LOS ANGELES — The clicking of keyboards is a familiar sound in Raymond Avedian’s eighth-grade chemistry class at John Adams Middle School.
“We don’t use paper and pencil anymore. Everything is on Chromebooks now,” Avedian said.
He’s taught there for 23 years and said, unfortunately, the Chromebooks they use are as advanced as his classroom gets.
“Some of the old desks are coming apart,” Avedian said.
His classroom is one of several in a building, and he said it is crumbling underneath them.
Carey Upton has been with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District for 17 years and said he’s seen the need for change grow from campus to campus.
“This is a building built in the 1950s. It was built at the time of the baby boomers,” said Upton, the SMMUSD chief operations officer. “It’s really been worn and no longer supports what we need to teach students.”
Like schools around the state, John Adams Middle School seeks to keep up with the ever-changing times.
“I see teachers doing their best to teach in those spaces. I see students doing their best to learn, and I know we’re just not giving them the right tools,” Upton said.
But to make those changes, the money has to come from somewhere. On Election Day, Californians voted to approve Proposition 2, a bond that will issue $10 billion to public California schools.
Susan Shelley with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association said Proposition 2 is a waste of Californian tax dollars and that the state already has debt issues. She said there is a better way to fund renovations to public school facilities and keep the burden away from California’s taxpayers.
“A better solution is to pay for the high-priority needs from the budget without paying interest on it,” Shelley said.
But back at John Adams Middle School, students and faculty celebrate the decision, like school leadership around the state.
“Kids are always the same. You do this long enough, you see that whatever you have been complaining about, the kids are always the kids,” Avedian said.
They’re celebrating because they feel voters put kids and their educations first.