Anaheim teachers’ union highlights community schools, Minecraft project and Prop. 55 renewal effort

Jeff Morgenstern, president of the Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association (ASTA), told the host of the Anaheim Union High School District podcast that community‑schools funding and teacher‑led classroom initiatives are central to the district’s strategy for keeping students engaged and supporting families.

Morgenstern said ASTA helped co‑write a statewide community‑schools grant that allowed the district to expand services and establish steering committees at sites that include students, parents, community partners, district staff and labor. “We saw it as a great opportunity to cocreate and write that grant, to just work collaboratively with the district and all of our educational partners to promote community schools,” he said.

He described implementation steps the district has taken at school sites, including hiring dedicated community‑school coordinators and placing part‑time release teachers at participating schools to bring local “assets and needs” data into classroom instruction. “We put a lot of time and resources behind implementing the capstone, and now it’s completely embedded in what we do,” Morgenstern said.

As an example of teacher innovation, Morgenstern recounted a project led by Jason Coller, a community‑school teacher at the junior‑high level, who used Minecraft to help students model their school community and develop local solutions. Morgenstern said Coller presented the effort at the CTA Summer Institute and now serves as the junior‑high community‑school teacher lead in Anaheim.

Morgenstern also raised concerns about state funding for public education and urged action to renew a ballot measure he said provides major revenue for K‑12. “We’re funding our students thousands of dollars less per pupil than the national average,” he said. He described Proposition 55 (the high‑earners’ tax referenced in the interview) as bringing “over $14,000,000,000 to public education” and warned that, if renewal efforts fail, Anaheim Union alone could lose “close to $50,000,000. That’s 15% of our budget. That’s gonna lead to layoffs for certificated and classified employees.”

Morgenstern said ASTA is asking for an internal goal of 85% of its members to sign petitions to qualify the renewal for the ballot, and that the group intends to build a broader coalition of education management, labor and community partners to carry the measure to the November 2026 ballot. “If someone’s gonna sign a petition to qualify this for the ballot, then when they get the ballot in the mail … they’re more than likely to vote yes for it,” he said.

The podcast conversation emphasized collaboration between union and district leadership on redesign and community‑schools work. Morgenstern said he was heading to Western High School after the interview for a meeting about fine‑tuning redesign implementation.

The district and ASTA provided program examples and campaign aims on the podcast; formal ballot language, projected revenue impacts for Anaheim Union or final campaign strategies were not presented during the interview.