In This Issue:  | | • | LOCKE HIGH: School Is Turned Around, but $15 Million Cost Gives Pause | | | • | LIBRARIES FADING AS SCHOOL BUDGET CRISIS DEEPENS | | | • | MAYOR WANTS TO CHANGE HOW LAUSD CHOOSES OUTSIDE OPERATORS + VILLARAIGOSA BACKS CHARTER SCHOOL BIDS, RIPS CORTINES + ●● smf's 2¢ | | | • | EDITH SHAIN, RETIRED LAUSD KINDERGARTEN & FIRST GRADE TEACHER DIES AT 91; She was the nurse in iconic Times Square V-J Day kissing photo | | | • | 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: | | | | On Tuesday afternoon the Board of Education hired a new Deputy Superintendent: Dr. John Deasy.
• They also passed a very a very harsh budget,
• Superintendent Cortines promised worse to come
• ...and Deasy will be paid more than Cortines.
4LAKids has a problem with the process of his hiring - especially as the week wore on and became apparent in comments from Superintendent Cortines that Deasy is the heir-apparent/superintendent-presumptive.
What little public input there was on the process of the hiring - and there was little (Feed the story to the press on Monday; do the deal on Tuesday) - the job description posted and recruited was that of Deputy - NOT General Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
And elsewhere Mayor Tony intimated that Superintendent Cortines was not working out.
It seems to me I've heard that song before
It's from an old familiar score - Styne/Cahn
A few weeks ago there was a open process with public interviews in the hiring of the last direct-report-to-the superintendent in the person of the Chief Facilities Executive. What happened here ...did we spend all of our accountability budget?
Dr. Deasy comes from the Gates Foundation. The involvement of Foundations like Gates, Walmart and Broad is well known and well documented - most recently in this summer's required reading assignment: Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. These are not the beneficent philanthropies like Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller that encourage and foster new thinking - these are funders of their own thinking and drivers of their own agendas. Agendae for classical grammarians.
By all appearances Dr Deasy is "the player to be named later" in a the trade for Yolie Flores with Gates. Flores denied this - but correctly recused herself from voting on Gates hiring.
Dr Deasy is a true believer in the charterization/ reconstitution/ Arne Duncan donut-ization of American public education: choice and competition and testing/carrot and stick/reward and punish. Public Schools with Private Agendae - with much talk of accountability ...but accountability to the outside partners: the foundations, the philanthropists, the billionaires.
Dr. Deasy also brings some potentially worrisome and embarrassing personal baggage, all of it unsubstantiated, unproven and circumstantial. That said, one wonders how much the Board of Ed was aware of the allegations ? Guilt by association is McCarthyesque - but we are known by the company we keep.
• Was due diligence done? By whom?
• How much did the board know and when did they know it?
• In their closed session interview with Dr. Deasy (he was the only candidate interviewed) did they ask the questions that needed asking?
The unlovely thing about closed sessions is that we will never know.
The process was about as open and transparent as a acre-foot of water off the Louisiana coastline.
WELCOME DR. DEASY TO THE PUZZLE PALACE; welcome back to Southern California. - we are still not Seattle or Virginia. Hopefully in your BlackBerry you have some contacts at Gates and Microsoft that can help bring this technology-and-communications-challenged District into the mainstream ...and then into the forefront of educational technology. Think e-textbooks and online learning and universal connectivity and scalable bandwidth to match our mission. Think social networking though email and phone apps and Twitter and Skype between parents and schools. Deasy's former boss Microsoft founder Bill Gates may have eclipsed IBM's founder Tom Watson - but Watson's single syllable mission statement still resounds: THINK.
Apologetically this welcome is left-handed - but the future is a blank page. In a letter elsewhere in this blog [http://bit.ly/akBCTL] the writer takes my fellow parents to task for expecting miracles. We expect them from you.
¡Onward/Adelante! -smf
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CODA/CAVEAT: From a 2008 Louisville Courier-Journal article that outlines allegations about Deasy and his history before he joined the Gates Foundation: FELNER OK'D EX-CLIENT'S QUICK PH.D. AT U OF L - Educator Deasy received doctorate in one semester | http://bit.ly/dagReH
"Deasy, a nationally recognized school-reform advocate, won the Prince Georges County job in 2006 over two candidates with more experience in large, urban districts.
