Riverside Unified Candidates Talk Test Scores, AI And More Ahead Of Election

There are three candidates running for the Riverside Unified School District Board of Education Trustee Area 1 seat this November.

Earlier this month, The Riverside Record interviewed the candidates about several districtwide issues to help voters make more informed decisions for themselves, their families and their communities. Don’t know which trustee area you’re in? You can look that up here.

The Candidates

Before diving into the issues, get to know who’s on the ballot and why they’re running. The candidates are placed in the order they appear on the Riverside County Registrar of Voters’ final candidate list.

The following statements have been lightly edited for clarity.

Noemi Hernandez Alexander (incumbent)

Occupation: RUSD Governing Board Member 

I’m seeking re-election to the [Riverside Unified School District] governing board, because I want to continue the momentum of student success that we achieved together. 

I don’t act alone. One of the things that I’ve been able to do over the last four years is bring my colleagues along with me when I have an initiative. I don’t have an ax to grind. I don’t have a political agenda, and because of that, we’ve been able to do a lot together because we’ve been able to work together. 

I believe I’m the only candidate that, first of all, is a parent that has kids in the school district. So I am very much invested. I would like to say I have skin in the game, is what I’ve said in the past [because] what happens to your kids happens to mine, so I would never do anything to harm your children. 

Also, I have the temperament and the ability and the skill set to bring my partners along with me and have a good relationship, a respectful relationship, with my fellow board members. Together, we’ve been able to ensure that every student is safe, supported and prepared for what comes next. Safety has been a priority of mine. When I was first elected in 2022, I made promises about making our schools more safe, and they have been. I have made good on that promise. 

I support teachers. I support special [education]. I support those assistants that help teachers help students, so that it frees up their time, so that teachers can teach, and those that are assisting around them can help students with emotional, physical safety and with their needs, with their exceptional needs as well. 

And preparing students for what comes next, we have such great access to higher education now. Our community partners with higher ed are greater than ever. Students have higher access to college. Students have higher access to careers. That is what I had promised in the first place, and I think that we’re getting there in the next four years. We’re going to build on that momentum, not just ready for college, but entered into college and also entered into a well-paying career. 

Jinane Annous

Occupation: Retired Superintendent

During my career, I have taught second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and 11th grade.

I have multiple credentials. I was an assistant principal at four different schools. I was a principal at two schools that reached high accolades with the state because we closed the achievement gap for our [special education] and our [English language learners]. I was a director for six years. I was a deputy superintendent, responsible for $450 million with 13 directors and 30 principals under me, and I was the superintendent. 

I understand the inner workings of a district. I understand what it takes to build consensus with the community, what it takes to build relationships. 

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 25 years. My granddaughter goes to school here. She still has at least four more years in Riverside Unified, and I want her to experience a great journey and to graduate from our schools. 

I teach students who are preparing to become teachers at the University of Redlands. I have taught for [the University of] Redlands for 29 years. I teach all the courses of the credentials and the master’s program, and I supervise them when they are in the classrooms in different districts doing their student teaching. 

I know the standards of the profession. I can go into a classroom and I can walk the halls and I can understand what’s happening within 10 minutes because, as a principal, I hired and I fired so many, and I have trained so many, and I have walked in tons of classrooms, and I have worked with so many students. 

I bring a lot of experience, but most of all, I bring the ability to build relationships. I bring service leadership. I’m in it for the long run. I’m in this neighborhood for the long run, and I want our students to compete with the best of the best at this stage, and I want them to be higher up on the echelon of students, prepared for everything, having had the experiences that they need to have. 

Duffy Atkinson

Occupation: Local Businessowner/Parent

One thing that I believe that the district has been missing is true leadership at the governance level, and by that I mean the district has been showing a system and a history where the board has been essentially rubber stamping, for lack of a better term, everything staff delivers. 

We’re not hearing tough questions. We’re not digging deep enough as a board to find out exactly what our money is buying and we’re not establishing true metrics and then holding people accountable to those metrics. So we drop a couple million dollars in programs, but we never follow up in the next year or the subsequent years and say, “Did we get a return on our investment?” 

You need a numbers guy. You need someone who’s got a background in business, someone who looks at strategic planning, who looks at strategic investments, who can understand metrics and who’s willing to ask the hard questions about whether we’re actually executing on the mission. 

