eventness" of disaster, as Scott has highlighted many times. But my concern is not just to critique and tear down concepts like resilence (or vulnerability). I worry that we then evicerate common lexicons of hope and imaginaries of the future that do some good. How are we as field campus participants and those who re-envision or reveal the quotidian reflexive? How do we triage the Anthropocene amid our own state of compromise--as scholars, participants in Capitalism, in post colonialism, humans? What are our ethical commitments? How do we make good? 

The article goes into how the Kresge Foundation's Climate Resilience and Urban Oppurtunity Initiative came togethre to try and make Newark more resilient in terms of the community.