In This Issue:  | | • | CONGRATULATIONS TO THE LAUSD BUILDING PROGRAM FOR ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL YEAR | | | • | LET ALL STUDENTS DREAM - California state Sen. Gil Cedillo critiques The Times' editorial on financial aid for undocumented students. | | | • | CHARTERS MUST BE WATCHED: A former teacher critiques The Times' suggestions for the Los Angeles Unified School District. | | | • | PREPARED FOR WHAT? – "College Prepared & Career Ready": Matching Our Rhetoric to Reality | | | • | USA Today: EDUCATION STANDARDS: STATES GAME THE SYSTEM | Opposing View: WE'RE ATTACKING THE ISSUES | | | • | EVENTS COMING UP | | | • | What can YOU do? | |
Featured Links: | | | | CONGRATULATIONS: The school year winds down and congrats are in order.
To GRADUATES who saw it through from K to 12.
And CULMINATORS who move along from preschool to K, from elementary to middle, from middle to high.
To HONOR ROLL STUDENTS and those who almost made it.
To STUDENTS WHO STUCK IT OUT and don’t know why.
To TEACHERS WHO STUCK IT OUT and don’t know why.
To EDUCATORS who did their best and now move on.
To DREAMERS who dared to live the dream.
To FOLKS WHO WEREN’T PAID, or were paid late – and even those who were overpaid and still no one will listen.
To PARENTS WHO PACKED THE LUNCH and got the kids to school on time, teeth brushed and ready to learn.
To BUREAUCRATS who aren’t bloated but still seem to be in the crosshairs.
To YOU WHO READ AND THOUGHT ABOUT IT …and thought to yourself how wrong many of us are an awful lot of the time – and how right this discussion is.
To THOSE WHO SIGNED MY PETITION and believed. And those that didn’t.
To THOSE WHO ACTED, who put on the blue or the yellow or the red T shirts.
Every one of you made and makes a difference, every day. Good job!
TRUE CONFESSION. I and my little family are on vacation and have been for the past week. There is no new news in this 4LAKids – just a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to get to.
NO GUILT. I didn’t take a computer or a cell phone on our vacation. I am going to try to avoid the internet and English language newspapers and CNN. We’ll see how that goes!
THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR BEGINS IN A WEEK. The bell rings at year round schools again on July 2. If you’ve read this far - and 4LAKids before - you know full well the multi-track bell doth not ring but it tolls for the lost days and missed opportunities of the thee's and me's and he's and she's in year round schools. I am he as you are me as we are all together: We ARE the walrus!
Rock onward! – smf
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE LAUSD BUILDING PROGRAM FOR ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL YEAR
BUT THEY’RE GOING TO NEED SOME HELP IF WE WANT THEM TO KEEP IT UP!
by smf for 4LAKids
I am wary about being a cheerleader here because I have an official role as an overseer (hopefully not in the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” context!) …but I am proud of the progress made in the past year and over the past six years.
I give the Facilities folks an “A” on their “progress report” to date. But an “A+” is possible ….and we need to get there! There are certainly things the district can and must do better in school construction – including listening better to the community and really watching every single dime of the taxpayer’s money at every turn!
LAUSD’s New School Construction Program is committed to providing neighborhood schools with a full nine-month instructional calendar to every student in the District.
• The program has made tremendous strides – To date the school district has built 65 new schools, 50 additions, and 22 early education centers.
• Today, no elementary school students are involuntarily bused out of their own neighborhood. None.
• Students are being moved off the shortened year-round calendar faster than originally anticipated.
• Full Day Kindergarten – a major facilities challenge - will be universally implemented in LAUSD beginning in two weeks – ahead of schedule and under budget!
The school district has worked hard, and will continue to do so in the face of challenges ahead. Now that we are building so many schools, some question the need for more.
BUT THE FACT IS THAT LAUSD CAMPUSES HAVE OVER TWICE AS MANY STUDENTS AS THE AVERAGE SCHOOL IN CALIFORNIA. …AND BIGGER IS NOT BETTER!
And even after completing the current School Construction Program, many LAUSD students will still attend older schools in need of repair, and over 200,000 – slightly less than a third of all students – attend class in temporary portable relocatable classrooms that usually that take up playground space. When the law says that too many students in a school with bungalows shoehorned onto the playground is NOT overcrowded we need to change the law!