So I will be the voice of that, and I will make sure that all parental voices and student voices are heard when it comes to the larger governance questions and the implications for those decisions as they affect each school site in the trustee area, and anybody that would have a need to reach out to their governing board member, I will respond 100%. 

The Issues

To watch the candidates’ statements, click here.

Declining Enrollment

Riverside Unified School District is experiencing a decline in enrollment. If this trend continues as projected, it could pose fiscal challenges in the coming years. How would you tackle this issue if elected?

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

I would tackle this issue very similarly to the way that we have been over the last four years since I’ve been on the board. 

It is nationwide. The birth rates are lower, and we know that at all levels. I’m feeling it at the higher ed level. We have less students, [and] we’re expecting less students across the board. So it’s not just unique to California. It’s certainly not unique to RUSD. 

What we’ve been doing over the last few years, we’ve hired a demographer to do projections for the housing that might be developing in the area, identifying areas that might be landlocked, and those demographic details are what are informing our long-term facilities planning going forward.

So we’re considering both the facilities that we need based on there being less students [and the] type of programming that we now get to be a little bit creative about. A lot of people think that this declining enrollment could be only detrimental, but it’s actually an opportunity to shift in programming in a way that we can serve students when we have less students at one site. 

Also, with [average daily attendance], we’ve done a couple of things. We’re a District of Choice. That’s very unique to us. We’re the only District of Choice in the region so far. That means that we allow students from other neighboring districts to come in and to be our students, and so because of that, you know we get the [average daily attendance] numbers from that.

There’s also creative ways, and we’ve been doing this, of getting money outside of [average daily attendance] dollars. We apply for grants. We’re very active in grants and looking for grants. We have a foundation as a part of RUSD, and these are all ways that we look for ways to supplement. 

Jinane Annous

Declining enrollment is a very serious concern. Having been a superintendent and having worked in this school district for 39 years, like I said, I realize how serious it is. 

First of all, I would like to understand, as a board member, why we are encountering enrollment in decline. Are the famil[ies] moving away? Are they choosing other schools? We need to listen to the parents and survey them to find out what’s happening with that, and take a close look at the data. 

I believe we need to strengthen academic programs, provide more opportunity for students, and make sure families feel connected to our schools. We also need to manage our budget carefully so the declining enrollment doesn’t take away from the quality of education our students deserve. So whatever fiscal impact is gonna have, it’s gonna be the least impact on our classroom because our students deserve the best. 

My goal is to make Riverside Unified a district where families want their children to attend school, and for that, we need to be out there in the community. We need to be holding meetings with the families. We need to be listening to them, and we need to be finding out what’s going on that our students are not coming to our schools like before. 

Part of it [is probably inflation and] budget overall in the state, people moving away, and so on. But the more services we provide, the more we aim to be in competition and prepare our students and having different programs for them, the more we will be attractive. 

We are in the business of serving students, and to do that, we have to be the Nordstrom of servicing students, preparing quality and making sure that we have a variety, diverse program that attracts students in our schools. 

Duffy Atkinson

It’s a very serious issue that all districts in the state are having to face. 

Declining enrollment is a multifaceted problem. There are a lot of factors that are at play that are causing it. When we look at any type of enterprise, like a public school agency that is funded by what’s known as average daily attendance, i.e. the number of students that are in school seats every day, declining enrollment is a real hit to the budget. 

So the aspect I would first address as a board member is doing a deep dive into how we are spending our money now. I know that all organizations, particularly large organizations that are looking at $850 million annual budgets, there’s probably some areas in there that could use better efficiencies. 

So to address declining enrollment, I don’t think it’s structurally within the school district’s purview, outside of the fact that if you look at schools as a business, for simplistic sake, then what you’re creating is a product. And if the community and the families and parents are not happy with the product, which is a well-educated student ready for the workforce, then they’re going to go somewhere else. 

And I think some of the declining enrollment is going to show up in numbers that are reflected in increasing populations inside private and charter schools, so the district can can probably improve its outcomes, and that would certainly help with the declining enrollment aspect, wherein families choose to actually have their students at the district because they know they’re going to get the education that they expect.

