In This Issue:  | | • | MANY SOUTH L.A. STUDENTS FRIGHTENED AND DEPRESSED, SURVEY FINDS | | | • | L.A. UNIFIED MAY RETHINK OFFERS TO CHARTER SCHOOLS | | | • | A NATION@RISK@25 | | | • | NATIONAL SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION WEEK April 26 - May 2. | | | • | HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources | | | • | EVENTS: Coming up next week... | | | • | What can YOU do? | |
Featured Links: | | | | MILESTONES IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR: You read it nowhere else but here: at one o'clock on Tuesday with the groundbreaking of New Central Elementary School #18 at 260 E. 31st St. in South LA LAUSD broke ground on the ONE HUNDREDTH SCHOOL in its current building program! 100 - and 70 of them are complete with kids in seats and flags on flagpoles!
MILESTONE #2: This week is the 25th anniversary of the famous "A Nation at Risk" report, with its oft-quoted: "If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." In recent memory only Newton Minnow's indictment of television as a "vast wasteland" has drawn more attention. And television, as we all know, turned around after Minnow's speech.
This was "Beat Up on LAUSD Week" at the LA Times and NBC4. Channel Four's investigative reporters gave the poor District the old one-two, first with the Drinking Fountain version of Water Wars; then in their own self-styled "Book Wars". The Times had their go with the provocatively headlined: " MANY SOUTH L.A. STUDENTS FRIGHTENED AND DEPRESSED" [online] - "IN POOREST SCHOOLS, FEAR, DESPAIR RULE" [in print]
►The Drinking Fountain deal is old and remains unsolved, our old schools have old pipes - and the pipes aren't getting any younger. To repipe the schools will cost upwards of $300 million - a lot of money but with 900 schools it goes at about $333,000 per school (or $728. per student) …so one can see how the cost mounts up. The truth is that drinking fountain water (tap water) when uncontaminated - is better for kids (and the environment) then the bottled water they bring from home and/or the vending machines sell because it's fluoridated! We need to fluoridate the district's bottled water supply AND fix those pipes. This probably needs to be on the next school bond.
►Book Wars reads like a battle between non-profits over who has the most wonderful program of do-goodery. There aren't enough books, there aren't enough school libraries, and there aren't enough kids reading. If you read the Times article it starts: "In 2004 the state stopped budgeting money specifically for elementary school libraries…" That identifies the accountable party; let's hold them accountable.
►The Times shows us what happens when folks don't put on their critical thinking caps and start believing what other people tell them. The article cites a study by an organization "South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA)" and implies a level of applied academic thought by saying the study had "technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University". The study quotes some numbers from the survey - and then goes on the attempt to prove clinical depression in the student population surveyed.
Clinical depression, gentle readers, is a medical diagnosis — I didn't know we did these with student surveys!
And "technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University?" …What exactly does that mean? Especially as the survey and its report is nowhere posted on the internet, nor is there any mention of the survey or the study or anything about SCYEA on the LMU website. The only news organization reporting on this survey is the LA Times - other outlets (sadly including public radio) cite The Times as their sole source.
So, if you'll allow a jumped-to conclusion (Why not me? Everyone else is!) I somehow doubt if this is exactly a peer-reviewed scholarly scientific study from a prestigious institution of higher learning.
Especially as The Times breathlessly concludes from a 29% Agree/Strongly agree | 36% Neutral | 35% Disagree/Strongly disagree to "I feel safe in my school" that a huge number of kids feel unsafe. Only 35% feel any level of unsafety! That's not good, it certainly isn't good enough …but the sky is not falling!
Only 22% Disagree or Disagree strongly that they are "being prepared for college or a 'high-paying job'!"
Statistics, under torture, can be made confess to anything you want them to, but I have a hard time agreeing with how optimistic these numbers are!
And it gets better; in the conclusion of the article it describes a game of Monopoly® on a cleverly engineered board as being news. That game of Monopoly® is a piece of political theater.
►…and, because the wackiness never ends, President Bush announced this week that the federal government has a responsibility to shore up declining enrollment in parochial schools!
