Supporting Military Families

We see you, and we’re ready

A military child changes schools six to nine times before graduation. Here’s how ours became some of the first in the region ready to catch them.

It started with a phone call. A graduate of our own schools — someone who had gone on to work on military-family issues in Washington — asked me a simple question: why don’t Roseville’s schools have the Purple Star designation? I had to admit I’d never heard of it. By the time I hung up, I knew we were going to earn it.

Why it matters

Here’s what I learned. A child in a military family can expect to change schools six to nine times between kindergarten and graduation — roughly three times as often as their classmates. Every move means a new campus, new friends, a new curriculum, and often a new tangle of graduation requirements to sort out. Somewhere in America, about 200,000 military-connected students change schools every year, and California — home to the largest concentration of active-duty, National Guard, and Reserve families in the country — sends many of those kids into classrooms like ours. They don’t wear their sacrifice on their sleeve. But they carry it.

What Purple Star actually is

The Purple Star School designation, written into California law in 2024 and administered by the state Department of Education, recognizes schools that have made real, structured commitments to these students: a staff point-of-contact who helps military families with enrollment and the maze of requirements; professional development so staff understand what these kids are navigating; a dedicated web page of resources; and a student-led program to welcome new arrivals and help them belong. Notably, none of it requires new money. It requires intention.

First in our region

We earned the designation at four of our campuses — Adelante, Antelope, Roseville, and Woodcreek — making RJUHSD the first district in Placer County, and among the first in the greater Sacramento region, to do it. When ABC10 covered the news, the story that came through wasn’t about a plaque on a wall. It was a message to families: when the orders come and you land here mid-year, we’re ready for your child.

Now we’re taking it countywide

I didn’t want this to stop at our district line. So I’ve been sharing our application, our materials, and our staff’s time with neighboring districts — and I put a challenge out publicly, in an op-ed and in person: let’s make Placer County the first county in Northern California where every eligible school earns the Purple Star. Districts across the county are now working toward exactly that.

“This is the kind of thing government should do more often: it costs almost nothing, it asks only for a little intention, and it tells families who sacrifice for all of us that we’ve got their kids.”

I spent my career in public safety before I ever sat on a school board, so I carry a particular respect for the families who serve. Getting this right isn’t political, and it isn’t expensive. It’s simply the right thing to do — and I’m proud our schools were among the first in the region to do it.

Pete Constant is a retired police officer, a university professor, a parent of five Oakmont graduates, and RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Family & Community Engagement record →

How I Govern

I didn’t learn governance on the job

Most people come to a school board wanting to help and learn how it all works along the way. I came at it from the other direction.

Serving well on a public board is a craft. Most trustees, understandably, learn that craft while they’re doing it — a meeting at a time. I’ve spent the better part of my career on the other side of it: studying how public boards actually work, and then teaching it.

I teach this for a living

By day, I’m a professor and the chair of the Public Policy Department at William Jessup University, right here in Rocklin, where I teach courses like public-sector leadership, public administration, and state and local government. The work of a governing board isn’t abstract to me — it’s the subject I stand up in front of a classroom and explain. I’m even finishing a doctorate built around it, with a dissertation on how public board members actually make their decisions. It turns out that if you want to serve on a board well, it helps to have spent years asking why some boards thrive and others come apart.

And I’ve done it, not just studied it

The theory only counts if you’ve lived it. I’ve sat as a trustee over multi-billion-dollar public pension funds, where a single vote can affect thousands of families’ retirements. I’m a founding board member and corporate secretary of the Equable Institute, a national, bipartisan nonprofit that helps governments keep their retirement promises sustainable and honest. That combination — the classroom and the boardroom, the research and the responsibility — is what I bring to our schools.

You never stop going back to school

Here’s the part my kids tease me about: I don’t think you ever graduate from this. Even now, decades in, I still go back to school for it — this year I completed executive programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School on corporate governance and on being effective in the boardroom. Nobody made me. I did it because the families of this district deserve a trustee who treats governing as a skill worth sharpening, not a title to sit back and enjoy.

What this means for our schools

It means I don’t have to guess at the best way to run a board — I’ve helped write it, and I’m regularly asked to teach it. Over the years I’ve been invited to train city councils and school boards, to lead board retreats, and to speak at conferences across the country and beyond on how good governance turns a board and its administration into partners instead of rivals. When neighboring districts want to get this right, they’ve asked me to come help. I’m proud of that — but the point isn’t the training. The point is what it protects.

“Good governance is the quiet work behind the walls. You don’t notice it when it’s done right — you just notice that the lights come on and the house holds. That’s the job.”