Statewide Test Scores:

Data shows RUSD’s statewide test scores have been steadily increasing but remain below pre-pandemic levels. What initiatives do you believe the district should implement to improve test scores? 

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

I think there’s a couple of things that I’ve heard teachers say. One of them is that the strategies for improving test scores change rapidly. I think we need an opportunity for whatever type of test we’re giving, also the type of assessments that we’re making, to give some time for them to work out. 

We have seen some progress. We have a lot to go. As an educator myself, I always ask a couple of things: What are we testing for? What are these assessments about? 

If you think about any test, the students taking a state test, this is a snapshot in one day of a whole year of how they’re doing that day. There are other ways of assessing. We can do intermittent assessments. Teachers have an opportunity, and they are doing this, creating assessments within the school year that aren’t necessarily tied to the state test, but can gauge where our students are in real time, and be able to help our students along the way. 

So that is one thing that we can continue to increase our test scores. Also, have a real conversation with all across the state about how we are assessing our students. 

Jinane Annous

Improving student achievement is one of my highest priorities. 

Having been a principal and having been a deputy superintendent and a superintendent, that’s always been my focus. What goes [on] in the classroom is most important, and I believe that we need to focus on strong reading and writing and math skills, especially in the early grades.

We all know that literacy happens between kindergarten to third grade, where we are teaching the students how to read. After third grade, there is no explicit reading instruction because students are reading for content. They’re using whatever they’ve learned about reading to access content. So we need to take a very close look at what’s happening in the early stages and why our students are struggling and what kind of support we need. 

I also believe that it starts with preparing teachers and giving them the right resources and supporting them to help the students succeed. You just cannot put a teacher in the classroom and not provide the support and the training and the material. This is where our budget needs to be going to our teachers, to our students. 

Test scores are important, but we need to take a look at student growth throughout the school year. It needs to have so many benchmarks where we look at academic goals and regularly review the progress and check it out and see what’s going on, and decide how we can alter the results, how we can work on them.

Every student deserves the opportunity to succeed, and therefore, our job is to have the right program, to have the right training, to be in the classroom, to be visible, and as a community, and as a board, and as schools, to look constantly at the result and shift whatever we need to shift and adjust. Flexibility is the name of the game. 

A lot of people put programs in place and then they become antiquated. They don’t look at them again.

Duffy Atkinson

We can’t buy our way out of this. We can’t cheat our way out of this. We can’t shortcut our way out of this. 

I believe the problem that the district is facing is an inability to close the learning gap in the first three years of education, we’ll call it four, kindergarten through third grade. Once we have a third grader that can’t properly read, does not have the literacy, and we can’t get that third grader into fourth grade with full fluency, then all statistics show that that child will be behind their entire academic career through 12th grade, and that is where the failure is occurring. So we need to close the literacy gap early on in the educational life of the students. 

So the focus really needs to be on early literacy because if you have a child that has difficulty reading and comprehending what they’re taking in information, then they will have problems in math, they will have problems in history, they will have problems in science. So that, I believe, is where the failures are. 

So when you talk about initiatives to improve, definitely it’s early literacy. So English language arts and math scores that show up problematic later on in the years, I believe the genesis of that problem lies in the early parts of the education. 

So if that means that we need to help teachers get coached up, we do that. If we need to invest in helping teachers with differentiated assistance in the classroom, we do that. We have the money, and we just need to apply the discipline to make sure that we are doing it districtwide, and we’re finding best practices for all school sites and applying them to every school site for every teacher. 

STEM Joint Expansion

Riverside Unified School District and University of California, Riverside, earlier this year jointly announced a strategic expansion of STEM education, pivoting away from plans to build a STEM high school campus after years of discussion. What are your thoughts on this pivot, and how would you ensure the new project is successful? 

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

I am in full support of this initiative, and I’ll explain a little bit what it is. 

It’s not a [University of California, Riverside] (UCR) and [Riverside STEM Academy], it’s an interdisciplinary approach for greater partnership with UCR. Of course, our greatest partner [is] with UCR because they’re a research institution, it’s a strong fit for STEM research and they will continue to partner with us in the STEM fields, but they’re also going to partner with us in the humanities and the languages and the medical school. 