¡Onward/Hasta adelante! - smf
MANY SOUTH L.A. STUDENTS FRIGHTENED AND DEPRESSED, SURVEY FINDS
THE REPORT, PREPARED BY A YOUTH GROUP WITH HELP FROM LOYOLA MARYMOUNT, SAYS THAT THE CONDITIONS OF THEIR SCHOOLS IS CONTRIBUTING TO A LOSS OF HOPE AND DRIVE.
By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2008 -- A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.
"A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey. "They see that their school is failing them, their teachers are failing them, there's racial tension and gang violence, and also many feel that their schools are not schools -- their schools look more like prisons."
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South L.A. students speakSouth L.A. students speak
The survey, released late Thursday, was conducted in seven South L.A. public schools by a community youth organization, South Central Youth Empowered Thru Action (SCYEA), with technical guidance from the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University. It suggested that many students in some of the city's poorest, most violent neighborhoods believe their schools set the bar for success too low -- and then shove students beneath it.
In fact, the student organizers said they don't like to use the word "dropout" to describe their many peers who leave school. They prefer "pushout," because they believe the school system is pushing students to fail.
"We're ignored -- our schools are ignored," said Susie Gonzalez, another Jordan 11th-grader who helped organize the survey. "They give us the short end of the stick. . . . They expect us not to amount to anything."
Only about one-quarter of the students surveyed said they felt safe at school while 35% said they don't. Just under half said their school is preparing them for college or a high-paying job, and 93% believe their school should offer more college-preparatory classes. Fewer than half could define the "A to G" curriculum that is the college prep standard in California. The youth organization, which advocates educational equality, fought for six years to push Los Angeles Unified School District to require such a curriculum for all students. The curriculum spells out the types of college prep classes and number of years they must be taken to qualify for UC and Cal State schools.
Two thirds of the students, nearly all of whom were African American or Latino, said they wanted their schools to offer more ethnic studies classes.
The schools surveyed are among the lowest performing in the Los Angeles Unified School District and are in an area where dissatisfaction with the traditional public school system is driving many students into charter schools.
The survey's findings contrasted with a February school district report in which 90% of students questioned at selected schools districtwide said they were being pushed to do their best and 80% said their classes "give me useful preparation for what I plan to do in life."
That same report was sharply critical of the district's efforts to get all students into a college-prep curriculum by 2012. "With the current school climate and instructional quality," it said, "a significant proportion of the students who enter the ninth grade in 2012 will not only fail to meet college eligibility, but will also fail to graduate from high school."
Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said she welcomed the survey and believed the district was responding to the students' concerns. "This is energizing, this is encouraging," she said. "We need the consumers of our services to be advocates of change."
But Jordan High Principal Stephen Strachan took exception to some of the results, saying the survey was skewed to provoke negative responses. He said his school has made great strides in preparing students for college and has created a "safe haven" from a violent community.
He did not, however, dispute the findings about depression. "This morning at 10 o'clock at Simpson's Mortuary, a 16-year-old was buried. That's one of my students who was shot in the community," he said. "I hear kids say, 'Too many people are dying in our community.' And that plays on the psyche. . . . It's really hard to focus on Algebra 2 when your friends are getting shot in the community."
Cheryl Grills, a professor of clinical psychology at Loyola Marymount, said that she was struck by how many students volunteered answers to one question about why they sometimes skip school. More than half hinted at depression, saying they were tired, had trouble sleeping, felt helpless or hopeless, were bored or felt lazy, among other responses.
She compared those responses to the symptoms of clinical depression from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "Much to my horror and shock, they almost completely matched up," she said.
That led her to conduct a follow-up survey among 52 students. Of them, 67% reported that they had "felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more," and had "stopped doing some of their usual activities" as a result.
"That's clinical levels of depression," she said.
Grills said that while the initial survey did not select students randomly, she believed it was scientifically valid because of the large sample size. She said there was significant uniformity of results among the seven schools: Jordan, Crenshaw, Dorsey, Fremont, Locke, Manual Arts and Washington Prep. Students from Gardena High also participated, although the survey was conducted outside school.
