Whole Foods Market and Dublin High School’s Culinary Program Partner for Kitchen Success
Part of what leads to a successful community is the willing partnership between local businesses and its own civic organizations. As a case in point, we were recently informed of a highly unique circumstance between the Dublin High School Culinary Program and Whole Foods Market located in the Persimmon Place shopping complex. DHS Culinary was the recent beneficiary through the “Nickels for Nonprofits” program hosted by Whole Foods Market. How are these nickels raised? Simply by those that can be credited when shoppers utilize reusable shopping bags. In this case, the 4Q15 store effort ultimately benefited the program led by Ms. Jackie Lawson. Recently, these proceeds were delivered to Jackie and her students in the amount over $2,300.00.
OneDublin.org recently had the opportunity to engage with Ms. Lawson and she explained how this program came their way.
OneDublin.org: Please explain how you initially connected with Whole Foods and then how you became aware of the “Nickels for Nonprofits” program.
Jackie Lawson: “As culinary instructor at DHS I was invited to attend the store’s grand opening dinner. While at that dinner I inquired about who would be the community outreach person for the store as we had partnered with Whole Foods in San Ramon previously. Paul Barron was introduced to me where we set up an appointment to meet and discuss potential collaboration. At that meeting we discussed a field trip, store department demos for my students and donation opportunities including Pennies for Non-Profits. With Paul’s help we applied for the opportunity to be named the stores’ non-profit.”
DUBLIN, CA–The Dublin Unified School District and IKEA jointly announced an innovative solution to Dublin’s capacity challenges at the high school level. As widely reported, IKEA is currently seeking approval to build their third location in the Bay Area (there are existing IKEA locations in Emeryville and East Palo Alto). “We continue to be thrilled with the reception afforded us in the Bay Area, so we are excited about submitting plans for IKEA Dublin to extend our reach further into the East Bay,” said Lars Petersson, IKEA U.S. president. “This proposed store would complement the presence in Emeryville and East Palo Alto, providing Tri-Valley customers their own store.”
The IKEA announcement, the second attempt to open a store in Dublin, has been met by some with skepticism due to concerns about the impact on local traffic. A Change.org petition was even started by local residents that has garnered over 1,500 signatures.
The unexpected joint announcement with DUSD comes at a time when the District is under increasing pressure to find a solution to rapid growth at Dublin High School, where enrollment is expected to exceed capacity within a year. From Gael period quiet spaces to lab science facilities, growth is challenging Dublin High’s administration. And while the District is already working on stop-gap measures including the installation of portables to address growth, the ultimate goal is a new high school to complement Dublin High School and Valley High School. An agreement to seek solutions for a new high school was reached at the February 23rd Board of Trustees meeting. That plan took a big step forward to implementation with the joint announcement with IKEA.
Walter Lewis (4th from right)
DUBLIN, CA–The role of standardized testing in assessing student, teacher and school district performance is a topic of controversy and misunderstanding. Making the situation more complex is the transition from STAR to SBAC testing with the introduction of the Common Core Curriculum. To help make sense of these acronyms and how they relate to your child’s education, we recently spoke with Walter Lewis, Dublin Unified School District‘s Director of Assessment, Accountability and Education Technology.
OneDublin.org: What was your path to Dublin?
Walter Lewis: “I’m originally from California, and received my teacher training here, but spent a long time in North Carolina due to rapid growth in Wake County at the time. I was a teacher for five years and then had a scholarship opportunity to go back to college enroute to becoming a principal, as a principal fellows, much like our teacher fellows program.
“I moved back to California, to Castro Valley, where I was an elementary and then a middle school principal. My experience in assessment at the district level, even as a principal, led to the opportunity in the Dublin Unified School District starting last year. I’ve truly enjoyed my experience in Dublin so far.”
OneDublin.org: There is a lot of controversy about standardized testing, the perception by some that teachers are forced to teach to the test. Is there any truth to that perception? What are your views regarding the role of assessments in education?
Lewis: “I believe in a balanced assessment approach. There are a lot of definitions about balanced assessment, and one of the truisms about that approach is that balanced assessments recognize that different assessments serve different purposes. There are SBAC assessments for external assessment but there are other assessments that are as vital and important: benchmark assessments for measuring our progress for essential standards as a District so we can allocate resources appropriately and in-class, or common formative, assessments to drive instructional programming for individual students. Each of these assessments have a different purpose but are all connected through our standards.
DUBLIN, CA–One of the more noticeable changes at the Dublin High School Campus in 2015-16 is the fully-fledged Freshman Mentoring Program or FMP. This process occurs within the school day and is imbedded within the primary lunch period.Between Monday and Thursday, scores of DHS junior and senior students commit a portion of their lunch period to provide support and guidance to incoming freshmen. This mentorship can take the form of simply an opportunity to speak to older student through fostering a relationship that may help the younger student navigate the high school experience. While the program experiences continued refinement, the newest members of DHS appear to be receiving a benefit from their peers.