That partnership is now more of an interdisciplinary partnership where our students in our district will benefit from the partnership and the expertise of professors from UCR. That is one thing that we’re doing for the whole entire district. 

The partnerships with Riverside STEM Academy and UCR will remain as they are, where students go onto campus and professors mentor [Riverside STEM Academy] students and they have an exchange, that will continue as well. 

Jinane Annous

I strongly support STEM education because, being in 2026, it prepares students for future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I believe that STEM opportunities should be available to all the students because all the students need it, not one school. 

I will completely support partnership with [University of California,] Riverside, Riverside City College [and] local businesses to give students hands-on learning experiences. We have to get the students out in the community, and we have to invite partnership from businesses so that the students have practicum of what they’re learning in the classroom. Theory is beautiful, but applying the theory to apprenticeship, to businesses, to working in collaboration with businesses to see how that theory applies in reality is most important. 

We need to be responsible with district funds, and before moving forward with any major expansion, I would like to review the cost benefit to the student and the district’s existing needs. 

And so, STEM education, in my opinion, is a priority, however, not to one group of students, but overall to every student and every campus and schools in Riverside, because every student is deserving to be experiencing this first quality that prepares them for the future and for the century. 

Duffy Atkinson

My thoughts on the pivot were, I didn’t feel that the project, as it was being presented to the public, was in the best interests of Riverside Unified School District to begin with. 

So I am happy that [the] project, in its form, was canceled. There’s still debate as to who actually pulled the plug on that project, but I’m glad it’s done. Now, as to what we are looking at in terms of future ongoing partnership activities, I have not seen much in the way of a template or framework of what that’s going to look like. Certainly, if that is the case, and I think it should be, we should be leveraging all of the colleges and universities in the region the same way. 

So [University of California, Riverside is] a great school, and it could be a test bed for how we execute on this as a district. But I believe that RUSD needs to make sure that all of the colleges and universities local within our area are participating in the same model. We have students going to Cal Baptist [University]. We got students going to La Sierra [University]. We got students going to Cal State San Bernardino. All of those schools need to be part of the conversation, and certainly it benefits the students that can take advantage of their own discipline within themselves and leverage that to gain college experience and gain college credits at the K-12 level.

My daughter was one of the lucky ones that was able to knuckle down and get those same credits and units, and it put her a year ahead in college. Every student should have that opportunity. So yes, we need to definitely leverage the colleges and universities in the region, including [University of California, Riverside], to benefit the students that can take advantage of that and improve their potential for ongoing academics. 

Measure O & Rebuilding Trust:

As part of the state audit on the now-tabled STEM high school project, the state found that RUSD used Measure O bond funds legally, but lacked transparency with the community on how the funds would have been used.

At least one trustee said the district would need to rebuild that trust before asking the community to approve another bond. How do you plan to rebuild that trust for the community in the coming years? 

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

I 100% agree that we have some trusting fences to mend. 

I think that there wasn’t an attempt to withhold information, there just wasn’t full information to provide. There was a lot that we weren’t prepared to speak of because we weren’t there anywhere yet. We were never in a place where we knew exactly where we were going as far as this project. 

Now that it’s behind us, we realize that in that hesitation, it seemed like there was a lack of information, because we were not able to communicate really what we didn’t fully know yet. So yes, when there is an absence of information, trust is lost. 

We will continue to work towards gaining the trust of the community. The first thing we did is we created dashboards. Now you can go onto our website and look at dashboards of where money is going. In particular, with Measure O, you could see what dollars were spent, where they [were] spent, what project they went to, and how much that project cost. That is a new framework that we’re going to apply to everything. Anything that is of high interest to the public, we will put on a dashboard very similar to the one we did for Measure O, so that the public is aware of what’s happening in real time. 

Jinane Annous

Transparency, transparency, transparency and communication. 

I always tell my students in Redlands University in my very first class: R plus R minus R equal R plus R. And they challenge me, they say, “This equation doesn’t work.” And I challenge them and I say, “Yes, it works. Rules plus regulation minus relationships equals rebellion and resentment.” 

