Dear Fontana Community:

It’s been about a week since my last post. During this past week, I’ve been reflecting on many things. At tonight’s board meeting, I made this statement:

I want to congratulate Jim Williams, former President of USW 8599, on his retirement. I remember when I first met Mr. Williams, I was working in FUSD as the Coordinator of Family & Community Engagement. He stopped by to learn more about my vision of reorganizing the work of all our Community Aides. At that time, many were working mainly in the office and not engaging our community. My vision was to make sure our Community Aides were engaging parents and the community at large. But before he asked about my vision, he wanted to get to know me personally before getting down to business. This showed me that relationships were very important to him. That stood out big time to me! I want to thank Mr. Williams for his work and many years of service to our FUSD community. I also want to congratulate Dawn Dooley as USW’s new president and Richard Romo as the new VP. I look forward to working with both of you.

I have been witnessing some dark moments, but I have also seen a great amount of strength and perseverance. I have seen individuals searching out hope and connect closer to their families and faith. Witnessing these incredible feats have given me tremendous hope. I have seen some incredible community champions serve our scholars and their families in some creative ways. We are having to learn how to develop curriculum and instruction to our scholars through distance learning, serve nutritional meals to our neediest, provide clean and safe facilities, all while “building the plane as it’s flying.”

For a while now, we have been talking about the need to rethink how we educate our scholars today and for future generations. As you all know, we are currently educating Generation Z and soon we will be educating Generation Alpha who will be their children. A silver lining of COVID-19 is that this disruption might be what we needed to get us all to rethink how we educate, and question what we need to teach and how we are preparing our scholars for their future. So, as we grapple with the new ways of communicating with our students away from our classrooms, it is a good time to reflect on how this disruptive crisis can help us define what learning should look like for future generations and beyond.

This crisis has pushed us locally to evaluate, harness and utilize our available technological tools to create content for remote learning for students in all sectors. Our teachers are learning and experiencing new possibilities to do things differently and with greater flexibility. For many of us, these are new modes of instruction that have previously been largely untapped particularly in our K-12 arena.

This pandemic has also shown us how globally interconnected we are. What affects those in one country can affect those in others. There is no longer such a thing as isolated issues and actions. Successful people in the coming decades need to be able to understand this interrelatedness and navigate across all boundaries to work in a globally collaborative way.

I do know one thing, we will come back from COVID-19 with a much more widely shared understanding how digital tools are complements, not substitutes, for the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face learning.
We are all experiencing social isolation and having to connect remotely more than ever. This is serving a wonderful reminder of the importance of our human need for face-to-face social interaction, the importance of our close friends and family, and our connection to faith.

I want to thank all our FUSD Champions who are making sure our “plane continues to fly” to best serve our scholars and their families.

Much love to each you,

Mars Serna
Vice President
FUSD Board of Education