But, what about these mentors and what types of training have they received? A spectacular example of this training occurred on Wednesday at the Stager Gym – adjacent to the Valley High School campus. OneDublin.org has been fortunate to chronicle the ongoing program of “Challenge Day” over past several years at VHS. Created close to 30 years ago by Yvonne & Rich Dutra-St. John, this endeavor exists to serve middle and high school campuses. Its primary purpose is to reduce bullying, teasing and stereotyping. Their all-day events are conducted at school campus across the county and around the world.
Life at Sante Fe University of Art and Design – Charles Simon on Finding Yourself in College
Our next article in the popular Life in College Series profiles Dublin High School Class of 2013 graduate Charles Simon. Charles’ story follows a path popular with many students – starting in a community college and transferring o a four-year university – and how that experience has helped the transition from high school to college.
OneDublin.org: How did you end up at The Santa Fe University of Art and Design?
Charles Simon: “After graduating Dublin High School I spent a year at Las Positas College where I took a bit of everything – from dance to radio. While I was there a representative from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design came to my multimedia class and she remembered me from a college fair and was surprised I hadn’t applied to Santa Fe. That encouraged me to look into how I could transfer schools: I met with my counselors and found my credits from Las Positas would transfer pretty well and the next thing you know I’m in Santa Fe. I started in Santa Fe with a focus on music, which gave me the opportunity to work with other artists my age in an actual recording studio, and it was a cool experience. I spent a lot of time researching different opportunities and ultimately decided to focus on business arts management as my major.
“The talent at Santa Fe is incredible – music, theatre, dance, painting, creative writing – everyone I’ve met so far is amazing and I can’t wait to see what we’ll do next together, as a youth force!”
Free Teen Heart Screening Coming to Pleasanton
It is estimated 1 in 500 school-aged children suffer an undiagnosed heart defect, which can lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death. A typical annual physical does not screen for advanced heart abnormalities. This does not take the place of your annual or pre-participation sports physical.
Stanford Health Care – ValleyCare are offering free heart screenings (students ages 12-25 attending schools in the Tri-Valley area) on Sunday, March 20th, 2016, 9:00 am to 3:00 pm at Thomas Hart Middle School (4433 Willow Road, Pleasanton). Screenings take 60-90 minutes (wait times may vary) and include a health history questionnaire review, an EKG test, and if warranted, an echocardiogram. The entire process is non-invasive—no needles or x-ray exposure—and each teen’s confidentiality, privacy and individual modesty is respected throughout all aspects of the screening.
Your child must be registered in advance and bring their pre-screening packet and permission/release forms to the event. Please register and find forms at viaheartproject.org/screenings/. Registration is open from February 10, 2016 to noon on March 18th, 2016 and is limited to 750 students.
For questions, please call 800-284-0125 or email screening@viaheartproject.org.
Student stress, homework overload and the inability for teenagers to get a full night’s sleep have been hot topics in recent years. Our next featured interview focuses on sleep, and the critical importance for childhood development. To learn more we spoke with Tri-Valley resident and UC Berkeley biological and developmental psychology PhD graduate, Dr. Irena Keller. Dr. Keller is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Development, Connie L. Lurie School of Education, San Jose State University.
OneDublin.org: What sparked your interest in sleep and lead you to dedicate your PhD research to the impact of sleep?
Irena Keller: “It started with my kids! They wouldn’t sleep when they were babies and I found the recommendations for parents about how to take care of children at night were so varied – co-sleeping vs. non-co-sleeping, what is culturally-based vs. what is biologically-based – people have a lot of misunderstandings about sleep. As I started to explore sleep and the impact on brain development, memory, and learning I started looking at older children and it was fascinating. Our society doesn’t take sleep as seriously as it should, and the importance of sleep in the development of children.
“Most of the population is sleep deprived. For children, and in particular teenagers, there is a biological shift when puberty hits resulting in children needing to sleep later. The circadian rhythm of teenagers shifts – they go from being early birds biologically to night owls! It’s not that teenagers don’t want to wake up early, it is difficult for them. The hormones that help you to wake up and go to sleep work on a circadian rhythm; in the morning you need cortisol to wake up and at night you need melatonin to fall asleep. Teenagers get cortisol much later in the morning and melatonin much later at night. When teenagers don’t want to go to sleep at night it’s because of how they are biologically wired.
“Unfortunately as children progress through school, the start time for school tends to be earlier, which is the opposite of what should happen based on the biology of teenagers. Schools also have a zero period for students in extracurricular activities like band or leadership, making the problem even worse.”