PERHAPS THE GREATEST CHALLENGE AHEAD IS SECURING THE FUNDS PROMISED BY THE STATE TO MATCH THE LOCAL BOND DOLLARS APPROVED BY VOTERS:
• Completely unforeseen and unforeseeable factors have pinched LAUSD’s building budget. Materials and labor cost escalation is in the double digits, school building costs (schools and hospitals are the most expensive construction in cost per square foot) from about $400 per sq. ft to $600+ per sq. ft. in the past two years; this is driven by the expansion of building programs in China (including the Beijing Olympics), The Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and Iraq reconstruction – plus other local projects susch as airport expansion, the community colleghe building program and light rail.
• The LAUSD New Construction Program was designed under the assumption that the State would fulfill its promise to match 50 cents of every local dollar spent on construction …but the reality today is that the state match is only about 35 cents on the dollar!
• Because of this disparity, local bond dollars are being spent faster than originally planned, which places future projects in jeopardy.
• We in Los Angeles need the State to do its part to keep the promises we all made to our kids.
To address this shortfall in state match funds, as well as unprecedented nationwide escalation in construction costs, the District has sponsored AB 818 (Krekorian), which would prevent school districts from shouldering the total burden of cost escalation, and AB 1014(Bass), which would ensure urban districts like LAUSD are eligible for the funds they deserve. The District will aggressively advocate for passage of this pending state legislation in the months ahead so that we can fulfill our promise of a neighborhood school on a single-track calendar for every student.
The weight of what we have already accomplished reminds us just how important the program is for our students and the future of the District; we are beginning to see the construction program making a difference in the instruction of our children – we cannot stop now! Thousands of kids are already getting off buses and back onto traditional nine-month calendars; passing these bills would help ensure that every student in the District is afforded that same opportunity. LAUSD and all urban school children deserve the same treatment as every other child in the State.
In the weeks ahead 4LAKids will post information on how you can advocate for this legislation.
LET ALL STUDENTS DREAM - California state Sen. Gil Cedillo critiques The Times' editorial on financial aid for undocumented students.
by Gilbert Cedillo | LATimes Blowback
May 29, 2007 - When a California student is handed a high school diploma at graduation, no one asks if they are a citizen, legal resident or undocumented graduate. When the state sets aside money for the Cal Grants they look at the size of the potential applicant pool to determine funding needs, not legal status.
In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times did not tell the full story of how financial aid is awarded in our state and also on my bill, the California Dream Act (SB 160)
The Times suggested that state financial aid dollars granted to undocumented students come at the expense of students with legal status and that for this reason SB 160 was unacceptable. The vast majority of new student applicants benefiting from SB 160 would qualify for the Cal Grant High School Entitlement Award and there is no displacement of students in this program. In fact, the program is underutilized.
The High School Entitlement program is the largest Cal Grant program, and is guaranteed to every graduating high school student who meets rigorous academic eligibility requirements and demonstrates financial need. Of the 145,185 applicants for a High School Entitlement Award last year not one applicant was turned away for lack of state funds. More likely applicants are not matched with funds due to errors or missing information on the application form, or for not meeting financial criteria.
You might say there are too few applicants for these Entitlement grants. Although the program receives 100% annual funding, moneys go unused in some years. According to Department of Finance and California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) reports, during the previous two academic years only 64% of allocated grants were awarded. Many students are not aware of the statute on Entitlement grants, and allotted funds go unclaimed.
Because the state determines the size of the applicant pool for the Entitlement grants based on the number of graduating seniors, and not legal status, undocumented students are accounted for in the allocated grants. However they are unable to use the federal application form so their portion of the allotted grants goes unfulfilled as well. There are so few students participating in the Entitlement program that the CSAC maintains an aggressive campaign to entice students to complete the application.
The Times editorial claims that SB 160 might further distress the Cal Grant Competitive Award program. The Competitive Awards are a smaller program which targets older, non-traditional students, with slightly lower academic achievement. There is a statutory cap or limit on the number of Competitive grants provided; however any additional students eligible for this program as a result of SB 160 would be finite and very limited in scope.
