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| 4LAKids: Sunday, August 2, 2009 |  | | | In This Issue: | | • | WILLIAM R. “BILL” ANTON DIES AT 85; educator was L.A. Unified's first Latino superintendent. | | | • | L.A. MAYOR TAKES CHARGE OF NEW BOYLE HEIGHTS SCHOOL: The Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center becomes the 11th under mayor's control | | | • | LAUSD WAITS FOR WORD IN STATE FUNDING | | | • | OBAMA’S RACE TO THE TOP: Who’ll blink first: the unions, or the White House? | | | • | 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: | | | | In the recent New Yorker profile of Green Dot founder Steve Barr, the entrepreneur-provocateur advocated in-your-face 'Hostile Takeovers' of public schools.
The Parent Revolutionaries of Barr's LA Parent's Union have made that their battle cry. It's a strategy seemingly endorsed by EdSec Arne Duncan ...at least according to Barr.
This week we saw Mayor Villaraigosa employ Stealth in his takeover of the eleventh school for his Partnership for LA Schools. (see: LA Mayor Takes Charge of New Boyle Heights School)
Hostile Takeovers. Stealth. Can Mutually Assured Destruction and Shock & Awe be far behind?
An argument can be made for PLAS operation of the brand-new/as-yet-unopened Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center - the student body and faculty are being drawn from the partnership's Roosevelt HS campus. But the argument is that the argument hasn't been made ...instead we are faced with a Villaraigosian 'done deal'.
(Remember the seagulls in "Finding Nemo"? "Mine mine mine"? It's like that!)
• The Flores Aguilar Resolution: Public School Choice: A New Way at LAUSD, unpopular in these pages and probably unconstitutional to boot - requires community input.
• The LAUSD/PLAS/UTLA agreement requires teacher and parent votes.
• The charter law requires community input if it's a start-up, faculty input if it's a conversion.
• All require Board of Ed approval.
None of the above has happened. Instead the superintendent (unavailable for comment) - who has said previously that he and LAUSD habv no say in the operation of the PLAS - and the Board President (vacationing abroad) have done this deal with the mayor's office. And the LAUSD Communications Office cannot confirm anything.
The fact of the matter is that Superintendent Cortines has no vote on the Board of Ed and President García only one.
BE CAREFUL FOR WHAT YOU WISH: Because the Mendez Learning Center only transfers existing faculty and students from Roosevelt the PLAS will be operating their 11th campus with no additional funding. Less actually when you factor in the budget cuts from Sacramento.
A NONALCOHOLIC TEACHABLE MOMENT: Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez, for whom the new school is named, actually have no connection with LAUSD. They were the lead plaintiffs in Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California and set a precedent for the better-known Brown v. Board of Education seven years later -- paving the way for school integration and the American civil rights movement.
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THE PASSING OF BILL ANTON CANNOT GO UNACKNOWLEDGED. Besides being the first Latino LAUSD superintendent, Anton was a moral compass. He presided over difficult financial times - and when push came to shove over his vision for the District v. that of the Board of Ed, he resigned. A product of East LA he attended LAUSD schools, got his medical and dental care in the LAUSD/PTA clinics, and rose from classroom teacher through the ranks to superintendent without ever forgetting that the job description was "teacher". He was a friend to parents, a lifetime PTA advocate -- one of the shoulders we are privileged to stand on when we glimpse the future.
To say we won't see his like again is to admit defeat. Bill Anton's 'like' - his 'progeny' - are among us today, in classrooms as students and teachers, in front offices and district cubicles and patrolling the hallways and playgrounds -- talking and walking the talk and the walk.
Good job and Godspeed.
¡Onward/Hasta adelante! - smf
WILLIAM R. “BILL” ANTON DIES AT 85; educator was L.A. Unified's first Latino superintendent.
HE BEGAN HIS CAREER AS A TEACHER AT ROWAN ELEMENTARY IN EAST LOS ANGELES, THE 'HEART AND SOUL' OF THE DISTRICT ROSE THROUGH THE RANKS TO TAKE TOP POST DURING A TIME OF FISCAL CRISIS.
By Howard Blume in the LA Times
July 29, 2009 - William R. "Bill" Anton, who rose through the ranks to become the first Latino superintendent of schools in Los Angeles, died Tuesday morning, according to friends and the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was 85.