Alice Rubenstein, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Rochester, N.Y., who has written widely about adolescent psychology, agreed that the survey hinted at widespread levels of clinical depression. Given the environment in which the students live, that's hardly surprising, she said.
Students in South L.A. "live in a depressive environment where they feel helpless or hopeless partly because their choices are so limited," she said. "These kids are living in an environment where this is their state much of the time. It's very much a sociological issue as well as a psychological issue."
Rubenstein added that surveys of the general adolescent population tend to show that anywhere from 15% to 30% are depressed, well below the levels suggested by the survey. She added that the survey did not include the students most likely to be depressed -- those who were not in school.
At the announcement of the survey results, at the headquarters of the Community Coalition of South L.A., students played a home-made version of Monopoly that told much the same story as the survey.
Where the familiar squares of Baltic, Atlantic and Marvin Gardens might be, the options included Drugs, Dean's Office and Drop Out. Jail was a place to go when you're pulled over by the cops for no apparent reason. Restroom was where the player was likely to encounter gang members. Where Boardwalk should have been, the square read: "Dead."
As the game began, one student landed on Liquor Store and was told that, on his way to school, "You wind up in front of a liquor store and you find one of your homies smoking a blunt." When Juan Zamora of Jordan landed on Chance, he was told that "you're one of the lucky students who actually know and see a college counselor." His choices: Go to UCLA or "stay on the block and wind up selling drugs to support your family."
And when Sam Anguiano of Locke landed on P.E. Field, he was told that shots had been fired while he was running during gym class -- should he hit the ground or run? When he answered that he'd run, he was told: "You run away and are safe, but later that evening you find out that your friend was the one who was shot."
That was about as good a roll of the dice as anybody got. The one exception was Juan, a 17-year-old junior, who hit the ultimate Chance: "Your friends and family support you," the card read. "You don't die."
L.A. UNIFIED MAY RETHINK OFFERS TO CHARTER SCHOOLS
A DISTRICT OFFICIAL RESPONDS TO A BACKLASH FROM TRADITIONAL CAMPUSES TOLD TO SHARE SPACE WITH THE PRIVATELY OPERATED INSTITUTIONS, WHOSE NUMBERS ARE MULTIPLYING.
By Howard Blume | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2008 - Seeking to calm a backlash at traditional Los Angeles schools, a top district official promised this week to reconsider offers of classroom space on those campuses to charter schools.
The idea of privately operated charter schools sharing space with regular schools was met with fury at many affected campuses, including Taft High in Woodland Hills and Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles. Teachers and parents have complained that their own reforms and programs would be harmed.
Charter operators aren't too happy either: Many still await offers, while others are considering whether proposed deals are affordable or adequate.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines stepped into the fray with unscheduled remarks at a "town hall" this week before a standing-room-only audience of more than 800 in Taft's auditorium.
"I want to review each issue," Cortines said. "We had to pause, take a breath and look at . . . what we must do for charter schools but also how it affects . . . the regular school."
Under state law as well as a recent settlement of litigation, the Los Angeles Unified School District must share facilities "fairly" with charter schools. Charters are independently run public schools that operate with less state regulation in exchange for boosting student achievement.
This year, 54 charter schools applied to house nearly 17,000 students -- almost three times as many students as previously. About 12 schools already share space with charters; that number could rise to 35 next year.
Charter operators have complained that they were last in line for classroom space.
Now, some people say the pendulum has swung too far toward charters. As one example, they cite the freezing of open enrollment permits at affected campuses.
Taft depends on attracting students from outside its attendance area to buttress honors programs and sports teams and for planned academies specializing in technology and teacher training.
Carmen Hawkins of South Los Angeles said her sons attend Taft for its safe environment and academics, an opportunity that should not be denied to future students.
Others worried about a return to overcrowding and about competition with the arts program from the invited charter, the CHAMPS performing-arts high school. CHAMPS founder Norman Isaacs, a popular former middle school principal who sat quietly in the front row at the Taft meeting, received little sympathy from A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. (Charters are exempt from district labor pacts.)
