San Diego, CA (special) -- Marty Block is three generations removed from the immigrant experience, but Ellis Island is one of his important reference points as he helps to set the course of the San Diego Community Colleges.

Block became president of the college board just seven minutes after being sworn in last December.  Simultaneously, he has been serving as president of the San Diego chapter of the American Jewish Committee.

When his great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early 19th century, they had to pass through Ellis Island en route to America's opportunities.  Once in America, the Block family flourished, with Marty being raised in relative luxury in the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill.

Today many students at the San Diego Community Colleges' three campuses and 14 continuing education facilities are immigrants from other countries.  Other students, though American-born, are immigrating from poverty to opportunity and from despair to hope.

Block subscribes to the theory that the education system today is "the modern-day Ellis Island where people from all over the world, all the economic groups, come into the schools and this is where they really enter into full citizenship of the country."

He added during an interview last week: "I think the function of education is to prepare a wide diversity of people for the work force, for a useful place in society. ... 

"It is a vehicle for producing productive, well-balanced, content, effective citizens--people who hopefully because they are educated will do the right thing for their brethren."

Block has spent some three decades in various aspects of the educational system.  He taught junior high school in Skokie, while completing law school at DePaul University.  He became a school attorney at Western Illinois University, and took a similar position at San Diego State University in 1980.

After Block was elected in 1986 to the San Diego County Board of Education--which helps to coordinate policies and programming among all the school districts within the county--SDSU made him an assistant dean of its education department, focusing on relations between the university and K-12 schools.  

During his eight years on the county board, he served two as its president as well as one year as president of California's association of county boards of education.

Defeated for reelection to the county board in 1994, Block subsequently changed assignments at SDSU.  He became director of its Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, which deals with student conduct issues, discipline, and complaints of sexual harassment or discrimination.  

He made a comeback to politics last November with election to the Community College Board.  His new colleagues promptly made him their president, not only in recognition of his experience in other presidencies but because they hoped he could restore amity to their meetings. For Block, this was a fortunate development.  While he had much to learn about the day-to-day functioning of the Community Colleges, he knew how to work with board colleagues.  In his first six months, Block helped his colleagues fashion labor contracts with nine bargaining units serving the Community Colleges.  

I asked Block how he goes about determining what kinds of projects should be funded by educational boards and which should not.  Settling labor issues permitted the board to refocus its attention onto the educational system, he said. If he has a bias, he added, it is in favor of helping those people who have the greatest need for the benefits of the educational system.

For example, if asked to decide between funding college-level enrichment classes for high school students on their summer break versus funding programs "that will help tutor or remediate kids who didn't get basic skills in high school or elementary school," he would choose the latter. 

One initiative which he strongly backed while a member of the county Board of Education was the outreach program to homeless students which won Sandra McBrayer of San Diego recognition as a national teacher of the year.

"There was strong sentiment by some of the board members that we shouldn't fund a program that spent a lot of money on relatively a hand full of kids in need.  But the majority of the board felt that it was important to give these kids an opportunity that they had missed, either because they were kicked out of their homes by their parents or were having problems with drugs and alcohol at some point."

Block says he considers it important as an educator not only to promote the positive benefits of schooling, but to protect the public educational system from interference by people with private religious agendas.

On the day he was sworn in as Community College Board president, he was distressed by the fact that there was a decorated Christmas tree occupying a prominent spot in the board room.  He was too new to raise an objection then, he said, but this year, as president, he will oppose such an obvious religious symbol.

 "We have large numbers of students who are Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu and having a Christmas tree in a governing office is not appropriate," Block said.  "It tells people who come to a board meeting that they are not included unless they happen to be of the majority faith." 

Christmas trees, Christmas pageants, and prayers mandated by schools all are forms of religious coercion, which Block says he believes must be guarded against.

At the same time, he said, freedom of religion for students must be protected.  "I've had students over the years at San Diego state who missed days of class for the Jewish holidays and weren't allowed by certain professors to make up those classes.  Part of my job there is to make sure that students are allowed.  In fact there is a California code which requires professors to let students make up tests that they missed for valid religious reasons."