Anton had suffered from declining health in recent years and did not speak at a 2007 district ceremony in his honor, but associates remembered him as a genial and strategic fighter who looked out for minority children in a school system that did not always have high expectations for them."Bill was the heart and soul of the district," said Peggy Barber, who met Anton as a parent and later worked for him. "He knew every principal by sight and name. He knew every person in the building. He was as kind and generous as anyone could be, but he could be tough when he had to be."
Anton began his career as a teacher at Rowan Elementary in East Los Angeles, according to district records, slowly and steadily winning the respect of colleagues as he earned promotions to higher positions. Anton filled a groundbreaking role in developing the district's Title 1 program, which was at the time a new experimental effort to help low-income and minority students.
In that capacity and others, Anton groomed future district leaders who would follow him into top positions. Jim Morris, chief of staff to Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, recalled taking an administrative training course for teachers given by Anton, who was then a deputy superintendent.
"Mr. Anton said if you want to be an administrator you have to find out who the hardest-working person in that school is, and you have to work twice as hard," Morris said.
A Garfield High School graduate who supervised schools in East Los Angeles, Anton championed equity and a fair distribution of resources for Latino students. But he was liked in all communities, said those who worked with him.
"Parents always had access to his office," said Barber, who is a district lobbyist. "And he treated parents as equals. He would tell the principals that he expected everyone to have a PTA and they would be evaluated on the strength of the PTA."
Many district insiders and community leaders were sorely disappointed when the school board chose outsider Leonard Britton over Anton as superintendent in 1987. After three years, Britton resigned, never having won over an L.A. Unified bureaucracy that included Anton. To much acclaim, Anton became schools chief in July 1990, but he was immediately confronted with union unrest, budget deficits and a city elite that had grown dissatisfied with the school system.
"It was Bill's job to save the district from going into bankruptcy," said Dominic Shambra, an administrator who worked closely with Anton. "It was a difficult time, much like it is today."
Anton remained as superintendent only 26 months, retiring at the age of 68 in September 1992. He said his greatest accomplishment as superintendent was simply holding the district together in spite of a fiscal crisis that forced spending cuts of more than $1 billion during his tenure.
The factors that induced him to leave, he said at the time, included a school board that often would not listen to him and would act improperly unilaterally, as well as a teachers union that he said had too much influence.
L.A. MAYOR TAKES CHARGE OF NEW BOYLE HEIGHTS SCHOOL: The Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center becomes the 11th under mayor's control
THE BOARD OF EDUCATION DID NOT VOTE ON THE MATTER.
By Howard Blume | Los Angeles Times
August 1, 2009 -- The city's mayor is quietly taking control of a newly built high school in Boyle Heights, but the teachers union may challenge that conquest, part of a growing war between Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and United Teachers Los Angeles.
The school at issue is the $106-million Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center, which is to open this fall. Nearly all students will come from the attendance area for Roosevelt High School, which already belongs to the mayor's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
The transfer of the new school, Villaraigosa's 11th campus, was approved by L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, according to the mayor's team, and the office of school board President Monica Garcia, a close ally of the mayor.
Cortines was out of town and unavailable Friday. The Board of Education did not vote on the matter. The district's communication's office could not confirm the transfer, referring inquiries to the school board president.
One administrator for the new school quit in April after learning that the partnership would be in charge.
The mayor's team has been open about wanting the new school all along, said the partnership's chief executive, Marshall Tuck. He said Cortines consented in March and formalized a written agreement in April.
"I didn't talk with UTLA about it," Tuck said. "We had talked with certain teachers about it. They would ask us. Those people could have been completely unconnected to UTLA leadership."
The mayor's expanded territory makes sense, said Luis Sanchez, chief of staff for Garcia, who is traveling in Mexico.
"You can't give [Roosevelt] away . . . and then open up a brand new school the next year that takes 1,000 kids away [from Roosevelt] and have consistency with your work," Sanchez said. "Change is difficult at all levels. Roosevelt hasn't been a good school for years. The partnership has done as good as they could to challenge that."
"If we gave the old leadership at Roosevelt the benefit of doubt when they had a 60% dropout rate for 40 years, we have to do the same for the mayor for five years."
Under a process agreed to by the union and the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers and parents had to separately endorse the partnership before a school could be included.
That has not happened with the new school.
Sanchez said Roosevelt's teachers approved the mayor's plan by a wide margin in December 2007. The new school's faculty, he said, will consist mostly of Roosevelt teachers who voluntarily switched.
