Re-elect Mark Takano
to the RCC Board of Trustees

Stability and Continuity Allow for Real Change to Occur

Now is the time for sound experience and proven leadership. Mark Takano believes that great institutions are built with thoughtful planning and patience. RCC continues to move in the right direction with deliberate and confident steps. Mark has helped to make policies at RCC that will ensure that the District meets the needs of a rapidly growing population. He is committed to educational innovation and providing more choices for students. Most importantly, he has the perspective and background to tackle tough educational challenges such as the high rates of remediation and the rising costs of attending college.

Wise planning and good governance led RCC to its current situation of trust with the voters who saw fit to approve a $350 million capital construction bond in March of 2004 Over the fifteen year life of the bond, federal and state matches will leverage its effect to an amount approaching $1 billion. This will mean RCC will be able to build the classrooms, laboratories, and libraries necessary to serve the projected growth.

Leadership is about providing a positive vision for the community, and at times, challenging the community to make sacrifices for that vision. Mark is grateful to voters who responded to the challenge of the RCC Board to the pass the bond. He pledges that the bond money will be spent prudently, in accordance with sound institutional planning.

By supporting good policies and good governance, Mark Takano continues to be an effective change agent for RCC.

Inclusion is Best Implemented Before It is Demanded

The Norco and Moreno Valley Campuses will soon become independent colleges, making RCC a three-college system. This transition will be beneficial for a number of reasons. The District will be able to make more curricular choices available for students while avoiding costly duplication. It will benefit from the current plan to reform the state funding formula moving through California Community College System's consultation process. Under the current reform plan, each college in the state will be apportioned base funding. Good governance will involve ensuring that the efficiency that comes with being a large District is balanced with decentralized authority at the three colleges.

Wise planning and strong governance will be needed to keep District operations efficient and avoid harmful rivalries from emerging. Mark has the long-term perspective and experience to help guide this transition. One important step that RCC will need to take is to ensure that the communities surrounding the Norco and Moreno Valley Campuses are represented at the Board level. Mark will reform the way RCC Trustees are elected to ensure political representation to these communities without making incentives for trustees to "pork barrel" resources. He wants to structure governance at RCC carefully so that the focus is always on the bigger picture of serving students.

He opposes a large central District bureaucracy and wasteful duplication of programs, yet all three of RCC's colleges must have in common a strong academic core in the liberal arts and sciences. He favors equipping the three college presidents with enough authority to serve the students, faculty, and community without stifling red tape. The central administration should be lean.

Innovation is the Key to Providing More Choices and Opportunities for Students

"...the right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

During a mission to France on behalf of the Continental Congress to preserve the French alliance with American Revolutionary armies, John Adams experienced the wonders of Paris: the opera houses, the gardens, and the fine arts. He had to keep his focus on the fight for liberty back in America. For John Adams, The beauty of Paris presented both temptation and inspiration. It tempted him to become distracted from his mission to secure French support of the American cause for liberty, but at the same time, the beauty he experienced inspired him to imagine what winning liberty would mean for future Americans. He wrote to his wife Abigail while in Paris:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathmatics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapstry, and porcelain.

It is interesting that he writes about arts education as a right. It is too easy to think of the arts as a luxury, but for John Adams the arts would be a source of deep inspiration for the struggle of American Independence.

After years of planning, The Riverside School for the Arts is about to break ground in downtown Riverside. This school will be open to students from throughout District as well as the county. Indeed, the student body may well be national and international. The arts have usually been considered something that wealthy people sponsored as patrons and the children of the wealthy studied because they didn't have to worry about getting a job. Not so anymore. Technology has made training in the arts a solid career choice. Today's artists, in order to be successful, will have to integrate a wide variety of thinking skills. RCC, joining with UC Riverside and local K-12 schools, is leading the way to establish The Riverside School for the Arts as a place where students from humble means who possess artistic potential can gain public access to a superb arts education.

It should be remembered that Mark brought in advisors from the animation studios of Sony Motion Pictures to help with this project. He also identified the person who would lead the planning team, Dr. James Caterall of UCLA. Nine years ago, in its editorial page endorsement of Mark, the editors of the Press-Enterprise wrote in reference to his work on the School for the Arts, "Mark Takano has the capacity to envision a program, work it out, gather support, and see it through..." This project has received over $1 million in federal planning money. Architects are working on designs for the initial phase of the building that will house the school. Downtown businesses are excited by the economic development that the school is sure to stimulate. This school will be another high quality educational choice for our area's students.