A well-run board keeps the focus where it belongs: on students, and off the drama that has swallowed so many districts. It settles the boring questions — who decides what, how a policy gets made, when the budget gets set — so the important ones get the attention they deserve. That’s not glamorous, and it rarely makes the news. But it’s the foundation everything our kids get to stand on. I’ve spent a career learning how to build that foundation, and I’d be honored to keep building it for Roseville.

Pete Constant is a university professor and department chair, a former public pension trustee, a parent of five Oakmont graduates, and RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Governance & Accountability record →

My Priorities · Family & Community Engagement

We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or even buy new tires

The hardest family issues split other districts into lawsuits. We brought parents and teachers to the same table and got it right — together.

I want families to experience our district as a genuine partner — one that respects them, keeps them informed, and actually hears them. That sounds simple. But over the last few years, some of the hardest questions in public education have landed squarely on school boards, and how you handle them tells families everything about whether you see them as partners or as problems.

Getting parental notification right

Across California, districts on every side of the parental-notification debate ended up in court or in labor disputes. I didn’t want to pick a political fight. I wanted to do what’s right for students and families and stand on solid legal ground.

So I framed our policy the way the issue actually presents itself to a school — not as any one hot-button topic, but as a universal question. The same tension shows up with a teen pregnancy, with substance abuse, with a student in a mental-health crisis: when a student’s privacy and a parent’s right to know are in conflict, how do we resolve it? So we wrote it plainly into board policy: clear respect for our students’ rights, clear respect for parents’ rights, and a commitment to work diligently to balance the two in the best interest of our students and families — and when a child’s safety is at risk, safety comes first. We discussed it all in public first, worked closely with our teachers, and adopted it unanimously.

It has drawn no legal challenge. While districts up and down California ended up in court or tangled in labor disputes over this very issue, we came through it without a single lawsuit, court order, or labor grievance — a distinction few, if any, of the districts that took it on can claim. Other boards have since asked to borrow our approach. As I put it at the time: we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, or even buy new tires. We just needed an alignment.

A Purple Star for our military families

The other work I’m proud of here started with a phone call. A graduate of our own schools, who’d gone to work on the issue in Washington, asked me a simple question: why don’t our schools have the Purple Star designation? I’d never heard of it.

Here’s why it matters. Military-connected kids move six to nine times before they finish high school — new school, new friends, new everything, again and again. The Purple Star program recognizes schools that ease those transitions with a dedicated staff liaison, real support, and a student-led transition program. We applied and earned the designation at four of our school sites — among the first in Placer County and the greater Sacramento region to do so. And now we’re working to help other districts earn it too, with the goal of making our county a model for the whole state.

What engagement really means

Underneath both of these is how I understand this job. When you elect someone, you’re not asking them to parrot your words back to you. You’re entrusting them to use good judgment on your behalf — out in the open, where you can watch. A school board serves several communities at once: the residents who elect us, the students and families who fill our classrooms, and the teachers and staff who serve them. Every one of them deserves a seat at the table.

“The measure of engagement isn’t whether everyone agrees. It’s whether every family walks away knowing they were respected, informed, and heard.”

That’s how you keep politics out of our kids’ schools — not by avoiding hard issues, but by facing them together, with respect, and getting them right.

Pete Constant is a parent of five Oakmont graduates, a retired police officer and university professor, and RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Family & Community Engagement record →

My Priorities · Transparency

The 599 courses no one had ever approved

When you do the public’s business in public, you find what needs fixing — and people trust the outcome, even when it isn’t the one they wanted.

I keep coming back to one idea: it’s not our work; it’s the public’s work. Our state constitution is clear that officials do the public’s business, and it should be done in public. Voters delegate their authority to a board of trustees — and out of respect for that trust, the board should include the community in everything it does.

That’s not just a compliance box to check. When people can watch the real deliberation, they trust the outcome, even when it isn’t the one they wanted. So one of the first things I did was open our process up.

Open by default

When I first joined the board, our policy committee meetings weren’t even open to the public. So I insisted they be opened up — publicly noticed, with agendas that describe each item and the full text of every policy up for discussion posted in advance, changes shown in strikeout, in full compliance with the law, so anyone can see exactly what’s changing. I moved board and staff comments to the beginning of meetings; they used to come at the very end, to a mostly empty room. And I renamed the confusing old “Audience to Visitors” section to plain “Public Comment,” so people actually know it’s their time to speak. Small changes, but each one makes it a little easier to take part.

The audit that surprised everyone

The clearest example of transparency paying off was our curriculum review. A hot, divided debate came before the board, and everyone expected a quick, angry vote. Instead, we moved the meeting to a campus theater to fit the crowd, took input only, and did a careful, layered audit — checking state law against board policy, board policy against the administrative regulation, and all of it against the actual practice at each site.