It's not clear, however, that teachers would now vote the same way. In May, on a 184-15 vote, Roosevelt teachers expressed "no confidence" in the mayor's team. In a later survey of school morale, 86.1% said it was worse or much worse, according to teacher and union co-chair John Fernandez. And 58.6% gave the partnership an F as an overall grade in its first year, he said.
Eight of the nine other current partnership schools also gave the mayor poor first-year marks. Some teachers faulted the mayor's team for a "top-down management style," the opposite of what Villaraigosa pledged. They also cite a dearth of promised additional resources. Leaders of the mayor's team have pledged to address such concerns.
Regarding the new school, "the teachers haven't voted and the parents haven't voted," Fernandez said.
The dispute over the new school coincides with a deterioration of the relationship between the mayor's office and United Teachers Los Angeles, for which Villaraigosa once worked as an organizer.
The mayor recently called the union "dysfunctional" in a television interview. He also was displeased that the union and the school district couldn't agree on union concessions that would have avoided teacher layoffs. Villaraigosa's schools were especially hard hit because they employ more new teachers who lack seniority protections.
Teachers union President A.J. Duffy said the mayor falsely suggested that the union was unwilling to negotiate.
The dispute echoes another brewing struggle over a proposal that would let outside organizations -- including the mayor's -- bid to take over new schools across the city. The mayor has sided with charter schools and other proponents against UTLA and other employee unions. The school board is scheduled to take up the issue this month.
LAUSD WAITS FOR WORD IN STATE FUNDING
By Connie Llanos Staff Writer | LA Newspaper Group/Daily News
Aug 2, 2009 - With one month left before the start of a new school year, Los Angeles Unified School District officials are still struggling to learn how the new state budget will filter down to classrooms.
Educators are relieved the budget does not suspend Proposition 98 - the state law that guarantees schools get roughly 40percent of the state general fund - but the deal calls for cuts that will hit the state's lowest performing and neediest schools, which constitute much of the district.
The district estimates it could lose about $140million at a time when it has already slashed programs and laid off thousands of employees to close a multimillion-dollar budget gap.
The state budget contains language that calls on districts facing cuts to apply for federal stimulus dollars to make up the difference. But LAUSD officials said they have little certainty about where the money is coming from or how they'll be able to use it.
"This budget devastates the social safety net for all Californians, and appears to take another huge cut from our schools," said LAUSD board President Monica Garcia. "This situation is alarming.
"LAUSD is required by law to balance our budget by September. We are calling on the state to clarify the situation as soon as possible, or we will be forced to make even deeper cuts to an already bare-bones budget."
Districts that serve a proportionally high number of low-performing students like LAUSD were hit especially hard
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by this deal because of the way state lawmakers decided to slash education funds. The cuts were based on the amount each district received in a state grant established for needy schools known as the Quality Education and Investment Act.
The state grant was created after the California Teachers Association sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over cuts in 2004-05. The $3billion grant is available only to the neediest schools in the state, which must apply for the money.
LAUSD received about $140million in funding from the grant last year, so it will lose that amount in the latest budget deal.
While the budget deal says that school districts may apply to receive stimulus money to compensate for the loss, LAUSD chief financial officer Megan Reilly said there is no guarantee the district will receive the money.
Reilly also said that some of the federal money may not help pay for teachers, administrators and other school expenses because of guidelines and restrictions.
"We don't know if these dollars are going to be as flexible as the ones that they are taking away," Reilly said, equating it to having cash taken away from you in exchange for a gift card that must be spent at a certain store.
"If we can't service all our kids, then we are not being equitable."
Federal law also says states are supposed to pay for the core instructional programs of school districts, while Washington funding can only be used to enhance and supplement existing programs.
"The issue is the federal government says you can't take our money and pay for something that the state was supposed to pay for," Reilly said. "It's a compliance issue."
Officials at the state Department of Education said they were aware of the concerns and confusion among school districts but that they were also mulling over the details of the new deal.
"We know things are very difficult and we understand districts are frustrated but it's going to take us a couple of months to figure this out," said Tina Jung, spokeswoman for the Department of Education.
"We know that these cuts are deep and devastating....We are working very hard towards providing guidance to schools about the budget."
There were some positives in the budget deal, according to a 32-page budget analysis written for LAUSD by Sacramento-based consultants Strategic Education Services. For example, there was an agreement to reduce cuts to transportation at LAUSD from 65percent to just 20percent.