The Learning Center at La Sierra: A Partnership with Alvord Unified School District

The brain research of the past decade has confirmed the value of early childhood education in setting the stage for the successful development of students later in life. Mark has served on a joint Alvord/RCC committee to build an innovative Center for Primary Education that will train early childhood educators. Together, Alvord and RCC will operate a laboratory school where preschool teachers and elementary school teachers will be trained. In this setting, strides will be made to train these teachers in the latest advances teaching math and language skills. One of the crises our nation faces is the low number of Americans entering into scientific programs. Doctorates awarded in the sciences are increasingly being earned by foreign graduate students. This is due in part to the weakness of science instruction at the elementary school level. The Center for Primary Education will also address science education as a component of teacher training.

Educational Innovation: Middle Colleges and Early College High Schools

Building on the tremendous success of the Moreno Valley Campus Middle College, RCC is expanding the concept of offering the option of early college opportunities to students in Norco. In Moreno Valley, cohorts of students take classes on the Moreno Valley Campus, supervised by high school instructors. The college campus is the center of their education. It is an alternative to the conventional high school experience. It is an opportunity for teenagers to be in a more mature environment. This often serves those students who may be alienated in a conventional setting. Nearly all students who complete the program matriculate to college. Large percentages of students graduate with substantial amounts of college credits completed in addition to a high school diploma.. In Norco, an entire high school, John F. Kennedy High School is being constructed on RCC property. Its proximity to the college will allow RCC to offer the Middle College option to students in the Corona-Norco schools.

Capitalizing on the Gates Foundation's interest in funding the reform of high schools, RCC has already formed partnership with the Riverside Unified School District with its creation of a charter school for dropout students from age 16 to 21. Instead of having to return to the high school environment where they have previously experienced failure or alienation, students are welcomed into the college environment through carefully focused remediation courses, eventually putting themselves back into the education track. The Gateway to College Early College High School is enormously successful.

Mark supports continued efforts in the future to participate in experiments to restructure and reform high schools. He is especially intrigued with the work of Bard College President Leon Bottstein who established the Bard Early College High School in Manhattan. Dr. Bottstein believes that far more students than generally believed can benefit from restructuring of education. He believes that four years of high school and two years of community college can be compressed into a four year program. This concept is known as Early College High School. It can be thought of as a more systematic and dramatic restructuring of the high school experience than the middle college program RCC currently offers. For more information on this educational innovation, please read Dr. Bottstein's book, Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture.

The Roubidoux Early College High School posted outstanding academic achievement as measured by the California Standards Test.

The future of the Ben Clark Academy located at March Air Force Base provides integrated training for first responders: Police, Fire, Medical, and Forestry. This training approach which brings public service professionals together to learn how to coordinate responses to disasters is essential. Such training will help to avoid a repeat of the tragic communication glitches that affected the first responders in New York City during the September 11th attack. Mark Takano believes that the Ben Clark Academy is uniquely positioned to make a significant contribution to National Homeland Security. He will urge that the District focus energy on making sure RCC is considered for federal funding as a major training center.

Completion of the Vision that Continues to Grow

Mark Takano's vision for the future of RCC is a work in progress. It is substantive. It is about adapting and changing to meet the needs of students and the community. While much has been accomplished during his tenure on the Board, he has not ceased to be an agent of change.

He brought change to the RCC Board of Trustees eighteen years ago. He brought stability to a volatile Board environment. it is in an environment of stability that real change occurs: needs are assessed, plans are laid, plans are implemented, and institutions get built.

His continuing presence on the RCC Board of Trustees means the continuation of positive change for RCC. He can bring his institutional knowledge to bear on the complex decisions that will present themselves in the near future.

Mark Takano is senior most Board member in years of service, but he remains the youngest member in age. His vision remains fresh, relevant, and vital. He stands on eighteen years of successful service.

Let him continue his work for RCC and you. Vote to re-elect him on November 4.