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 →