Finally, I'd like to address the misperception or misunderstanding related to existing law. Federal law provides states the authority to issue non-federal student aid to undocumented students. Because California has not passed a specific law on the issue, dispersing funds falls within a legal grey area. While there are some private scholarship funds available which do not require proof of legal status, as noted by the Times, there is not a legal statute or protocol enabling the institution to release these funds to undocumented recipients. Many private scholarship funds never make it to students. SB 160 would resolve this matter, provide a specific statute, and thereby expand access to financial aid dollars.
Increased access to education and workforce development is why CSAC, the University of California and California State University systems, the Los Angeles and San Francisco Chambers of Commerce and numerous community colleges support the California Dream Act. The proposal clearly states that one student will not have an advantage over another student, a concept referred to as "equal access."
California needs more college applicants, more college graduates, not fewer. In a report released Wednesday, "Can California Import Enough College Graduates?", the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) noted that at current rates, the state is not capable of producing enough college graduates to meet future economic demands. The report suggests that migration of college-educated workers from other states and countries alone will not fill our need. The authors advise that the state has a role in "encouraging and enabling" Californians to obtain degrees and urges timely action, "of all the times to make an effort to increase educational attainment, doing so now may be particularly advantageous and can lead to better economic opportunities for Californians and possibly better outcomes for the state."
In closing, I'd suggest the Times assertion that awarding financial aid to undocumented students, "amounts to saying there's no reason to obtain legal residency in the first place" misses the point. Given the academic and business community's support for SB 160 and PPIC's analysis of the need for more college-educated workers in our state, the more mainstream opinion seems to focus on economic benefits. Distributing financial aid to our best and brightest students is not a matter of immigration policy; it's an investment to secure our economic prosperity. Passage of the California Dream Act does not place one student's future above another student's future; it opens the door for all students.
State Sen. Gilbert Cedillo represents California's 22nd district.
CHARTERS MUST BE WATCHED: A former teacher critiques The Times' suggestions for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Opinion by Chyre Kan Chyre Kan is a former teacher and administrator at Ivy Academia Charter School, and prior to that was a teacher in the L.A. Unified School District.
June 14, 2007 — As part of the suggestions for improvements to the education provided by Los Angeles Unified School District in its June 3 editorial " Next step for schools," The Los Angeles Times infers that Charter schools are the next-best thing to sliced bread for revamping our failing public school system. Charter schools can offer teachers the ability to create their own dynamic curriculum, free from the bureaucratic hurdles of the behemoth LAUSD. But as a former administrator and teacher at Ivy Academia Charter School in Woodland Hills, presently under a near year-long internal investigation by LAUSD, I'm concerned that districts are not yet equipped to deal with the opportunists who are attracted to this emerging field and who are not in it for the kids.
Charter schools are seen as cash-cows for those who learn how to work the system, and the districts that sponsor them must closely scrutinize not only the schools, but also the people who apply for charters. They must also closely monitor how they run their businesses. While most charters and their administrators are concerned with building a positive and ethical environment in which children can learn, there are some who see charter schools only as a business. There is nothing overtly wrong with that unless their business model is more Enron than Harvard. And when that happens, safeguards must be in place, and LAUSD, as well as the Los Angeles City Council and other governing agencies, cannot let these principle-challenged Charter school operators hide behind smiling children and seemingly grand test scores.
Administrators might tout heady test scores, but little or no consideration is given to the fact that there are those charter schools who actively seek out high-performing students who may have already been scoring high at their previous school. Comparing each child's score against their own past performance is a more realistic and responsible way of determining if a particular Charter school's curriculum is as good as its founders claim.
Speaking from my own experience, there are charter school operators who do not have educational backgrounds sufficient to supervise a complex teaching environment.
I've personally witnessed attendance record tampering (which can dictate overpayment to the school from the taxpayers).
Conflicts of interest must be carefully monitored. I've seen school founders who are not only employees of a school, but who also sit on the school's board of directors/governing board, holding controlling positions where they set their own salaries and set financial, banking and administrative policies beneficial to their own personal financial interest.
So while I appreciate that Charter schools can be part of the answer at LAUSD, we must do everything we can to keep unscrupulous people from coming in and personally benefiting at taxpayer expense. And if they do get into the system, we need to hold them accountable for their actions, not make exceptions or change the rules to allow for out and out disregard for regulations and policy. Because, in the end, the only people who get hurt are the students, staff and families whose only crime was to try to find something better for their kids.