"The Washington Post said in a story published then that Deasy presented himself as a leader free of ethical taint.
"'Do your LexisNexis,' he challenged the Prince Georges County board, referring to the database of news stories. 'Not going to find a thing.' "
LOCKE HIGH: School Is Turned Around, but $15 Million Cost Gives Pause
By SAM DILLON | New York Times
June 24, 2010 -- LOS ANGELES — As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation’s worst failing schools, and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out.
Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke’s central plaza have helped transform the school’s concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework.
“It’s changed a lot,” said Leslie Maya, a senior. “Before, kids were ditching school, you’d see constant fights, the lunches were nasty, the garden looked disgusting. Now there’s security, the garden looks prettier, the teachers help us more.”
Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools.
The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.
But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.
“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’ ” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Locke High, with 3,200 students, sprawls across six city blocks in south-central Los Angeles. The school’s principal in 2007 complained publicly that the Los Angeles Unified School District had made it a dumping ground for problem teachers.
Kevin Rauda, a senior, recalled a teacher who read newspapers in class instead of teaching. In spring 2008, only 15 percent of students passed state math tests.
Green Dot, which operates charter schools in Los Angeles and one in the Bronx, won control of Locke from the district in 2008 and began a turnaround effort.
In August 2008, Kevin King, a retired police lieutenant hired by Green Dot, toured Locke’s campus and found broken windows, smashed lights, and security cameras that did not work. Teachers’ cars were parked helter-skelter, including on some handball courts; gang members were selling drugs on others.
“Kids couldn’t even go to the bathroom without being pocket-checked or hassled,” Mr. King said.
He put together a new security force to expel the gangs. Green Dot fixed the lights and cameras, painted over graffiti, reorganized the parking, and hired bus companies to transport 500 students who previously walked dangerous streets to school.
Green Dot divided Locke into small academies. Several, modeled on the charters it operates elsewhere, opened in fall 2008 with freshman classes of 100 to 150 students and are to reach full enrollment of 500 to 600 students by fall 2011.
Other academies concentrate on remedial classes for older students, including some returning from jail. Another focuses on preparing students for careers in architecture.
Green Dot required Locke’s 120 teachers to reapply for their jobs. It rehired about 40, favoring teachers who showed enthusiasm and a belief that all Locke students could learn. The campus stays open each day until early evening for science tutoring, band and other activities.
Although state test scores administered in spring 2009, just months after the Green Dot makeover began, showed modest gains, Locke remained among California’s lowest-performing schools. Still, a dozen students said in recent interviews that the school was safer and instruction had improved.
Hundreds of school districts across the nation will soon be trying makeovers, prodded by the Obama administration’s push to remake the nation’s 1,000 worst schools, and the availability of $3.5 billion in federal money.
But if they rely on federal money alone, they will have to spend less than Green Dot.
Under rules set by Congress, districts can apply for up to $6 million for each failing school, to be spent over three years.
During a Senate hearing in April, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, congratulated Mr. Petruzzi on the Locke transformation, but also suggested its reliance on philanthropic donations would make it difficult to imitate.
“I’m thinking, how scalable is this?” Mr. Franken said.
In interviews, Mr. Petruzzi and other Green Dot officials offered a budget overview. Before and since Green Dot’s takeover, tax dollars have financed Locke’s annual operating budget of upward of $30 million, which during the four-year turnaround will total about $115 million, he said.
By then, expenditures will have exceeded that four-year, taxpayer-supported budget by about $15 million, with philanthropies making up most of the difference.
Over the four years, Green Dot is set to spend about $2 million on increased security and busing. It spent about $700,000 to create a classroom for a new architecture academy.
Green Dot has also spent several million dollars for additional classroom space because hundreds of students who had cut school or dropped out now show up for class, Mr. Petruzzi said.
Dividing Locke into academies resulted in extra personnel costs, Mr. Petruzzi said, because each academy has its own principal and other staff members.
Another cost: the salaries of two psychologists and two social workers who help students endure hardships like losing a sibling to gang warfare, or being evicted. They have helped prevent several suicides this year, said Zeus Cubias, an assistant principal.
