Parents from La Jolla’s schools want to ensure that their voices are heard loud and clear before school district officials. A group of 10 parents (two from each school) is working to organize La Jolla’s schools into an official cluster, similar to the Point Loma cluster, in the hope of building a strong platform to represent the schools before the Board of Education. The group presented its ideas before a favorable crowd of 130 parents, teachers and administrators at the inaugural La Jolla cluster meeting on Jan. 21 at La Jolla High School auditorium. “We’ll have a much stronger voice if the district understands what we need,” said Lisa Bonebrake, a parent of a first- and a third-grader at Bird Rock Elementary. “If the district knows that we’re speaking for 5,000 families, we’ll have a much louder advocacy than one parent standing up there asking for the district to save a program.” Board of Education member John de Beck, who represents the coastal schools, said the cluster isn’t going to solve the budget crisis but it’s a start. “It’s a good way to position yourself,” de Beck said. “If the school board listens — that’s another thing.” The Point Loma schools found that organizing as a cluster enabled them to develop a shared strategic plan between the schools, according to Christy Scadden, president of the Point Loma Cluster Schools Foundation. Together, the schools determined common values, formed a vision statement and worked to build programs across the cluster, which can be seen at www.pointloma cluster.com. “I think our stakeholders feel like they have an organized voice,” Scadden said. “When we do bring it before the board, there’s an identifiable source. The [district] knows where it’s coming from and why.”  Board of Education member John Lee Evans compared a school cluster to the community planning groups that make recommendations on land-use issues to City Council. “The ability to come together and make decisions and advocate back to the school district is very important,” Evans said. The group plans to survey parents and staff to gauge their support for forming a cluster. The La Jolla Cluster would include La Jolla High, Muirlands Middle, and Bird Rock, La Jolla and Torrey Pines elementary schools. Forming a cluster would also foster better communication between schools, the group of parents said. The cluster could help establish curriculum priorities across the schools, and perhaps coordinate fund-raising. For example, the cluster could help ensure each elementary school provides a strong foundation in technology learning so students arrive at the middle school with a similar knowledge in the subject. “I hope the cluster would create better dialogue with the middle school to help ease parents’ anxieties about their kids moving to the middle school,” said Alison Lee, president of the Muirlands Foundation. The cluster would not replace the activities of the foundations or PTAs, however, nor would it use funds from the foundations to become established. The cluster would have to raise funds — or rely on parents for pro bono work — to establish a 501 C3 nonprofit. Each school would nominate two parents and two staff members to serve on the cluster committee. It took three years for Point Loma to organize its cluster, but Bonebrake believes La Jolla can organize much more quickly because it already has a model to follow, as well as active parents to implement it. More radical ideas to negotiate with the school district to gain greater autonomy in its curriculum — or even to form charter schools or break away as a separate costal school district — are not off the table. “Nothing is off the table, but we need to unify as a cluster first to do this,” Bonebrake said. In 2002, La Jolla High School managed to negotiate an autonomous agreement with the school district to gain more control over its curriculum since the high school has strong student achievement levels. For more information visit www.lajollacluster.com or e-mail [email protected].