But, overall, the district's financial picture appears bleak, said Stephen Rhodes, an author of the financial report.
"There are a lot of unanswered questions that people are trying to get resolved," Rhodes said.
"School districts have been left with all this responsibility and they are between a rock and a hard place. And the worry is they are going to have to make additional cuts they did not plan to do."
OBAMA’S RACE TO THE TOP: Who’ll blink first: the unions, or the White House?
The Wall Street Journal
OPINION | REVIEW & OUTLOOK from The Wall Street Journal
31 July, 2009 -- The Obama Administration unveiled its new “Race to the Top” initiative late last week, in which it will use the lure of $4.35 billion in federal cash to induce states to improve their K-12 schools. This is going to be interesting to watch, because if nothing else the public school establishment is no longer going to be able to say that lack of money is its big problem.
Four billion dollars is a lot of money, but it’s a tiny percentage of what the U.S. spends on education. The Department of Education estimates that the U.S. as a whole spent $667 billion on K-12 education in the 2008-09 school year alone, up from $553 billion in 2006-07. The stimulus bill from earlier this year includes some $100 billion more in federal education spending—an unprecedented amount. The tragedy is that nearly all of this $100 billion is being dispensed to the states by formula, which allows school districts to continue resisting reform while risking very little in overall federal funding.
All of this is on top of the education spending boom during the Bush years to pay for the 2001 No Child Left Behind law. Democrats liked to claim that law was “underfunded,” but the reality is that inflation-adjusted Education Department elementary and secondary spending under President Bush grew to $37.9 billion from $28.3 billion, or 34%. NCLB-specific funding rose by more than 40% between 2001 and 2008.
It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates.
So now comes “Race to the Top,” which the Obama Administration claims will reward only those states that raise their academic standards, improve teacher quality and expand the reach of charter schools. “This competition will not be based on politics, ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group,” said President Obama on Friday. “Instead, it will be based on a simple principle—whether a state is ready to do what works. We will use the best data available to determine whether a state can meet a few key benchmarks for reform, and states that outperform the rest will be rewarded with a grant.”
Sounds great, though this White House is, at the behest of the unions, also shuttering a popular school voucher program that its own evaluation shows is improving test scores for low-income minorities in Washington, D.C. The Administration can expect more such opposition to “Race to the Top.” School choice is anathema to the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which also oppose paying teachers for performance rather than for seniority and credentials.
NEA President Dennis Van Roekel told the Washington Post last week that charter schools and merit pay raise difficult issues for his members, yet Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said states that block these reforms could jeopardize their grant eligibility. We’ll see who blinks first. The acid test is whether Messrs. Duncan and Obama are willing to withhold money from politically important states as the calendar marches toward 2012.
Race to the Top is bound to have some impact, and lawmakers in several states—including Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Massachusetts—already have passed charter-friendly legislation in hopes of tapping the fund. But the exercise will fail if it is merely a one-off trade of cash for this or that new law. The key is whether the money can be used to promote enough school choice and other reforms that induce school districts to change how the other $800 billion or so is spent.
Charter schools and voucher programs regularly produce better educational outcomes with less money. But as long as most education spending goes to support the status quo, Race to the Top will be mostly a case of political show and tell.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources
CALIFORNIA’S HEALTHY FAMILIES HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM LOOKS FOR FUNDS; First 5 may come to the rescue
Saturday, August 01, 2009 2:45 PM
AUTUMN CRUZ / acruz@sacbee.com Amy Whittle, of the American Academy of Pediatrics, California Division, speaks at the Capitol on Thursday at a meeting of the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board, which oversees the state's Healthy Families health care program.
SCHOOL VIOLATES WATER RESTRICTION LAW
By Carlos Granda | KABC News Friday, July 31, 2009 -- GRANADA HILLS, Calif. (KABC) -- At a time when L.A residents face penalties for wasting water, a San Fernando Valley school is under fire for allegedly running its sprinklers all day long, and violating conservation guidelines. The sprinklers on the field at Porter Middle School in Granada Hills are now off. But they were on earlier
COURT SAYS ENGLISH-ONLY TESTS OK IN SCHOOLS
Bob Egelko, SAN FRANCISCO Chronicle Staff Writer (07-30) 17:21 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- California is entitled to administer school achievement tests and high school exit exams in English to all students, including the nearly 1.6 million who speak limited English, a state appeals court ruled Thursday. The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco rejected arguments by bilingual-education
CALIFORNIA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM BROKEN
EDITORIAL IN THE LOMPOC RECORD July 31, 2009 -- To better understand why California’s public schools — once the envy of the nation and, perhaps the world — have fallen deep into the pit of academic despair, one has only to follow the recent interaction between federal education officials, and the folks who oversee this state’s school system. Last week, federal officials — some holding fairly
WANT AN EDUCATION REVOLUTION? BREAK UP LAUSD!