Some new services for students have cost Green Dot nothing. Ms. Maya’s grades have improved since a teacher noticed she could not see the blackboard. Her parents are unemployed, and she had no money for glasses. But she had her eyes tested at a mobile eye clinic that visited Locke in October, where Vision Service Plans, a nonprofit provider, donated eyeglasses to her and 200 other students.
Experts are debating whether Locke is a good model for other turnarounds.
Justin Cohen, a turnaround expert at MassInsight, a Massachusetts nonprofit organization, said most districts could expect to spend $2 million to $3 million over three years to overhaul a failing school. Costs often include teacher training and extending the school day, he said.
“I don’t doubt they’re putting all those resources to good use,” Mr. Cohen said of Locke’s $15 million costs. “But that’s high.”
Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group leading several turnaround efforts in Chicago, disagreed, arguing that even expenditures surpassing $15 million on a big school could be a smart national investment.
“We’re wasting billions every year by not fixing these schools,” Mr. Cawley said, “because the students they’re not educating end up filling our prisons.”
LIBRARIES FADING AS SCHOOL BUDGET CRISIS DEEPENS
By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP | Associated Press
24 June 2010 -- BELLEVUE, Wash. — Students who wished their school librarians a nice summer on the last day of school may be surprised this fall when they're no longer around to recommend a good book or help with homework.
As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.
No one will know exactly how many jobs are lost until fall, but the American Association of School Administrators projects 19 percent of the nation's school districts will have fewer librarians next year, based on a survey this spring. Ten percent said they cut library staff for the 2009-2010 school year.
A trip to the school library may be a weekly highlight for children who love to read, but for kids from low-income families, it's more of the necessity than a treat, according to literacy experts and the librarians who help kids struggling in high school without a home computer.
Unlike the overflowing bookshelves of wealthier families, 61 percent of low-income families own no age-appropriate books, according to a 2009 study commissioned by Jumpstart on "America's Early Childhood Literacy Gap." They depend on libraries to keep them from falling behind in school.
While the American Association of School Librarians says some states like California, Michigan and Arizona have been hit especially hard, a map of cutbacks on the organization's website shows jobs are disappearing across the nation.
"We're doing a disservice to our kids, especially those in poverty, if we don't have the resources they need," said association president Cassandra Barnett, who is also the school librarian at the Fayetteville, Ark., High School library.
Since few state or federal laws mandate school libraries or librarians, and their job losses are small compared with classroom teacher layoffs, library layoffs may seem minor to some observers. But librarians say few administrators or parents understand how involved they are in classroom learning and school technology.
"We have really cut off our noses to spite our face because we are denying access to the very resources we say our kids need," Barnett said.
Rosemarie Bernier, president of the California School Library Association, says she doesn't know how students doing complex online research projects could complete their assignments without the guidance they get in school libraries.
"The people who control the purse strings are out of touch. They don't understand what the kids really need," said Bernier, who is the librarian at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles.
She spoke of a student with a first period English class who came to her in tears because she didn't have enough time to transfer and reformat the essay she had written on her cell phone. Since she doesn't have a computer at home, the student's cell phone is her only hope of completing assignments that need to be typed.
The number of California school libraries that won't have teacher librarians next year is changing daily, but she says many students will be surprised next fall when they find their school library closed or staffed by someone who can check out books but not help them with their school work.
Los Angeles eliminated all its elementary school librarians a few years ago and has left next year's staffing of middle school libraries up to the schools. Of 77 middle schools, about 50 have found the money to pay for a teacher librarian, according to Esther Sinofsky, who is in charge of libraries for the district.
Sinofsky, a former school librarian, says Los Angeles Unified School District recognizes the connection between student achievement and school libraries, but the district is also struggling to close a $640 million budget gap for the 2010-2011 school year.
Teacher-librarians have been disappearing from Michigan schools gradually over the past decade, with a drop of nearly 1,500 to not quite 500 since 2000, according to Tim Staal, executive director of the Michigan Association for Media in Education.
Those who remain are doing the jobs done by two or three people a few years ago.
Gigi Lincoln, the librarian at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, Mich., since 1973, was told she would have to leave the library and start teaching French because the district needed to make drastic cuts in the middle of the school year.