PREPARED FOR WHAT? – "College Prepared & Career Ready": Matching Our Rhetoric to Reality
By James E. Rosenbaum in EdWeek
June 12, 2007- Despite all the rhetoric, "prepared for college" says much less than it seems, since many colleges don't require anything besides a high school diploma for admission, and many students attend only briefly and drop out with few or no college credits. "Prepared to pass placement tests" is more meaningful, and we need to do more to make that standard clear and visible in high school, preferably in time for students to devote more effort to meeting the standard. Aligning high school tests with college-placement tests would be a valuable reform.
But while it would be desirable to have all students meet the standards for college-placement tests, it's not clear that the labor market demands that. The top 40 percent of jobs may require greater academic skills than schools are currently producing, especially in math and science. The standards movement has gotten that part right. Many other jobs require some academic skills, and that is truer now than it was 30 years ago, when many well-paid jobs required no academic skills.
Research by the economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, however, suggests that while academic skills are required for many jobs, such jobs require communication, problem-solving, and 9th grade academic skills, not college skills. I found the same thing in interviews conducted with employers as part of a study of workforce readiness in Illinois. Many students don't get these skills now, but that requires better high school instruction, not necessarily college.
Indeed, while the United States is trying to devise policy so that all students can handle highly skilled jobs, our society has many jobs that do not require such skills, and many students will not end up in highly skilled occupations whatever we might wish. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and research by Paul E. Barton at the Educational Testing Service suggest that over 60 percent of jobs don't require any college degree at all, and many baccalaureate-degree holders report having jobs that don't require college. Aiming to prepare 100 percent of students for the 40 percent of society's jobs that require college skills makes good politics, but bad economics, and it will create a lot of disappointment.
But the bigger problem is that nearly all jobs require communication skills and basic work habits, such as regular attendance, motivation, and discipline. Employers I've interviewed said they were able to redesign jobs around high school graduates' academic-skills deficiencies, but not around deficiencies in these "soft skills." Unfortunately, schools are not taking steps to improve students in these areas. In fact, the opposite may be occurring. If teachers are compelled to focus more on academic skills and test scores, do they devote less attention to soft skills and efforts to improve them? I'm seeing some evidence that teachers are spending more time on "drill and kill" exercises to boost test scores and less time on group activities that may foster soft skills.
There's also the potential that heightened academic standards will make low-achieving students even more discouraged than they are now, contributing to poor motivation, poor school attendance, and a sense that their efforts in school are hopeless. Such students could be needlessly facing frustration and failure over skills that they believe will never be useful to them again. Only 29 percent of 8th graders reach the National Assessment of Educational Progress' proficient level, and many enter high school several grades behind. We can't pretend that high standards have served these young people. I worry that the more we focus on skill standards that are distant and unrealistic for the bottom 40 percent of students, who have failed at these standards for many years, the more we lead them to behaviors that undermine their readiness for any jobs in American society.
Aiming to prepare 100 percent of students for the 40 percent of society's jobs that require college skills makes good politics, but bad economics, and it will create a lot of disappointment.
At the margin, some students will benefit from higher standards. However, for the students far below the margin, we need to examine what can be done to prevent them from being hurt. Many high school seniors have less than 9th grade skills, they aren't attending school, they aren't doing the homework, and they aren't staying awake in class. Exactly how the "higher standards for all" movement relates to these students and their needs is unclear. Simply offering them "college for all" dreams and delusions—especially given their 80 percent likelihood of dropping out of college with few or no credits—may be the wrong way to go. They may need something that differs from raised standards and traditional approaches to instruction.
Our political reluctance to prepare students for anything besides the top 40 percent of jobs may leave many students unprepared for any jobs. Traditionally, the nation has offered such people job-training programs, which rarely improve employment outcomes and might even confer a stigma.
Enhanced career and technical education offers one option. Economist John H. Bishop at Cornell University has suggested that, as a safety measure, students take a string of four sequentially arranged career courses as electives during their high school years. That approach provides students with alternative career options in case college doesn't work out, it provides good earnings payoffs, and it can also lead to college. A handful of career-oriented courses is not a large burden and can lead to valued jobs (for instance, in skilled trades) that don't require college degrees. Such an approach could be combined with other standards-based education reforms and with the option of pursuing occupational coursework in community colleges.