Transparency and communication. The state audit did not find any fraud, however, they found that the funds were used appropriately but there was a lack of transparency and communication. And as a former superintendent, I understand that managing public funds is tricky because it comes with great responsibility. You need to communicate. You need to be transparent. You need to be clear. But I believe the board should have provided clearer information about the project, cost, timeline and changes along the way and they [should] have kept the public informed with all what’s going on. 

So if I’m elected, I would support regular public financial reports, independent oversight — which is very important — and clear communication with the community. I will also want to make sure that the recommendations from the audit are being addressed. Taxpayers deserve to know where their money is going during this time. 

This time, the inflation, how hard it is to earn a living, people want to know that whatever they’re paying for is benefiting the student and is a worthwhile investment. You would not want to pay your [tax] dollar and not know what it is buying you back. 

So clarity, communication, transparency is my responsibility as a board member to the public who elected me.

Duffy Atkinson

I think that there’s two layers to that. Rebuilding the trust with the community is attached to many other aspects of the district operations. 

I know that the district has some issues, and I have received numerous conversations and complaints or issues from families related to how the district handles things like special ed, so there’s a lot that can be done. 

I believe that trust is a two-way street. District communication, I believe they want to do better. I don’t know why we haven’t been better, but for certain, we can model it at the higher levels. So I’m talking from the school board on down, school board, superintendent and cabinet, can model what that looks like, and that means you pay attention and you respect when public comment happens, you don’t act like it’s not important, and that’s body language [and] that’s everything else. 

So that would be a great start. I think people would really appreciate to see their elected [officials] pay attention and take their complaints seriously. Sometimes it gets heated, sometimes it gets emotional, but that’s parents looking out for their kids. So that’s a good start. 

And from there, the rest of it is being Johnny-on-the-spot with answers when things pop up in the community. Yes, you need law enforcement sometimes to take their time to get investigations done before you release [information], but you need to get out in front of that, and I think the district can certainly improve that a little bit better. 

Artificial Intelligence:

The district has already set some new guidelines on artificial intelligence, but how do you think the district should respond to AI’s continued growth and widespread use?

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

That is a tough question that we’re grappling with all through education. We acknowledge that AI is a tool. We acknowledge that, in many instances, AI can help take care of some of the backend work, and it actually frees up our teachers to be able to engage with our students more. So I am hesitant to call AI all good or all bad. It’s all about how we use it and how we measure it and what we use it for. 

We continue to encourage students and teach students how to think critically, how to be human, how to be compassionate and how to be empathetic. That is something that teachers model, we adults have to model, and students learn through human interaction. 

What we are hard about is using it for plagiarism or for students to cut corners in lieu of critical thinking or getting to something on their own. There’s nothing wrong with using a tool. Let your teacher know what tool you want to use. Communicate with your teacher. Cite your sources. Nowadays, we’re not just citing other people’s intellectual property. We’re citing actual AI tools as well. I tell my students, “If you’re going to use even Grammarly to fix your sentence, just tell me you used Grammarly to fix your sentence, and that’ll be fine.” 

We also have technology that checks AI use, and so we’re making it difficult for students to outright cheat, but there’s always an opportunity to redirect, to restore and to teach students how to use it responsibly. 

Jinane Annous

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of our everyday lives and nobody can deny that. Our schools, our teachers, everyone who deals with education needs to be prepared for that reality that’s hitting us hard, and that’s coming like a huge tsunami on us. 

I completely support using it as a tool to improve teaching and learning, but I do not believe that it would replace teacher or personal interaction in the classroom. 

I just mentioned, in my previous question, the importance of relationships for us. Relationship is what builds character, what builds empathy, what builds caring for others, working with others, group working, which is still needed in our days for students to be prepared to work later on in their future career. So we need to be very responsible using AI because we still want the student to think critically, to problem solve and to understand that technology does not replace a human being or always provide accurate information. The teachers need to be trained and have a clear guideline on how far they can use it. 

Student privacy and safety should always come first. As a university professor, I understand how technology is changing education, and it’s changing it greatly. I believe Riverside should embrace the innovation, but they should make sure that the students continue to develop strong academic and independent thinking skills, and that their privacy and safety come first, and that they can discriminate between myth and fact and what are the sites that will provide them with accurate information. 

Otherwise, they will be just going into the abyss and dark halls where you cannot retrieve any real information, and they will lose the ability to critically think for themselves and to develop empathy and good relationships with other kids and other adults. 