Duffy vowed to target the district and Isaacs' school with letter-writing campaigns and pickets.
"The hostility here is such that he would be foolish to bring a charter here," Duffy said. "We're going to bring that anger to his front door."
UTLA has helped organize protests at Wadsworth Elementary in South Los Angeles, and the faculty at Fairfax High has rallied community groups in opposition to the district's space-sharing offer there.
After the meeting, Isaacs said he would prefer space at one of several San Fernando Valley campuses that were closed years ago because of declining enrollment.
"The district has put these parents in a terrible position," Isaacs said. "I hear this passion. The district has to respond to this in some way, and we have to respond to the district."
Under state law, charter schools have until May 1 to accept offers. But Cortines indicated that the deadline might have to be adjusted.
Since April 1, the state deadline for making offers, the district has taken four schools -- including Nevin Elementary in South Los Angeles and Portola Middle School in Tarzana -- off the list.
Portola is one of three sites the district had selected to accommodate Ivy Academia. Another is Sunny Brae Elementary in Winnetka, which Ivy already is sharing.
Ivy co-founder Tatyana Berkovich said the district has tried harder to help charters but remains an inefficient landlord at best. The charter's bathrooms at Sunny Brae weren't ready until March 19, she said. Until then, first-graders had to use adult-sized, outhouse-style portable toilets.
In South Los Angeles, charter operator Michael Piscal requested space for five schools and received offers for three.
Piscal, founder and chief executive of the Inner City Education Foundation, said he would decline to place one of his high-performing charters at Crenshaw High because he didn't want to damage good relationships in that community.
But he might need to accept an offer at Westchester High, even though "they were less than excited about us coming there, and they made that clear."
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smf notes: I was at the angry Town Hall at Taft High School about the Prop 39 allocation of seats to CHAMPS Charter School last Wednesday night.
Present were Boardmember Canter, John Creer - the Facailities Division exec in charge of seat allocation to charter schools under the out-of-court settlement with the California Charter School Association (CCSA); LAUSD lawyer (and former charter division honcho) Greg McNair, Local District #1 Superintendent Jean Brown, UTLA President A.J. Duffy and Senior Deputy Superintendent Ramon Cortines. Sometimes it's telling to notice who wasn't there: Jose Cole-Gutierrez - the head of the LAUSD Charter Office and former executive director of CCSA was conspicuously absent. The auditorium was packed, restive and ranged from grumpy to angry.
The Prop 39 provisions mandating charter access to space was described by McNair (a Taft Alumni), to boos and catcalls from the SRO crowd, universally opponents to a charter on the Taft campus. The District's out of court settlement to the CCSA lawsuit got an even warmer reception! Former UTLA Government Affairs Director Bill Lambert suggested legal action; Duffy rose to that bait and promised to sue - going so far as to introduce the union's lawyer. Lambert's proposed cause for action was narrow, based on the fact the proposition unconstitutionally contained multiple issues in a single ballot inititiative; Duffy's was broader - based on rhetoric, the union contract and the unfairness of it all!
4LAKids considers the Prop 39 requirement for school districts to offer space to charters poorly crafted at best, egregious at worst - a hidden 'Easter egg' in Prop 39 placed there by Reed Hastings and the charter community.
For the first time in memory Greg McNair's description of the Prop 39 challenge was brutally honest rather than legally correct; John Creer's description of the challenge made it clear that the district cannot meet it - creating a Catch 22.
Taft High School's recent history and academic (and sports) success has relied upon open enrollment. The LAUSD/CCSA settlement ends open enrollment; open enrollment and zones of choice are close to one and the same - District policies and even NCLB are at odds — Charter schools cannot be the Only Choice! The alignment to Small Learning Communities (SLC's / Bulletin 1600 district policy) are also imperiled as the critical contiguous and dedicated space for SLC's have been compromised away in the settlement
McNair, Canter, Brown and Creer wrung their hands - and Cortines stepped up and said Prop 39 "is the law, is the law, is the law ….but one needs to look at this from an educational standpoint." And he intends to. He noted that educators were not involved in the decisions on the settlement ....or in the District/Creer's proposed solutions.