Another key reform that could help many students in the labor market is to focus more on their acquisition of soft skills. Teachers' ratings of soft skills strongly predict work performance. Currently, employers don't use teachers' ratings because they mistrust teachers' judgments. However, by ignoring such ratings, employers deprive themselves of signals about students' work habits and social skills, deprive teachers of authority in the classroom, and deprive students of incentives for working hard in school. In other words, everybody loses.
Job-placement activities at schools and colleges, as well as individual faculty-employer contacts, are other promising ways to assist students. These contacts provide dependable signals to employers about students' capabilities, and dependable incentives to students for working hard in school and college. These effects are powerful. They motivate students who have never done well in school before, as studies by my colleagues and I of successful high schools and two-year colleges indicate (James E. Rosenbaum, Regina Deil-Amen, and Ann E. Person, After Admission: From College Access to College Success, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2006).
High schools have the responsibility to serve all students and prepare them to fit into productive roles in the larger society. Politicians like to make grand promises of getting all children to be doctors and lawyers. But education policy should focus on meeting the needs of the entire society and all students. Otherwise, we will offer only dreams and delusions to roughly half our young people, who will not only fail to earn a college degree, but also will lack the basic work habits needed to have any productive, respectable job in society.
• James E. Rosenbaum is a professor of sociology, education, and social policy and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill.
USA Today: EDUCATION STANDARDS: STATES GAME THE SYSTEM | Opposing View: WE'RE ATTACKING THE ISSUES
▼EDUCATION STANDARDS: STATES GAME THE SYSTEM: Gaps in test performance reveal need for more uniform measures.
USA Today Editorial
June 14 - Today's pop quiz: Mississippi elementary school students are (A) the best readers in the USA, (B) the worst readers in the USA, or (C) both.
Bizarre as it might seem, the correct answer is (C), depending on who's measuring.
Based on state standards, Mississippi has the USA's highest-achieving fourth-graders: 89% passed the state reading tests in 2005, tying Nebraska for tops in the nation.
Based on a national assessment, however, Mississippi has the nation's lowest-achieving fourth-graders: just 18% passed a more rigorous national reading test, the lowest of any state.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out what's wrong with this picture. It all revolves around the 5-year-old trade-off made to pass the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires all students to be "proficient" by 2014 — with proficiency measured by 50 state standards.
Not surprisingly, some states have tried to look better by adopting lame standards. Gannett News Service reported last week that Mississippi had the biggest gap between fourth-graders passing state reading tests and those passing the national assessment, followed by Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Oklahoma. While lax standards might make states look good, they are a disservice to students who will have to compete in the ever more competitive global economy.
Other ways states make themselves look better, the Gannett report says, include limiting which students must show progress, lowering the passing scores and allowing multiple chances to pass.
How to prevent states from gaming the system?
Among the possible solutions:
• Adopt national standards. Algebra is the same across the 50 states, so it makes sense to have national algebra standards. Beyond math, however, the issue gets stickier. That's why a decade ago, the national standards movement withered under controversies over which history lessons get taught where. While the time to have federal standards imposed from Washington has probably passed, it's not too late for shared state standards to bubble up to the equivalent of national standards.
• Switch to "growth" models. State educators would have fewer motives to dumb down state standards if they could switch to an accountability system that gave them credit for moving students forward — not just meeting a static standard that seems out of reach.
• Modify the goal. Making "every" child proficient in math and reading by 2014 is a nice political sound bite, but it's about as realistic as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average." Committing to a more achievable standard would give governors more reason to improve schools and reduce the incentive to cheat.
In the coming years, all three of these things are likely to happen. In the short term, however, there's an even better solution that too often gets overlooked. States with embarrassingly low standards should simply raise them. That might make them look worse on paper, but it would help their students. Which is what this is all supposed to be about in the first place.
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▲Opposing View: WE'RE ATTACKING THE ISSUES: Mississippi is developing rigorous assessments, tougher curriculum.
By Hank M. Bounds, Bounds is Mississippi's education superintendent.