Lincoln, who was honored in 2008 by the American Library Association with one of just 10 national "I love my librarian" awards, hasn't taught French since 1972, when she and her husband were living in Australia.
"That was a real wake-up call," said Lincoln, 61, who called the ALA for help and managed to keep her job. Now she's working part-time at two school libraries and says she will do her best to do more than just check out books.
Even wealthy Seattle suburbs have identified the library as a target for budget cuts so they could avoid increases in class sizes.
Sandy Livingston retired this year after the Bellevue School District eliminated all its high school and middle school librarians.
"Information literacy is just so important for kids to be more successful in college," said Livingston, 66, who worked in the Sammamish High School library for about a decade. "The kids are being hurt."
●● smf's 2c: There is no more important classroom in the school than the library. None.
I feel a strange illiberal nostalgia for the George W. Bush administration; after all is said and done, Laura Bush was a school librarian
Where are you now Laura Bush? -- a nation turns its lonely eyes to you -smf
MAYOR WANTS TO CHANGE HOW LAUSD CHOOSES OUTSIDE OPERATORS + VILLARAIGOSA BACKS CHARTER SCHOOL BIDS, RIPS CORTINES + ●● smf's 2¢
MAYOR WANTS TO CHANGE HOW LAUSD CHOOSES OUTSIDE OPERATORS
Daily News Wire Services
06/25/2010 -- Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants Los Angeles Unified to change how it chooses organizations to put in charge of new schools and troubled campuses, but his recommendations weren't embraced by the superintendent.
Under the district's Public School Choice program, groups of teachers and administrators, charter operators and a nonprofit organization controlled by the mayor can compete against each other for a chance to run schools within the LAUSD.
Villaraigosa said the current selection process is "not good enough" and called for several changes, such as giving more weight to an applicant's track record and requiring innovative governance structures as part of the reform strategy.
In a letter to Superintendent Ramon Cortines dated June 9, Villaraigosa submitted a list of recommendations, the first being: "If there is no satisfactory application for a focus school, then reconstitution of the school should be the default action."
Cortines deflected each of the recommendations. In his reply, dated June 18, he said, "I believe that reconstitution or restructuring should be the last resort, not the default. Our goal is to support our schools so that they may improve the outcomes for our students. I will use all available options to improve a school under No Child Left Behind, if necessary."
Still, Cortines added, "We agree ... there are areas of the Public School Choice process that could be strengthened; with this in mind, staff has worked and continues to work diligently to ensure that all issue raised and others that might be raised are addressed so that this round of the process is far more effective than the previous."
In February, when LAUSD decided to turn over control of 18 new schools and 12 troubled ones to outside operators, the teacher-administrator groups backed by United Teachers Los Angeles claimed the vast majority of them.
Charter operators were awarded four of the schools, while Villaraigosa's nonprofit ended up with one.
The mayor said the selection process "doesn't stand the test of transparency, accountability, commonality of standards, the governance models, a track record that demonstrates a plan is more than just a piece of paper."
Cortines' decision to "summarily dismiss" his recommendations was "frankly, just unacceptable," Villaraigosa said, and called for changes before another set of schools is turned over.
When asked whether he would withdraw support for LAUSD officials who rejected his recommendations, Villaraigosa said, "I'm absolutely committed to seeing this process through, and I won't let anyone who opposes transformative reform get in the way."
LAUSD board President Monica Garcia said: "We welcome today's call by Mayor Villaraigosa and representatives of the charter and higher education communities to continually strive for reform, innovation and excellence."
"We appreciate the feedback we received today, and we invite all community members and stakeholders to partner with us to do more, better, and faster," she said.
Letters of intent to participate in the Public School Choice program are due Wednesday. Full applications are due in December.
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VILLARAIGOSA BACKS CHARTER SCHOOL BIDS, RIPS CORTINES: THE MAYOR SAYS L.A. UNIFIED DIDN'T GIVE CHARTERS A FAIR CHANCE IN AN EARLIER BID FOR CONTROL OF NEW AND LOW-PERFORMING CAMPUSES.