During the angry Q&A that followed (nobody spoke for the charter, CHAMPS Charter Director Norm Henry declined to speak) much was made of vacant school property nearby - why wasn't this offered to the charters?
In all likelihood the Taft challenge will go away because CHAMPS will decline the offer based on the ugly reception (and that their program may need more space than offered) but it will play out in other schools throughout the District. Hopefully Cortines can engineer something - otherwise we will be in court, spending education money on litigation - and ultimately having the courts tossing out or implementing the Prop 39 charter provisions.
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A NATION@RISK@25
AN@R@25► RE-READING 'A NATION AT RISK': A 1983 report warning of a decline in U.S. education provides a blueprint for schools today.
LA Times Editorial
April 24, 2008 - Twenty-five years after “A Nation at Risk” warned about the "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. public schools, the landmark federal report seems strangely prophetic -- and eerily descriptive of some of Los Angeles' woes today. Though it was based on faulty data and jumped to largely the wrong conclusions, time has caught up with the report.
"A Nation at Risk" caught the attention of the nation when it said that SAT scores were dropping. Trouble is, that wasn't true -- they only appeared to be falling because a wider pool of students began considering college and thus taking the test. Some other standardized test scores were rising, and some were stable. The report's doomsday tone about how poor education would stifle the economy appeared laughable 15 years later as the country prospered.
Yet by the 1990s, scholastic achievement was stagnating, while grade inflation and social promotion were producing high school graduates with skimpy skills. In more recent years, nations that bolstered their school systems while maintaining a low-cost labor force have presented a potent economic threat. As a nation, we have finally become more aware that poor and minority students too often are stuck in overcrowded, physically deteriorating campuses with undertrained teachers.
"A Nation at Risk" was largely a gambit by the Reagan administration to frame the education debate in Cold War terms: The communists would prevail if this nation didn't get tough on its schools. Although educators blame the report for creating an obsession with standardized testing, they also owe it a debt of gratitude. President Reagan's idea of education reform was to privatize schools through vouchers and tax credits, abolish the Department of Education and slash federal funding. The report made it clear that the nation needed to put more thought and support into its public schools.
The road in that direction has been slow and slippery under the clumsily framed No Child Left Behind Act. The authors of the 1983 report would have decried the school reform act's rigidity and narrow focus, which have pushed schools toward achieving minimum competency rather than broad intellectual development. Charter schools have interpreted the Reagan-era report more cannily, using its recommendations for longer school hours, merit-based teacher pay and a more challenging curriculum. The results, notably here in Los Angeles, have been encouraging.
As policymakers here and elsewhere stumble over school reform, they might want to re-read the quarter-century-old report. Oddly, it provides a more useful blueprint today than it did in its own time.
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AN@R@25► EDUCATION LESSONS WE LEFT BEHIND
by George F. Will | Op-Ed in the Washington Post
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)
Thursday, April 24, 2008 -- Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.
Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.
Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.
In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.
Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.
But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.
In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.
Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.
A nation at risk? Now more than ever.
NATIONAL SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION WEEK April 26 - May 2.
• comments by smf at the kick-off of National School Construction Week at the Roybal Learning Center - the school formerly known as The Belmont Learning Complex and more lately Vista Hermosa High School, Saturday morning April 25th. Following is the schedule for other LAUSD NSCW activities.
To be invited as a guest on this stage today and not quote Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead would rank up there in great opportunities too obvious to be missed:
"Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it's been."
Indeed.
I am a guest on this stage because the Bond Oversight Committee, whom I represent here today, sadly and happily had almost no role with the construction of this school. What role we did have was as parties to litigation and then as curious bystanders, lookie-loos and sidewalk superintendents shut out of the process. Because that-which-happened-before was outside our purview we can avoid responsibility for the errors …and can't take credit for the success that I hope and pray the students and faculty of this school will make of this tremendous facility.
When we came into this room today we passed the empty trophy cases; it is up the students of this school to fill those cases and create their own legacy.