Duffy Atkinson

I get asked that a lot, and it’s a growing, broader question because of the growth of AI. 

I use AI in my business. However, AI should supplement education, not be a replacement for it. The nuances of AI create concerns about the nature of what AI is actually imparting in terms of communication to the students that are engaged with it, so I have discernment concerns wherein the students might have a hard time understanding exactly what AI is communicating and structuring for them. 

Therefore, I absolutely believe that AI should be completely excluded from all lower grade level education, and it should not be part of any type of classroom model engagements. And by that, I mean no operating AI engines connected to the internet should be in any school, any classroom outside of the high school levels, the upper levels. Simply because there’s just too much. It is too complex of an engine, too complex of a structure that we need to make sure that it is not taking over education but helping. 

There are certainly aspects of AI that can benefit teachers in their instructional plans, creating lessons. There’s a lot of good stuff that can happen from utilizing AI as a model, but we have to be careful. It is not a replacement for education, and that’s the concern.

Title IX:

Publisher’s note: The Riverside Record proudly stands with the LGBTQ+ community in Riverside County and beyond. For us, this is not a political statement, but rather our deeply held belief that all people — regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, ability or national origin — are entitled to equal rights, equal treatment and equal protection under the law.

The district has previously been at the forefront of Title IX debates. How do you think the district should respond if the issue is brought up again? 

Noemi Hernandez Alexander

I maintain that we remain consistent with the law, that we may remain consistent with federal law, with state law, and if we’re talking about sports, that we remain consistent with CIF guidelines.

These are all things that are outside of our purview, but what we are held to account as a board to follow. And so, when those shift, we shift with it. You’ll see our policies chained along with those bigger policies. We’ve never done anything different. We implement the law as it is written. We don’t create extra laws. We don’t create additional policies as a school board, when it relates especially to Title IX laws. Title IX laws are laws set by the federal government. 

The state also has their own set of rules, and the CIF has their rules. And so we implement those higher laws, and we will continue to do so. 

Jinane Annous
I believe every student deserves to feel safe, respected and supported. 

Title IX is about protecting students from sex discrimination and ensuring equal opportunities in education. As a former superintendent, I understand the importance of having clear policies, following the law and making sure those policies are applied fairly, consistently and equitably with everybody. So I believe that the school should be a place where students can focus on learning without being afraid of being harassed or discriminated against. 

That’s why I will completely support proper staff training, clear procedures, addressing complaints promptly and opening communication with families while respecting the student’s privacy, which is always at the forefront of everything we do. 

When sensitive issues arise, we need to listen carefully. We need to respect everybody’s rights. We need to apply whatever applicable laws there are. My priorities will always be student safety, fairness and making sure that our environment in the school is positive and every child is feeling safe coming into our school. 

As a principal in the past, and as a teacher, I’ve always known that whenever you lack safety, your first [instinct] is fight or flight. So you either shut down or you either create discipline problems. So what we need to make sure is that every student feels that they could come and present their complaint, talk about being harassed, talk about whatever safety issue they have and that they know that, as a district or as a school, [we] will act upon it promptly, and we will communicate and will make sure that the students feel that this is home for them, that [the] school that they go to as home and where they feel safe. 

Duffy Atkinson

It’s something that school boards are obviously going to have to address. 

Let me say this: I am 100% a proponent of Title IX and all of the protections it afforded, and it was created to protect the rights of women and girls in sports, to include everything ancillary to that. That means their locker rooms, their restrooms and such. 

I do not believe that biological males should be participating in female sports. They certainly should not be in female restrooms. Now, I understand that California has passed laws that attempt to provide protections for those that believe that they are transgender or of the separate sex. I understand that, and I understand probably the equality sense of purpose behind it. And I’m 100% in support of all students, regardless of how they feel about their sexuality or gender identity. 

However, biology is a thing. We teach it in school, and I don’t believe that we should be putting the pressures of our girls in situations, such as sports, and certainly in situations such as locker rooms and bathrooms, and having male athletes who claim to themselves and state that they are of a different gender. 

So Title IX was written for a purpose, and I believe it should be protected. The girls should be protected, and we can make accommodations for those that have a different opinion. But girls need their space, and Title IX needs to be protected, 100%. 