That review turned up 599 courses being taught with no record of ever having been formally approved by the board — out of only about 650. It surprised all of us: the board, the administration, and our teachers alike. We didn’t paper over it and we didn’t panic. We built a work plan and brought every one of those courses into compliance, out in the open. And because we did it that way — slow, deliberate, evidence first — people on all sides of the original debate came away feeling heard.

Reporting back, and redrawing the map

I also launched an annual State of the District. Cities have a State of the City; our schools do just as much work that deserves to be reported out to the community in a straightforward, even celebratory setting, rather than buried in a board agenda.

And when we had to redraw attendance boundaries — and nothing, believe me, is more emotional to parents than which school their kids attend — we set our goals and criteria in public first, took about a year of community input, and the board actually changed the map in response to what we heard, rather than rubber-stamping a staff plan. People watched trustees argue passionately, and watched some of us change our positions based on what the public said. That’s not a bug in open government. That’s the entire point of it.

“When the public sees the real deliberation — including officials changing their minds — they trust the result. That trust is worth more than any quick vote.”

Transparency takes more time and more patience than doing things behind a closed door. It’s also the only way to earn the confidence of the families we serve. I’ll keep choosing it.

Pete Constant has chaired the board’s Policy Committee for six years, teaches public policy at the university level, and is RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Transparency record →

My Priorities · Fiscal Responsibility

The move I’m proudest of is one you’ve probably never heard about

Fiscal discipline isn’t about spreadsheets. It’s about making sure a bad budget year never costs your kid their teacher.

I learned fiscal discipline the hard way — helping lead one of the nation’s ten largest cities through the depths of the Great Recession. When you’ve had to make those decisions, you never forget what’s really at stake in a budget: it’s not a number on a page, it’s whether the adult standing in front of a classroom is still there next fall.

So let me start with the fundamentals, because they matter. We’ve balanced the budget every single year. We hold reserves at over double the state’s minimum requirement — and in some years closer to three times it — a genuine cushion, managed right up to the level the state allows, so we can absorb a bad year or an unplanned event without cutting into kids. And we refinanced bonds to save taxpayers over $13 million, retiring that debt sooner and leaving more in residents’ pockets in the years ahead.

The second mortgage nobody talks about

Now the part I’m proudest of — and the part almost nobody hears about. Like most public agencies, our district carries pension obligations it’s paying down over decades. Think of it as a second mortgage: a large, long-term debt with payments you have to manage year after year. The actuaries tell us those annual payments are going to jump sharply around 2030 to 2033. And that money comes straight out of the same general fund that pays our teachers.

Most districts are going to wait for that squeeze and then scramble. I didn’t want to do that to our kids. So rather than wait, we set up a restricted federal trust — an IRS Section 115 pension trust — and have been steadily banking money into it. Because it’s restricted under strict federal rules, that money is protected for exactly one purpose. We’ve put about $7 million into it in a relatively short time, with roughly $3 million more expected this year.

This isn’t an idea I stumbled into locally. For years, my work across the country has been helping governments get ahead of exactly these pension obligations — work that helped bipartisan reforms pass in six states. I’ve brought that same foresight everywhere I’ve served: as a member of Roseville’s Community Priorities Advisory Commission, I urged the city to prepare the same way. It didn’t set up a Section 115 trust, but it did create a dedicated pension reserve fund and has been steadily funding it ever since — real, lasting security for the city’s employees and their retirements.

Here’s the payoff, in plain terms. When that pension bill rises and other districts are pulling the increase straight out of their classrooms, we’ll be able to pay it from the trust instead. It’s a shock absorber for a bump in the road we can already see coming. I’d advocated for exactly this kind of foresight years earlier at the city level; here, we did it even better.

On time, on budget — on purpose

We’ve applied the same discipline to construction. Serving on the Finance and Facilities Committee, I helped move our capital projects — including West Park High School and the district office — to a design-build approach, where one accountable team is on the hook to design and deliver on time and on budget. They have. Public projects don’t always work out that way, and that’s exactly why the delivery method matters.

“Fiscal responsibility isn’t about hoarding money. It’s about making sure the dollars are there, year after year, to educate our kids.”

We’ve all seen what happens when a district lets its finances drift: painful layoffs, bigger classes, cut programs, sometimes state oversight. That’s the outcome discipline prevents. Because our district stays healthy while many around us struggle, we can do the things that actually reach students — pay teachers at the top of our peer districts, protect athletics and the arts, and keep expanding opportunity. Keeping our dollars in the classroom isn’t a slogan. It’s the whole point.

Pete Constant chaired the finance committee of one of the nation’s largest cities and has served as a trustee on multi-billion-dollar public pension funds. He is a founding board member of the Equable Institute, a bipartisan think tank focused on retirement and fiscal policy, and the founder of Verdara, which helps charter-school teachers and employees secure their retirements. He is RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Fiscal Responsibility record →