This is a very expensive building with a flagpole; they need to make it a school. That magic place where the synapses fire and the ideas and the book and the minds connect, Where education happens
What we saw in the sad history of this project was just how bad a lack of accountability can be; a lesson learned in construction that I think we all agree can carry over into instruction.
What we also saw was the power of a dream - the dream of this community - to overcome all obstacles, including that of reality itself. It also shows that a single leader can step in the middle of a process while the perfect storm rages - and I'm speaking of Roy Romer - and leave before it's done and can still make lemonade from an orchard of lemons. This school is a memorial to Congressman Roybal, but that it is here at all is a testament to Roy's tenacity.
I'm not going to trot out the would-a, could-a shoulda-s here; instead we all need to celebrate what's to come. Here and throughout LAUSD.
We kick off National School Construction Week with some fabulous milestones.
Today we take this school - the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center public, into prime time.
• Last week we broke ground on the one hundredth totally new built-from-scratch school in the school construction program.
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• On Friday we will cut the ribbon on the classroom addition and playground at Wonderland Avenue School. - And make no mistake - there is no more important classroom than the playground - and no more important school construction than building and modernizing the great schools we already have. And in the interest of full disclosure: Wonderland was my elementary school back in the days before the earth cooled.
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We have made a promise to parents, voters and taxpayers — but mostly to the children; present and future: We promised to build new schools and fix up the old ones when the approved Proposition BB and Measures K, R and Y.
You don’t need me to tell you, you only have to look around you to see the promise is being kept.
• We are building new schools.
• We are fixing the old schools.
• We are creating and fostering partnerships in the community.
• We are ending Involuntary Busing.
• We have implemented Full Day Kindergarten in every elementary school in this district.
• And we will eliminate the Multi-Track Year-round Calendar, once and for all.
The progress we have made so far is mind boggling; we have done and are doing the construction, the improvement to instruction is underway – helped along by the building and modernization work — but really driven by students and educators in the classroom and administrators and staff and yes - even consultants - in offices and local districts and in the black triangular tower to our south.
But as a voter and a taxpayer and a parent — and perhaps as one a little too willing to take too much credit for what we've all done — I see the danger of the proposed budget cuts on the horizon. In cosmology the edge of a black hole, the force that sucks in gravity and light, is the "event horizon" — and that's it. the signpost just ahead - in this version of the Twilight Zone.
We can't have come thus far to see our good work undone by folks who lack the vision and foresight to invest in the future, to invest in kids. We did not build schools to not have excellence in them. We need to make it clear to the powers-that-be in Sacramento that we will not tolerate across the board budget cutting at the expense of the education, health and welfare of our children. I'm a PTA leader and I'm not supposed to talk this way — so I'm going to quote Randy Moss, the San Diego County Superintendent: "We've got to show that we give a damn about kids."
If you agree, quote me; if you are offended, write Randy. Mostly, write Arnold.
Building schools is the best and most optimistic thing any community does. When we build schools we make positive investments in our future way beyond the news cycle or the election cycle or this year's budget …we are stretching the blank canvas that will be our kids masterpiece. With every school, school building, playground, library, gymnasium and auditorium we build we build on the foundation of the city of Angels we aspire to be.
What a long strange trip it has been . . . we need to keep on Keep on Truckin'.
Thank you - and onward!
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MONDAY, APRIL 28TH -- HEALTHY SCHOOLS DAY. Board Member Tamar Galatzan’s office will recognize the Community Honoring Inclusive Model Education (CHIME) Institute’s Arnold Schwarzenegger Elementary School (!) at 9 a.m. and Board Member Julie Korenstein will congratulate Harding Elementary School at 11 a.m. for receiving a Recycling Excellence Award from the City of Los Angeles.
TUESDAY, APRIL 29TH -- HISTORIC SCHOOLS DAY. Board Member Yolie Flores Aguilar will recognize John Marshall High School for its receipt of a Historic Schools Investment Fund grant. This event will take place at John Marshall High School at 8:30 a.m.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30TH -- SENIOR CITIZENS DAY. Board Member Marguerite P. LaMotte will honor senior citizens in her district that have contributed greatly to our schools. This event will take place at 1 p.m. at the Board Member’s district office.
