UPDATE ON MORENO VALLEY USD SCHOOL BOARD TRUSTEE MIKE RIOS

Riverside Case Number RIF1201429; Charges: 2 Counts of Attempted Murder, 1 Count of Prevent/Dissuade from Testimony, Prevent/Dissuade from Testimony, 2 Counts of Assault With a Deadly Weapon, as Well as Four Enhancement Charges of 2x Serious Felony/Used Firearm, and 2x Intentionally Discharge Firearm.

HONORABLE   JUDGE BECKY DUGAN PRESIDING.

COURTROOM   ASSISTANT: LMJ-L. JUNIO

COURT   REPORTER: HL-H. LEE

PEOPLE   REPRESENTED BY DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: MICHAEL BRUSSELBACK.

DEFENDANT   REPRESENTED BY DPD-MICHAEL MICALEFF.

DEFENDANT   PRESENT.

AT 10:10,   THE FOLLOWING PROCEEDINGS WERE HELD:

ORAL MOTION   BY DEFENSE REGARDING BAIL REDUCTION IS CALLED FOR HEARING.

PEOPLE   OPPOSE

MOTION   GRANTED

- - CUSTODY STATUS/INFORMATION - -

BAIL SET IN   AMOUNT OF $250000.00.

REMAINS   REMANDED TO CUSTODY OF RIVERSIDE SHERIFF.

CONDITIONS OF BOND IF POSTED:

1. NO   CONTACT WITH VICTIMS BY ANY MEANS

2. ABSTAIN   FROM ALCOHOL AND DO NOT GO TO PLACES

WHERE   ALCOHOL IS THE MAIN ITEM OF SALE

3. DO NOT   OWN/POSSESS/USE/HAVE ACCESS TO ANY

FIREARMS   DURING THE PENDENCY OF THIS CASE

ORAL   MOTION BY DEFENSE REGARDING RELEASE OF SAFE IS CALLED FOR HEARING.

MOTION GRANTED

COURT   ORDERS RETURN OF SAFE AND ALL NON-CONTRABAND/NON-EVIDENTIARY.

PROPERTY TO   THE DEFENDANT OR HIS GRANPARENTS

RAFAEL   MERCADO/ELENA MERCADO

ORAL MOTION BY DEFENSE REGARDING RELEASE   OF VEHICLE (HUMMER) IS CALLED FOR HEARING.

COURT AND COUNSEL CONFER REGARDING:   RETURN OF VEHICLE AT SIDE BAR

MOTION WITHDRAWN. Thanks Again to MVGordie (MVGordie.com)

Innovation Officer

Innovation


Enter the "innovation officer," a job title that is cropping up in school districts and state education departments nationwide. Often a top administrative position filled by a candidate from the corporate world, charter school management, or a district office,

The innovation officer (or a variant on that title) might oversee a "portfolio" of schools, lead the integration of new technology into the classroom, and redistribute central-office services.
Data on how many of those jobs exist are difficult to come by, but many identified by Education Week began in the past five years, with the more recent ones loosely coinciding with the Obama administration's Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation, or i3, competitions.
That shouldn't be a surprise, said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, based in Alexandria, Va. During President George W. Bush's administration, districts developed administrative positions around "assessment and accountability," to garner favor and funds under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its test-centered mandates, Mr. Domenech said.


How Much Substance?
Now, the Obama administration has awarded more than $4 billion so far in Race to the Top grants, which reward initiatives like school turnarounds, charter schools, and technology-based reform. School Improvement Grants offer $3.5 billion in federal aid to districts that agree to aggressive overhauls of their worst-performing schools. This year, the i3 fund awards $150 million in competitive grants for innovative practices proven to boost student achievement. Again, districts are responding, Mr. Domenech said, but will the administration's leverage really have an impact?


"They are just basically recooking or rewarming the old school," Mr. Domenech said. He added: "In the majority of cases, it's just a new title."
The U.S. Department of Education's top innovation official, however, disagreed.


"I don't think people are jumping in (to create the innovation officer positions) just because it's trendy," said James H. Shelton, the assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement. "I think districts are both seeing the upside of the opportunity and feeling the necessity that the pace of change should pick up dramatically."