Random Thoughts By Diana L. Chapman | CityWatch – an insider look at city hall July 31, 2009 - My toes are curling and my head is spinning with the Mayor of Los Angeles’ recent endorsement to pretty much sell off our new schools and let non-profits, charters or teacher partnerships run them – rather than Los Angeles Unified School District. In a long editorial endorsement in the Los
LAUSD MOUNTS ITS OWN CAMPAIGN FOR FEDERAL GRANTS
By Connie Llanos Staff Writer | LA Newspaper Group/Daily News 07/30/2009 12:39:52 PM PDT -- Cash-strapped Los Angeles Unified wants to compete on its own, rather than as part of a statewide effort, to secure federal stimulus money for education, officials said today. Superintendent Ramon Cortines sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, formally applying for money from the $4.35
WHY CALIFORNIA MUST FUND MUSIC EDUCATION
OpEd by Ted Barone | San Francisco Chronicle - Barone is the principal of Albany High School. Thursday, July 30, 2009 - The budget straits the state of California is facing are forcing our leaders to make a series of pernicious choices with legacy implications. One such choice is whether to fund music programming or refocus our funding priorities to the "core academics" (which happen to be those
SPECIAL SESSION?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 9:49 PM
from sacBee CapitolAlert In case you missed it: Legislators could find themselves back in the Capitol in late September for yet another special session. Kevin Yamamura examines the legal issues surrounding the governor's line-item vetoes. Still wondering what's in, what's out and what it all means? Read the Legislative Analyst's Office's summary of the package here.
L.A. RESIDENTS ARE NOT THE MOST CHARITABLE, STUDY FINDS by Jessica Garrison from the LA Times 7:16 AM | July 29, 2009 - To the woes caused by bad traffic and bad air, Los Angeles can now add a new concern: uncharitable neighbors. A new study from the Corporation for National and Community Service has found that Los Angeles ranks 45th out of 51 large American cities in the percentage of people who volunteer their time to help their neighbors or
CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS CHIEF REACTS TO U.S. CRITICISM ON TEACHER EVALUATION: Jack O'Connell visits Long Beach to show that districts in the state are allowed to tie test scores to educator assessments. Obama and his Education secretary chided California on the issue last week.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 10:55 AM
By Seema Mehta | From the Los Angeles Times The Long Beach Unified School District’s use of student scores to evaluate the effectiveness of programs, instructional strategies and teachers is a rarity in California, and state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell called it a model for other California school districts. “Becoming a data-oriented culture, as Long Beach is, won’t be easy, and
BLUE PENCILING THE LINE ITEMS: Full budget summary and breakdown of additional cuts
from the Sac Bee Capitol Alert | Posted by Torey Van Oot In case you missed it: Today was blue-pencil day at the Capitol and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't make any new friends with his"> line item vetoes of an already lean budget. Read the ">legalese of the reductions. The 27-bill budget "fix" signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today included an additional $489 million in line-item veto
A NEW CROP OF SCHOOL GARDENS: Even as state funding wilts, support for school gardens is growing.
PHOTO: Ava Allred, 2, helps during a volunteer gardening day at Farragut Elementary School in Culver City. By Krista Simmons | LA Times July 29, 2009 -- A freckle-faced Malloy Sparling wraps her dirt-dusted fingers around a three-pronged cultivator and looks up with a big-toothed smile. "We're making a garden," she says, plucking a weed out of the
VILLARAIGOSA ADVOCATES SELLING YOUR CHILD'S LAUSD EDUCATION TO WHOEVER'S GOT THE 'SUPERIOR' PLAN
by Lindsay William-Ross in LAist News July 27, 2009 11:30 AM -- If it's broke, fix it, right? Only what happens when the people who are supposed to fix it are the ones who broke it in the first place? And they happened to have run out of the money it's going to likely take to do the fixing? Easy solution: Sell management of the school(s) to the highest--well, "
H1N1: SWINE FLU GOES TO CAMP. WILL IT GO TO SCHOOL NEXT? + FLU SHOT ISN'T FOR H1N1
The summertime outbreak provides an education for school districts and universities, whose administrators are bracing for illness. By Seema Mehta and Nicole Santa Cruz from the LA Times July 27, 2009 - Hundreds of children have been sent home from summer camps across Southern California in recent weeks with flu-like symptoms, and camp
L.A.'s SCHOOLS – A NEW DAY? Mayor Villaraigosa calls on the Board of Education to vote for a reform that will allow groups to bid on running new L.A. schools.