By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
June 25, 2010 -- The mayor of Los Angeles sided publicly with local charter schools Thursday in their latest bid to take over new and low-performing campuses, while sharply criticizing the L.A. schools superintendent, his onetime deputy.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke one week before a deadline for applicants to submit bids for nine new campuses and eight low-performing ones in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In the first round of the groundbreaking competition, groups of teachers in February defied early expectations to claim the vast majority of campuses. Charters, which are independently run and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools, emerged with only four successful bids.
Villaraigosa castigated L.A. Unified for giving schools to groups from the very campuses that were up for bid because of poor performance. This time, he said, an organization's track record should be paramount.
"You can write a great plan, but if you don't have a history ... of proven results, that plan is just a piece of paper," Villaraigosa said.
The teacher groups, which had only weeks to put together proposals, received logistical support both from the district and United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union. The union then rallied local support behind teacher-led plans to dominate nonbinding community balloting over rival plans.
Villaraigosa said outside groups never had a fair shot at access to resources and parents.
In February, the mayor lobbied vigorously only for bids submitted by the nonprofit group that runs schools on his behalf, district officials told The Times. In its final decision, the school board majority he helped to elect gave him most of what he wanted, but favored even fewer charters than Supt. Ramon C. Cortines.
At the mayor's side Thursday were representatives from charter groups knocked out in the earlier round: one from ICEF Public Schools and three with ties to Green Dot Public Schools. Shane Martin, dean of the Loyola Marymount University School of Education, chairs the Green Dot board; Ben Austin heads a charter-allied parents organization spun off from Green Dot; and Steve Barr started Green Dot and headed it for years.
For schools with inadequate reform plans — and no competing outside bids — Villaraigosa called for reconstitution, a process in which all members of the staff are replaced or must reapply for their jobs.
Cortines called reconstitution a last resort rather than a default option. This year, he required staff at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles to reinterview, but he said such efforts fail unless handled with persistence and care. The example of Fremont, he said, was enough to move other schools into reform mode.
The teachers union has vigorously opposed the Fremont initiative, calling it unfair and unsupported by research.
Villaraigosa accused Cortines, a former deputy mayor and top education advisor, of dismissing his suggestions and straying from their shared reform fervor.
"Frankly, that's unacceptable," the mayor said. "We've got to stop biting around the edges.... We've got to be transformative."
Cortines said he found the mayor's suggestions, which Villaraigosa outlined in a June 9 letter, helpful, but added, "I don't think we would have given the mayor additional schools based on a track record."
"I looked at this process as an incentive to motivate and challenge and raise the bar for teachers and parents and administrators in this district, and they stepped up to the plate," Cortines said.
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●● smf's 2¢: Mayor Tony is entitled to his opinion. But the courts - the Superior Court, the Court of Appeal and the California State Supreme Court – ruled in Mendoza v. California /aka/ LAUSD v. Villaraigosa that he is not entitled to run the schools. Unconstitutional they said.
* The best board of education (his) money could buy has given him some schools to run anyway, And he has …poorly.
* The same board has given him the superintendent of his choosing; who is now dismissive of Mayor Tony’s suggestions and questioning of his track record.
Somehow this experience and investment and fervor has made him an expert and an authority
…or maybe picking on the schools might take the public’s attention off the fact that he’s gone to all those sporting events, concerts and award shows without paying for the tickets. Ya think?
EDITH SHAIN, RETIRED LAUSD KINDERGARTEN & FIRST GRADE TEACHER DIES AT 91; She was the nurse in iconic Times Square V-J Day kissing photo
SHE WAS A MARRIED, PART-TIME NURSE WHEN SHE JOINED THE JUBILANT CROWD CELEBRATING V-J DAY AND WAS KISSED BY A YOUNG SAILOR. THE PHOTO BY LIFE MAGAZINE'S ALFRED EISENSTAEDT WAS SEEN BY MILLIONS | http://bit.ly/7a4Gi
June 24, 2010 -- It's one of the most iconic images to emerge from World War II.
Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of an anonymous young sailor in a dark-blue uniform dipping a white-uniformed nurse backward while giving her a long kiss in the middle of Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945, symbolized the euphoria surrounding the news that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was finally over.
Edith Shain, a retired Los Angeles elementary school teacher who claimed to be the mystery nurse in the photo seen by millions around the world, died of cancer Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, said her son, Michael. She was 91.