DUBLIN, CA–The Dublin Unified School District Board of Trustees followed the lead of the Dublin City Council by approving the Jordan Ranch Ground Lease Agreement which sets the stage for Dublin’s next public school development, a K-8 school to address overcrowding at the middle school level. Fallon Middle School has reached its capacity of 1,500 students and new students are being redirected to Wells Middle School for the 2016-17 school year. The deal, which has generated controversy on social media, gives DUSD one year to fulfill a set of criteria, including securing funding, before the land is available for development. The deal also includes a joint use agreement for the Dublin High School Center for Performing Arts and Education, opening the theatre for City of Dublin use for a defined number of days during the year. The Board also voted to approve placing a bond measure on the June ballot. Both proposals passed unanimously.
Additional detail provided by DUSD:
The Dublin Unified Board of Trustees unanimously approved an Option to Ground Lease agreement that allows the district to begin site work on the E-5 Jordan Ranch K-8 school site. The Board’s vote at the March 8 regular meeting came a week after the agreement was approved by the Dublin City Council.
The Option to Lease establishes the requirements that need to be met by the District in order for the Superintendent and the City Manager to execute the Ground Lease Agreement. Those requirements include:
The latest entry in the Life in College Series is part II of the article contributed by Dublin High School Class of 2014 graduate and University of California – Berkeley sophomore Joshua Price. (Part I is available here).
There are so many student groups at Berkeley. Service groups, music groups, social groups, art groups, competition teams, sports teams, dance teams, honors societies… the list of active groups is over 1,000 groups long. Some undergraduates work in research labs, others take work-study jobs on campus, and some even lead businesses of their own. For most students, college is much more than classes — many find their smaller communities and best friends in student groups.
Extracurriculars (or how I founded Robotics@Berkeley)
While I explored a lot of different extracurricular groups in my first year at Berkeley, my focus was on undergraduate research. Through a lot of searching and the advice and assistance of an undergraduate advisor, I got a position working with PhD students in a lab that works on the cutting edge of autonomous vehicle controls (self-driving cars!).
The learning curve was insane. I spent many late nights and weekends reading papers on topics such as convex optimization and model predictive control, but the experience was incredibly rewarding. I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually contribute that much for the first few months because I had so much to learn, but the graduate students and professor were very supportive throughout. We would regularly drive up to Richmond to test changes on their full-size autonomous vehicles. My first time riding in an autonomous vehicle was thrilling — we were testing new changes in the software, and the car swerved off its path a couple of times because not all the values were tuned correctly yet! Fortunately the car is wired such that if you grab onto the steering wheel it will return to manual control, so it’s safe as long as the person sitting in the driver’s seat is paying attention.
Dublin Unites to Educate Students About the Horrors of Drunk Driving with “Every 15 Minutes”
DUBLIN, CA–Last Thursday at Dublin High School was just another day. Or was it? After first period classes commenced after the bell, visitors began showing up at random classrooms throughout the campus. Approximately every 15 minutes a “Grim Reaper” and a law enforcement officer would show up unannounced. The message to the class was clear and very blunt. It was stated that one of the students present had been killed in an alcohol related collision and was then thereby removed from the room. This went on for three consecutive periods.
In most classrooms, the mood was awkward and in some cases eerily silent. There may have been a few snickers – by from those that might have thought that this was some sort of prank. Any of those doubts were removed when a general announcement requested that the entire student body convene at the blacktop area behind the gym. The students quickly filed into a u-shaped bleacher configuration. The silence was broken with a distinct and searing sound of a collision. In the center of the assembly, multiple tarps were removed to reveal the aftermath of a two vehicle collision.
It was a confusing scene. Over the loudspeakers, those present could hear the frantic pleas for help via a 911 call. Shortly thereafter, first responders began to arrive. Police officers arrived via motorcycles and then by car. They were followed by fire engines and paramedics. While the gravity of the scene was obvious, there was no panic in the air. The responders worked at a measured and steady pace – utilizing their training to diagnose their sequential priorities. For some involved in the accident, there would be no miracles. The Alameda County Coroner’s van took those victims away. Another occupant demonstrated potential signs of paralysis and was evacuated by a helicopter to Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley. Others were treated and removed – only after the cars could be sawed apart to gain access to the passengers.
For over an hour, the crowd of about 2,500 sat in silence. They watched a scene that seemed so real and so gruesome. As the responders completed their tasks, they quietly collected their equipment and returned them to their vehicles. The students were then released to the lunch period. Perhaps they had the opportunity to reflect upon what they had just witnessed. All that remained in the area was broken glass and the blood smeared fragments of two cars.
OneDublin.org 