Career Technical Education:

The district has made strides to introduce and grow workforce development opportunities for its students, like its Career Technical Education courses. Should the district continue these efforts, and if so, what direction would you like to see it take?

Noemi Hernandez Alexander
I am so proud of the work that we’ve done in the last four years to create real, meaningful partnerships.

So not only are we exposing students to new skills, but we’re also creating the partnerships, strategic partnerships — it’s something that we’re prioritizing this year in our strategic plan — to make those warm handoffs and those bridges to those people who are creating those jobs. 

When I came on the board, I made a connection with the Carpenters, and I connected our construction pathway with actual apprenticeships. A couple of years ago, we celebrated our first signing day for those students who went from their CTE program into becoming apprentices with the Carpenters Union. I actually met one of them a couple of weeks ago. He came up to me, and he said, “Oh, I’m from Ramona High School. I was a part of the Carpenters program, and now I’m working on this project in Palm Springs, and I’m making a lot of money.” 

That’s what he said, and I was so happy to hear that, because we’re creating real partnerships. We’ll continue to do that in every area that we can with CTE. We need community partners to tell us what kind of CTE programs we need, so that we can fill that workforce. 

One of the things that I really want to work on, if I get elected in next four years, is creating an EMT fire pathway where students can learn emergency management technology and emergency management preparedness, and also parlay that into an opportunity to work with the Ben Clark Center and enter the Fire Academy with a pathway that starts in high school. 

Jinane Annous

[Those are] two things that were really dear to my heart, always dear to my heart, because when I was a director in Hemet, I was responsible for curriculum instruction and for working with local colleges, and I started in 2010 [with] the dual enrollment program with Mt. San Jacinto College in Hemet, and I was very big on career technical education, and I started it in Hemet.

I was the advocate and the godmother behind it, because I believe that not every student will choose to go to a four-year university. Not every student is going to end up a doctor or an attorney, or any of those careers. I mean, there are students who enjoy repairing cars, there are students who enjoy doing construction in the house and repairing homes, there are students who might enjoy working in plumbing. 

So I will support strengthening career education fully, and building relationships and partnerships with community colleges and local businesses, which we have many of them in here. Students should have the opportunity to explore careers in healthcare, technology, engineering, skilled trades and growing fields. I mean, Europe has been ahead of us for years with this. Like Germany, where the students have apprenticeships with local industries to do that. 

I also believe that dual enrollment and all these training [programs] will help the student to gain valuable experiences and prepare them for the real world. I don’t want a disconnect to be between our high school and the real world. Career education, dual enrollment, partnerships with community and businesses allow the student to explore what the real world will be about, and so, when they graduate and if they decide to go to a community college, also join the workforce after that, they are prepared. 

They know what it entails. That’s why I strongly, strongly support career education, dual enrollment and any opportunity that prepares our students for the real world. 

Duffy Atkinson

To answer the question simply: Yes, absolutely, we need to continue to execute on that program.

CTE is a phenomenal piece that all public education should have been looking at decades ago. Not every student is going to want to, or is primed and geared for their personality or whatever, to go to a four-year university. So, what do we do to provide a future for those students? 

Career technical education is a phenomenal pathway, structure and framework that allows us to deliver to those students, not only an immediate potential job after they’re graduating from high school, but there are also students that go through high school, they start as freshmen and they get in their sophomore years, they start thinking about their future, and they’re not quite sure what they might want to do. They have a hard time, maybe, landing on a college major. 

Well, that’s understandable. A lot of kids have that struggle. The exposure to a career technical education program, in a lot of instances, would give them exposure to the types of jobs that ultimately might require education but now they have the pathway. They see it now. They see the connection between where they are academically, where they would need to be. 

Maybe there’s some college. Maybe there’s some junior college that would require that to come true for them. Well, now you’ve created a pathway. You’ve created an actual way for them to make their dreams come true. 

So CTE, absolutely, whatever we can do to execute on that mission. It’s a challenge for a district to do because of the investments. It’s hard to provide the same CTE pathways across all schools across the district, so you kind of have to pick and choose. But I think the district’s doing its best. We’ve put a lot of money into the program. We should continue.