June 14 - In Mississippi, we recognize the discrepancy between what students are expected to know on our tests and on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We have developed a much more rigorous curriculum and will launch a more rigorous assessment system aligned to it next year.
We have two very bold goals: to reach the national average on NAEP and reduce the dropout rate by half, both in five to seven years. Dropout rates, NAEP, state accountability systems and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are all designed to measure success, but they are like looking at students through the different lenses of a microscope; sometimes what you see is the same, and other times it looks very different.
Developed a decade before NCLB, NAEP standards were set intentionally high. In 2006, education analyst Richard Rothstein concluded that no country in the world could reach 100% proficiency on NAEP and that every study of the NAEP standards found the proficiency setting "fundamentally flawed."
Standards vary from state to state, demonstrating that we have not reached a consensus as a nation. Historically, states have provided educational opportunities, so they have set the standards. There are high stakes tied to these standards. There are no stakes tied to NAEP. The study released this week from the National Center on Education Statistics concludes that there is no correlation between where a state sets its standards and performance on NAEP. So the question is, if higher standards don't necessarily predict higher student performance, what will improve student achievement?
In Mississippi, we know real improvement takes more than changing the standard on a test. Clearly, expectations and standards matter, but school leaders must focus on more than just standards. That is why we are increasing the rigor of the curriculum and assessments, increasing the quantity and quality of teachers and administrators, creating a culture that values education, and redesigning education for the 21st century workforce. We have built the most comprehensive plan in the country to attack all of these issues.
Overcoming the poverty that has historically kept Mississippi near or at the bottom will not be easy, but it must be done. It is the right thing to do for our children.
EVENTS COMING UP
There will be a farewell ceremony commemorating the end of David Tokofsky's term on the Board of Education on June 26, 2007 at 11:00 AM. during the regularly scheduled board meeting @ 333 Beaudry.
A brief reception will follow in the lobby.
One would presume that outgoing boardmembers Mike Lansing and Jon Lauritzen will be similarly recognized!
David has served for twelve years, Mike eight and Jon four.
David is "my" board member, as was Jon when my daughter attended middle school in his district. I have served with the three of them of the LASUSD Facilities Committee - and I will miss our discussion and debate.
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KCET & The Los Angeles County Office of Education
Invites High School History Teachers and Students
to a Special Preview Screening
"THE WAR"
A Ken Burns Film
Directed and Produced by
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Wednesday July 11, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Reception and screening
followed by a moderated Q & A with director Ken Burns
Wadsworth Theatre, 11301 Wilshire Blvd. L.A.
(located on Veterans Administration Campus)
Join Ken Burns and KCET for a special preview screening event of his epic new documentary, THE WAR, as it follows the fortunes of a handful of ordinary men and women caught up in one of the greatest cataclysms in human history, World War II, one of the pivotal events of the 20th Century.
Admission is free
Reservations are required.
Space is limited.
To register, please contact:
Sara Jones at KCET
323-953-5511
sjones@kcet.org
DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION: FRIDAY, JULY 6, 2007
For more information about the documentary, The War,
please visit
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/.
*Dates and times subject to change. ________________________________________
• SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE:
http://www.laschools.org/bond/
Phone: 213-241-5183
____________________________________________________
• LAUSD FACILITIES COMMUNITY OUTREACH CALENDAR:
http://www.laschools.org/happenings/
Phone: 213-893-6800
What can YOU do?
• E-mail, call or write your school board member:
Marlene.Canter@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Julie.Korenstein@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Marguerite.LaMotte@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Mike.Lansing@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
Jon.Lauritzen@lausd.net • 213-241-6386
David.Tokofsky@lausd.net • 213-241-6383
...or your city councilperson, mayor, the governor, member of congress, senator - or the president. Tell them what you really think! • There are 26 mayors and five county supervisors representing jurisdictions within LAUSD, the mayor of LA can be reached at mayor@lacity.org • 213.978.0600
• Call or e-mail Governor Schwarzenegger: 213-897-0322 e-mail: http://www.govmail.ca.gov/
• Open the dialogue. Write a letter to the editor. Circulate these thoughts. Talk to the principal and teachers at your local school.
• Speak with your friends, neighbors and coworkers. Stay on top of education issues. Don't take my word for it!
• Get involved at your neighborhood school. Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child.
• Register.
• Vote.
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