Shain was a married, 27-year-old part-time nurse at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan when she joined the jubilant crowd in Times Square celebrating V-J Day.
"You can imagine how people felt. They were just elated," Shain said in a 2005 interview with The Times. "Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country. I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him."
When Eisenstaedt's photo ran in Life magazine the following week — he had neglected to get the names of his subjects, whose faces are obscured in the picture — Shain recognized herself but was too embarrassed to tell anyone it was her.
"But I knew it was me," she said. "I was wearing the same kind of shoes, and I had the same kind of seams in my stockings. And a little bit of my slip was showing."
Immediately after the sailor kissed her, Shain said, she encountered a soldier who also wanted a kiss. But that was enough for her, and she and the friend she was with left Times Square.
Shain later moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a nurse before becoming a longtime kindergarten and first-grade teacher at Hancock Park Elementary School. She was married and divorced three times and had three sons.
In 1980, no longer embarrassed by her Times Square encounter with the anonymous sailor and wanting a copy of the famous photo, Shain wrote to Life magazine and identified herself as the nurse.
Eisenstaedt himself flew out to meet her.
"He looked at my legs and said I was the one," Shain recalled.
Eisenstaedt gave Shain a copy of the photo and, according to The Times article, Life flew her to New York for a luncheon.
In one of his books that he later inscribed for her, Eisenstaedt wrote that she was "the one and only nurse" whom he had photographed in Times Square.
But Bobbi Baker Burrows, a Life editor familiar with the subject, told the Associated Press in 2008 that Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, was never sure that Shain was the nurse in the photo.
Burrows recalled that when interest in the photo was renewed, Life ran an article saying, "If you are the sailor or the nurse in the picture, please step forward."
"We received claims from a few nurses and dozens of sailors, but we could never prove that any of them were the actual people, and Eisenstaedt himself just said he didn't know," she said.
Carl Muscarello, a former New York City police detective, was one of the men who have claimed to be the sailor in the photo.
"Everything points to him," Shain told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1995. "He was tall enough that he could execute that form."
During the 60th anniversary of V-J Day in 2005, Shain and Muscarello appeared together in Times Square, where they exchanged a kiss for photographers and a large crowd.
Shain, however, was still not convinced that Muscarello was the sailor who had bussed her.
"I can't say he isn't," she said. "I just can't say he is. There is no way to tell."
Born July 29, 1918, in Tarrytown, N.Y., Shain graduated from a nursing school in New York and earned a bachelor's degree in education at New York University. She retired from teaching in 1985.
"The famed kissing nurse," as the New York Daily News once called her, often served as honorary grand marshal of Veterans Day and Memorial Day parades and spoke to World War II veterans' groups.
She was scheduled to appear in Times Square in August for a V-J Day celebration.
She also had been serving as national spokesperson for a grassroots initiative to establish a permanent national day of remembrance on the second Sunday of every August to honor the men and women of the World War II generation.
"She used to call herself an accidental celebrity, and she felt she should use that celebrity for the common men and women of the World War II generation," said Warren Hegg, national supervisor of the Keep the Spirit of '45 Alive initiative.
In addition to her son Michael, Shain is survived by her sons Justin and Robert; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources
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TODAY IN LAUSD: Nada: from the LAUSD Communications Office Webpage | http://bit.ly/aR0dWb Reality takes a furl... http://bit.ly/cATnJq 2:45 PM Jun 22nd via twitterfeed
L.A. SCHOOL SYSTEM POISED TO HIRE SENIOR GATES FOUNDATION OFFICIAL (UPDATED: He's Hired!): By Howard Blume | LA Ti... http://bit.ly/964oLj
LAUSD BOARD MAY FILL NO. 2 POSITION: By Connie Llanos Staff Writer | LA Daily News 06/22/2010 | The Los Angeles ... http://bit.ly/dn7NT4
Lest we forget: SCHOOL'S NEVER OUT @ YEAR ROUND SCHOOLS: A Principal Friend Writes TO 4LAKids re: Schools? OUT! | ... http://bit.ly/deYNY1
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: 213-241.8700
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! • Find your state legislator based on your home address. Just go to: http://bit.ly/dqFdq2 • 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.
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