Unless we eradicate polio, within 10 years, as many as 200,000 new cases could occur around the world each year. In the past few years, only two countries have reported cases of polio caused by the wild virus, but no child anywhere is safe until we’ve vaccinated every child.

The 107 Billion dollar man administers a dose of vaccine.

New member alert

Joining Beurmann's Babies (#9) is new member Rick Montoya. Welcome!

Ring Your Bell!

Kevin Pope reminded us to mark our calendars for this year's bell-ringing day, Friday, December 13th. Our club is one of the top earners for the local Salvation Army.

Kevin went on to invite us to their Kettle Kick-Off on Thursday, November 14 from 6 pm - 9 pm. For more information and tickets, call 661-836-8487.

Guests:

Faust Gorham and Michael Lukens guests of Lynette Zelenzy

Anthony Galagaza guest of David Denison

Rotarian Hot Seat Segment

President Garro put Sue Benham in the spotlight this week. Sue met her husband, Herb, while attending Penn State. Somehow they found themselves in Bakersfield where she worked for the Public Defender's Office for 20 years. She has been in our club for 10 years now.

Progam

Sergeant at Arms, Jim Damian was absent today, and apparently his deputy Sergeant at Arms, Chad Tongco has been demoted. So everyone's go-to-guy, Steve Sanders, introduced our guests; Bryan Schaefer, Lynette Zelenzy and Christian Shannon, to discuss the Kern County Education crisis. "Crisis" might be too strong a word, but the numbers indicate a definite problem.

By the numbers:

Percentage of Kern County Students that met & exceeded mathematic testing: 28.8% which was up +6.8% since 2015.

Percentage of Kern County Students that met & exceeded English Language Arts testing: 43.2% which was up +10.2% since 2015.

Graduation rates for Kern County Students from 2016 - 2018 has hovered in the 85% range.

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Lynette started out with a briefing on the Kern High School District, BC and Cal State partnership. One of the cool things they are doing is called Dual Enrollment which allows a high school student to get college credits for certain qualifying classes. It's possible to enter as a Sophmore in college right out of high school!

Bryan and Christian talked about a couple of Mary Barlow's pet projects. (she was unable to attend today's meeting) The first being The Kern Education Pledge and the second is the Kern Integrated Data System or, K.I.D.S. (super clever).

Kern Education Pledge

Kern Education Pledge signatories consist of all 47 public school districts in Kern County, the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, CSU Bakersfield, the Kern Community College District, Taft College, and community partners. Essentially it's a list of goals and indicators that follow a student through Kindergarten to College.

The Kern Education Pledge signatories will regularly measure their progress as students matriculate through the local educational pathway, in pursuit of the following goals: Kinder Readiness Work Group, Literacy Work Group, College and Career Work Group and Postsecondary enrollment and program completion Work Group.

Essentially, educators working together at all levels to help students achieve better educational outcomes.

K.I.D.S Program

The last half of the discussion was about the K.I.D.S. program. It's pretty complicated, and this reporter noticed a lot of skepticism about it as members were mingling on the way out.

Here's how their website describes it:

"Through the Kern Education Pledge, the forty-seven school districts in Kern County have agreed to work together as one system to ensure student success. The Kern Integrated Data System (KIDS) is a result of the commitment to sharing real-time student outcome data to assist all stakeholders in making informed decisions about what is best for students, teachers and schools. The initial pilot project consists of nine school districts, Kern County Superintendent of Schools, and Hoonuit- working together to establish the learning and procedures that will provide the opportunity for additional districts to access these resources."

Basically KIDS is a powerful student data warehouse where educators have access to large data sets and a myriad of realtime reports that educators can tap into and then act upon on an individual student basis.

So- the way I had Christian explain it was- Student "Fred" is getting bad grades in 6th-grade math. Teacher is entering test scores and other matrices into this database, and somehow, teacher gets back recommendations and/or sources and resources to help Fred get back on track.

How the database knows about Fred's single mom's meth problem and that she's never around, and about Fred's own addiction to playing Fortnite till 3 in the morning, I have no idea.

There were many good questions after the program that created more questions in my mind.

I hope they prove the skeptics wrong and this does help nudge the percentages in math and English higher.