LA Times Op Ed By Antonio R. Villaraigosa July 27, 2009 -- We've all heard the horror stories about crumbling campuses, falling test scores, growing class sizes and decreasing graduation rates. Yet the debate over education reform remains stuck in neutral. School leaders, principals and unions haggle over contracts instead of hashing out lesson plans. We fight yesterday's battles – over
LOS ANGELES UNIONS FIGHT SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION EFFORTS: Politicians, charter school companies are behind the scheme
By: David Feldman | from PSL.org The writer is a public school teacher and member of UTLA. Friday, July 24, 2009 -- On July 14, the Los Angeles Board of Education decided to delay the vote on a proposal that would have allowed charter and outside groups to bid on control of 50 new schools scheduled to open in the next four years. Los Angeles teachers take action against budget cuts >
GREEN DOT CONNECTS: The charter is being used as a model for other groups that want to run up to 50 new LAUSD schools.
Editorial From the Los Angeles Times July 25, 2009 -- When Green Dot Public Schools took over Locke High School a year ago, the thinking was that a well-run charter might prove an instructive model for improving Los Angeles' public schools. That might yet prove true. What few expected was that Green Dot would set a new example for other charter schools. But that's exactly what has happened, as
US SENATE CONFIRMS APPOINTMENT OF POMONA SCHOOLS SUPERINTENDENT FOR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION POST
Staff Reports LA Newspaper Group/LA Daily News Posted: 07/25/2009 06:01:08 PM PDT Updated: 07/25/2009 06:49:54 PM PDT WASHINGTON - Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, the Pomona Unified School District Superintendent of Schools, has been approved as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education, according to information from the U.S. Senate Web site. The
CALIFORNIA TAKES CONTROL OF CASH-STRAPPED MONTEREY COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger authorizes a $13-million loan to the King City Joint Union High School District. A state administrator will be named Thursday. By Seema Mehta LA Times July 23, 2009 -- The state is taking over a Monterey County school district that was facing bankruptcy and lending it $13 million, state officials announced Wednesday. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed emergency
“WE HONOR OURS” AWARDS GO TO EDUCATION ACTIVISTS: Twelve people are honored with WHO awards at annual dinner by the UTLA/NEA WHO Committee
By Ana Valencia, UTLA /NEA Vice President |From the June 19, 2009 United Teacher • UTLA Newsletter May 18, 2009, will be remembered as a warm and sunny day when 11 UTLA/NEA members and one community member were honored for their individual achievements at the annual UTLA/NEA “We Honor Ours” Awards dinner. The WHO awardees, along with their family and friends, enjoyed a hosted dinner
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
*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:
Yolie.Flores.Aguilar@lausd.net • 213-241-6383
Tamar.Galatzan@lausd.net • 213-241-6386
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Marguerite.LaMotte@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Nury.Martinez@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Richard.Vladovic@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
Steve.Zimmer@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
...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.
• If you are eligible to become a citizen, BECOME ONE.
• If you a a citizen, REGISTER TO VOTE.
• If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT.
| |  |
| Scott Folsom is a parent leader in LAUSD. He is Past President of Los Angeles Tenth District PTSA and represents PTA on the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee and the BOC on the Board of Education Facilities Committee. He is the president of his neighborhood council. He is a Health Commissioner, Legislation Team member and a member of the Board of Managers of the California State PTA. He serves on numerous school district advisory and policy committees and has served a PTA officer and governance council member at three LAUSD schools. He is the recipient of the UTLA/AFT 2009 "WHO" Gold Award for his support of education and public schools - an honor he hopes to someday deserve. • In this forum his opinions are his own and your opinions and feedback are invited. Quoted and/or cited content copyright © the original author and/or publisher. All other material copyright © 4LAKids.
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