THURSDAY, MAY 1ST -- SCHOOLS AS CENTERS OF COMMUNITY DAY. Board Member Dr. Richard Vladovic will celebrate the launch of the Mobile Health Care Clinic initiative at Towne Elementary School at 2 p.m.
FRIDAY, MAY 2ND -- SCHOOL BUILDING DAY. Board Member Marlene Canter will mark this day by cutting the ribbon on a playground expansion project at Wonderland Elementary School. This event starts at 10 a.m.
If you need further information on any of these events, please contact Shannon Haber at 213.241.4575.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources
The news that didn't fit from April 27
• SCHWARZENEGGAR OPPOSES PROP 98 - duh... but not that Prop 98!
• MY ADVICE TO RAY CORTINES by Tamar Galatzan
• CONTAMINATED WATER? The Drinking Fountain version of Water Wars
• BOOK WARS
• BUSH URGES STEPS TO AID URBAN PRIVATE AND RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS
• CATCHING UP ON ALGEBRA
# THE NEW LAUSD ORG CHART: You can't tell the players without an org chart!
• Sandy Banks: IN L.A. SCHOOLS, DEATH BY 1,000 CUTS
• CALIFORNIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS SEEK PRIVATE MONEY JUST TO COVER THE BASICS
• Editorial: THE NEED FOR CHARTER SCHOOLS
• L.A. RETHINKING ITS ANTI-GANG PROGRAMS
• ALLEGATIONS FOLLOWED EDUCATOR AS HE CLIMBED THE CAREER LADDER
• Editorial: PAY INCENTIVES CAN LURE TEACHERS TO POORLY PERFORMING SCHOOLS
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
SEE NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION WEEK EVENTS ABOVE
A L S O :
SPECIAL INVITATION: Pass it On!
THE CALIFORNIA STATE PTA invites ALL MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, PARENTS, chaperones (that would include accompanying teachers), and members to attend the presentation by Craig Scott of Rachel's Challenge “You Just May Start a Chain Reaction” during our Third General Meeting of Convention, which is from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, May 2, 2008.
ALL TEACHERS, ADMINISTRATORS AND STAFF are also encouraged to attend the presentation from Erin Gruwell of Freedom Writers: (...and the movie of the same name) "Educator and Catalyst for Social Change".
Ms. Gruwell will be speaking during our Sixth General Meeting of Convention from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 4, 2008.
Registration for these special events is located on our website at www.capta.org, click on convention - or on THE SPECIAL PTA INVITATION LINK TO THE RIGHT
You need not be a PTA member or be from a PTA school to attend these free events.
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Monday Apr 28, 2008
Central Region Elementary School #22: CEQA Scoping and Schematic Design Meeting
6:00 p.m.
Loyola Village Elementary School
8821 Villanova Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Tuesday Apr 29, 2008
Valley Region Span K-8 #1
Preliminary Environmental Assessment (PEA) Hearing and Design Development Meeting
6:30 p.m.
Olive Vista Middle School - Auditorium
14600 Tyler St.
Sylmar, CA 91342
Wednesday Apr 30, 2008
Central Region Elementary School #21: CEQA Scoping and Schematic Design Meeting
6:00 p.m.
Harmony Elementary School
899 E. 42nd Place
Los Angeles, CA 90011
Friday May 2, 2008
Wonderland Elementary School New Addition and Playground: Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony
Ceremony starts at 10:00 a.m.
Wonderland Elementary School
8510 Wonderland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
*Dates and times subject to change. ________________________________________
• SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE:
http://www.laschools.org/bond/
Phone: 213-241-5183
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• 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:
Yolie.Flores.Aguilar@lausd.net • 213-241-6383
Marlene.Canter@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
Tamar.Galatzan@lausd.net • 213-241-6386
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Julie.Korenstein@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Marguerite.LaMotte@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Richard.Vladovic@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
...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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