Attracting Money
Innovation officers interviewed by Education Week did acknowledge a focus on procuring and managing state, federal, and private grants.
"That is what I do. All of it goes towards that," said Michael Haggen, the associate superintendent of innovative services for the St. Louis public school system, which enrolls 25,000 students.
Most of the time, Mr. Haggen's office, which manages federal School Improvement Grants the district received in 2010 to turn around 11 low-performing schools, must come up with an initiative, prove its worth and practicality, and then seek funding for it, he said.
"We're not going to write a grant with grandiose ideas," he said. "We are only going to put in there what we can do."
There's a similar approach in a much-smaller district, the 8,500-student Missoula County schools in Montana. As budgets are squeezed, Matthew Clausen, the director of creativity, innovation, and technology, seeks district funds, federal grants, and private money to support initiatives.
"The kind of things we are trying to do—our state budgets don't think about those things," said Mr. Clausen, who was hired in October as the first person to hold the position. "Grant funding is one of the ways to get the resources, so we can show they are successful and work them into state funding."
An undisclosed private foundation is supporting a pilot 1-to-1 iPad program for 120 elementary school students in Missoula, based on a similar Oregon initiative that is credited with helping to raise test scores.
Missoula's initiative illustrates Mr. Clausen's focus on technology. Before holding his current job, Mr. Clausen served in various district positions responsible for integrating technology into the classroom. It's a priority shared by innovation officers in smaller districts that don't have portfolios of schools or large federal support.
In Pennsylvania's 2,500-student South Fayette Township district, near Pittsburgh, Aileen Owens, the district's first director of technology and innovation, is focusing mostly on classroom technology and on the STEAM subjects: science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. Her goal is to train a new generation of software engineers and computer programmers.
A new computer-programming course enrolls 160 students in grades 5-7 this year, and 26 South Fayette high school students are enrolled in an after-school program that develops applications for Google's Android operating system.


While money for the programs is hard to come by—using free software and sharing costs with neighboring school districts are common—Ms. Owens prefers her small district. There, innovation can be nimble, as it should be, she said. "When you need to be innovative, you need to grapple with things quickly and move," said Ms. Owens, who was hired in July. "You don't want to wait a year to implement something."


Sharing What Works
In some large urban districts, new positions have formed to marry two new trends in education, "innovation" and school "portfolios."
Alyssa Whitehead-Bust, the chief of innovation and reform for the Denver public schools, oversees a portfolio of about 35 charter schools and 20 "innovation schools," which together enroll 18,000 of the district's 80,000 students.


In most cases, including in Colorado, innovation schools are not subject to certain state regulations and collective bargaining provisions, but are still operated by the school district. Some states and districts, most notably New York City, have taken the concept a step further and created "innovation zones," coordinated groups of schools within a district that pilot new programs and rigorously research them.
But rather than promote such schools as better alternatives to traditional schools, Ms. Whitehead-Bust aims to take what works in her portfolio schools—extended school days, for example—and scale it districtwide. The relationship works in reverse, too: A new initiative will allow charter schools to opt in to central-office services such as security, professional development, and English-language instruction, she said.
"It's a tighter, more congruent system, where schools get what they pay for and pay for what they get," said Ms. Whitehead-Bust, who was hired less than a year ago after working as an education consultant and founder of a charter school in Denver. "It's less about managing our portfolio of autonomous schools and more about creating district systems," she said.


Innovation Stakeholders
Christine Fowler-Mack, the chief of new and innovative schools and programs for the 42,000-student Cleveland district, oversees seven charter schools either operated or sponsored by the district. That puts her on the front lines of a larger effort by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson to reverse plummeting student enrollment, establish new charter schools, and overhaul rules on teacher compensation and tenure.
But as positive as "innovation" sounds, the plan in Cleveland has been criticized. The Cleveland Teachers Union accused Mr. Jackson and the school district of excluding the union from the new plan.
"The notion of innovative schools isn't at odds with us; it's the troubling track the district is often taking to shut out the union when it comes to reform that's related to innovation," said David Quolke, the president of the union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.
Both Mr. Quolke and Ms. Fowler-Mack highlighted successful innovation initiatives stemming from district-union collaboration, such as the 13 separate contracts agreed upon for Cleveland's innovation schools. But Mr. Quolke also noted that Mayor Jackson and the district consulted with Cleveland's business community when creating the new plan, highlighting what the union leader sees as the tendency for innovation to favor the private sector over teachers.
Indeed, for many innovation officers, building relationships with businesses is a large part of the job, a dynamic that can rankle parents and unions.
The Denver district, for example, will use an $800,000 donation from the Dell Foundation to train school leaders at charter schools to prepare them for jobs as principals at district-run schools.
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St. Louis is looking to the private sector to support new charter schools, including one that will incorporate literature into all the curriculum and another dedicated to environmental sustainability.
"There's no way to do this without the private sector," Mr. Haggen, the St. Louis associate superintendent of innovative services, said.
As federal policy and, perhaps, the presidential administration change, so could these new positions. The comprehensive, all-encompassing nature of "innovation" in education, allowing for an agile approach but a great deal of uncertainty, appears to also apply to the daily work of its district-level stewards. As Mr. Clausen said: "It's certainly been a challenge to know what I'm doing every day. There's limitless potential." 


