The Year's Highlights

Riverside County California is a fast growing, diverse and exciting place to live and work. We are one of the fastest growing counties in the nation where more than 25,000 new homes were built in just the last year. Our schools receive almost 15,000 new students each year while most of the counties in the state are seeing enrollments decline. A fourth of all Riverside County students speak a language other than English in their homes.

"The culture of Riverside County is high standards, high expectations and the belief that all students can learn."

– Jack O’Connell, California Superintendent of Public Instruction
2006 Riverside County Education Summit That keeps educators busy, but the Riverside County Office of Education is committed to helping teachers, administrators and school board members in our 23 local school districts keep up with rapid growth and the need for facilities and provide the highest quality education possible for every student.

RCOE serves a critical role as the intermediate agency between the Department of Education and local school districts. We offer direct instruction to 60,000 students in our own programs, including special education, vocational education and alternative education, as well as training for local district teachers and others.

RCOE also has oversight over certain state mandated programs as well as making sure that local districts balance budgets of more than $4 billion a year, and we provide child care for thousands of families who need it either in our own centers or through referrals.

Riverside County students continue to make remarkable gains in achievement, improving on the state’s testing program each year. Since 2001, our English Arts scores are up 11 points overall and math scores are up 14, as measured against California’s worldclass standards. To move more than 400,000 students that far and that fast is amazing.

For schools that need help and request assistance, our Riverside County Achievement Teams started with 14 schools eight years ago and now work with 153. These teams of highly qualified educational experts played a critical role in the county’s overall improvement. I am very proud of their work and the fact that Riverside County is now a state and national model for improving student achievement.

RCOE’s unique and much acclaimed Safe Schools Unit and its Connect to Achieve program puts highly trained educators, counselors, and law enforcement experts to work in schools each day to identify and help at-risk students and their families. Their work is showing great results. We offer ongoing training for teachers and administrators on stopping and preventing violence based on race or bias. This work is ongoing and involves literally hundreds of trainings countywide.

We recently sponsored our Fourth Annual Education Summit, with more than 400 of the county’s education leaders gathered to hear state and national experts offer their help in solving critical issues. It has grown each year and remains the one "must" event for Riverside County leaders. We had great representation from the 23rd District PTA as well.

And we have added new programs, such as the Riverside County Superintendents’ Academy for new district superintendents; the Academic All Star Recognition dinner; and an Internet Guide for Children and Teens, in response to concerns about what our young people are seeing on the Internet and how they are being seen.

Finally, something very new this year is our Operation Recognition program. This effort will provide our veterans from World War II, Korea and Vietnam a chance to receive the high school diplomas they might have missed out on because of their valiant service. The program also offers diplomas to Japanese-Americans who missed diplomas due to internment in relocation camps. I am very proud that we can offer this service and hope all of you join me in wishing them well.

This last year I got a very broad picture of education systems in our state and nation serving as the president of the California county school superintendents’ association and the national Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities advisory panel. From that vantage point, I am amazed at how hard Riverside County educators work and the results of their hard work.

I hope you enjoy and can make use of the information in this Annual Report to the Community. All the information is also available online at www.rcoe.us along with more in-depth information about each of our service divisions. Thanks again for your support of public education in Riverside County.

David Long, Ph.D.
Riverside County
Superintendent of Schools