Assistant Editor Michele McNeil contributed to this article.


Coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation is supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Vol. 31, Issue 22, Pages 6-7


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Score: 3
paulhoss@hotmail.com
7:07 AM on February 28, 2012
While "Innovation Officer" appears appropriate and clearly has great potential it also potentially adds another layer to the educational bureaucracy; one more insular division between someone in the classroom directly working with students.


I'd watch these appointments very carefully.
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Score: 1
Larry
12:57 PM on February 28, 2012
Those who were around when ESEA of 1965 came out will find this familiar territory. Title III of the orgininal act was dediated to innovation...and it set off many new directions that are commonplace today. What goes round comes round.
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Score: 0
DCGMentor
2:30 PM on February 28, 2012
Jason,
It is a funny thing about innovation. Some of the best innovations are not necessarily new. TV is 75 years old. Radio, 90. How about the refrigerator?


The question is not how to replace these but how to make them better thought the use of technology as a tool, not as a means and end unto itself.


The example I like to share is of a program that is approaching 40 years old and is nationwide. it is called the WISE program. (www.wiseservies.org)


It and others like it innovated the idea of experiential learning as a supplement to in class learning. What has changed is how we use the new technology. Experiential learning allows students to work with new technologies in subjects they are passionate about.


it was innovative back in 1973. It still is now. We should find ways to share it, not lose it.


In fact Denver had two HSs that had the program; Abraham Lincoln and East High schools, but somehow they lost out on that innovation as it was replaced with new innovation? Huh?

School Shooting Kills Two High School Students In Ohio

Originally Publishe

February 28, 2012, 9:14 a.m.

Edited by I, Praetorian

T.J. Lane, the teenager being held as the gunman in the deadly Ohio school shooting, is scheduled to have a proceeding in juvenile court on Tuesday afternoon, according to lawyers familiar with the case.

The appearance is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Eastern time in Geauga County Juvenile Court. Lane has been in custody since Monday’s shooting spree at Chardon High School, which has claimed two students' lives. The usual procedure is for a teenage suspect to be treated as a juvenile until a decision is made by prosecutors on whether to charge him or her as an adult, one attorney said.

Lane, 17, is being represented by family attorney Robert Farinacci, who identified his client in a statement released to the media overnight, before the second victim died.

“The family wanted me to convey to the citizens of Geauga County and northeastern Ohio that the family is devastated by this most recent event,” Farinacci said. “They want to give their most heartfelt and sincere condolences to the family of the young man who passed and their continuing prayers are with all those who were injured."

“This is something that could never have been predicted. TJ's family has asked for some privacy while they try to understand how such a tragedy could have occurred and while they mourn this terrible loss for their community,” the lawyer said.

Farinacci described Lane as a fairly quiet and good kid.

“His grades are pretty impressive,” Farinacci said. “He's a sophomore. He's been doubling up on his classes with the intent of graduating this May. He pretty much sticks to himself but does have some friends and has never been in trouble over anything that we know about.”

Lane allegedly entered the high school cafeteria on Monday morning and shot five students. Daniel Parmertor died Monday afternoon and a second student, Russell King Jr., was reportedly declared brain dead Tuesday. The three others remain hospitalized in serious or critical condition.

The victims were found in separate areas at the school, said officials who are still investigating the incident.

King was studying alternative energy at nearby Auburn Career Center and, like some of the others who were shot, was waiting for a bus for his daily 15-minute ride to the center.

One Chardon High School student wounded in the shooting, Demetrius Hewlin, was in critical condition at Cleveland's MetroHealth System hospital Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.


More guns in schools: Texas boy, 12, pulls loaded pistol on classmate