In This Issue:  | | • | School’s Out Soon: LAUSD SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE PLANS TO RETIRE IN SPRING | | | • | L.A. UNIFIED SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE'LL DEPART NEXT SPRING | | | • | Architecture Criticism: L.A. UNIFIED’S FAULTY VISION FOR SCHOOLS ON AMBASSADOR SITE | | | • | MOVING THE FUNNY PAPERS TO THE EDITORIAL PAGE: Not funny. | | | • | 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: | | | | THE NEWS THIS WEEK FROM LAUSD IS NOT NEWS AT ALL. Exactly a month ago Supt. Cortines announced on Patt Morrison's radio show [http://bit.ly/9SSMug] that he had a date in mind for his retirement from the District - and he intimated it would be next spring or summer. This week he made pretty much the same announcement to The Print Media ...and in so doing the broadcast secret and the dangled date became more real - recorded as it was in soy ink on partially recycled paper. The blogosphere and the airwaves - which had been reporting this already - dutifully picked up as Confirmed Truth. It must be true ....we read it in The Times. (Though the Daily News actually had it in print first.)
Maybe the superintendent's date-in-mind was for the announcement - he made it on his birthday. (#78 - ....and many more!) There is a popular Bush Era/Bush League political aversion to announcing exit dates (we don't want any long range plans made public lest terrorists or other evildoer/stakeholders take advantage) so the actual date remains uncertain -- sometime this spring is as close as we get. Cortines wants to get one last budget in. One last series of cuts. One more contract re-opener. One more go at decentralization. One additional round of Public School Choice. All in all, more bricks in the wall.
Returning to a theme that is so last week: (see: Moving the Funny Papers to the Editorial Page) We now have another lame duck to go along with Mayor Tony, The Gübernator, Yolie Flores and now the city management of Bell. The dark subtext is that the Board of Ed may dispense with a national search for a new supe in favor of the hand picked heir apparent, Dr. Deasy - who has still not yet worked a single day in LAUSD. That, gentle readers, would be an entirely new wall around the puzzle palace at 333 S. Beaudry.
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE PICTURE IN THE TIMES WITH THE BALLOONS. [http://bit.ly/dnxudG] When I first saw it the schoolboy temptation for sharp pointed metaphors was needlelike; at an event later that day a respected (and I thought more staid!) educator was all over the prickly metaphor. And 'puncturing pomposity' is so alliterative! And look at that picture of Cortines. Tell me he's not contemblating sharp objects!
LAST SUNDAY THE TIMES' ARCHITECTURE CRITIC TOOK THE SCHOOL DISTRICT TO TASK OVER THE AMBASSADOR/RFK-12 SCHOOLS. (see: Architecture Criticism) Some of criticism is spot-on, but I would run through the grass of Vista Hermosa Park in a blue dirndl and white apron singing "The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music" if architecture criticism was a big concern of public education in L.A.
However, it is the job of architecture critics to criticize architecture. Mouths to feed, column-inches to fill, deadlines to meet.
The RFK-12 schools cost too much. They took too long to build. The project preserved little if any of the old Ambassador Hotel. The design is a compromise that left no one pleased.
FOLLY: from Merriam-Webster Online [http://bit.ly/bsHdqn]
4 : an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking
5 : an often extravagant picturesque building erected to suit a fanciful taste
The delay and the cost escalation (time = money -- whether you go slow or go fast) was driven by decisions made by a series of decision-makers in the realities of a series of political and economic moments - stretching from the 1970's to today. and propelled by the economy itself and the unforeseen consequences of the decisions made. . The RFK-12 project was driven by Reality; not TV show reality but the real reality of 4000 children a day from the community being driven out of the community every year on buses, by need and dreams and promises made, by the "greed-is-good" of Donald Trump, by litigation costs and delays -- and by the price of concrete and structural steel.
But - picking and choosing (in other words, quoting out of context) from within the article to find my own truth I give you this: "But a building doesn't drive academic progress."
"It's no secret that the most important factor in student success is an excellent teacher. And research shows that exceptional teachers are especially important for low-income students since poverty can undermine educational efforts."
"Yet inner-city schools are top-heavy with instructional rookies. Union rules that let teachers choose schools by seniority mean the lowest-performing schools face an endless stream of new teachers and perpetual vacancies."
Hardly architecture criticism of bricks and mortar... but architecture is art and art is a reflection of life+truth. We have at RFK-12 built schools hopefully worthy of those kids in their community, a place to attract experienced educators and exceptional rookies to classrooms. A place to foster excellence all around. A place to remember RFK and the Grand Hotel where my parents first met. A place to teach youngsters to ask hard questions and to promote the discovery of lifetimes of right answers.
¡Nowhere but Onward/En ninguna parte, pero Adelante! - smf
_________
UPDATE FROM THE BARRICADES: The removal and replacement of the principal at HS#9/The Visual and Performing Arts High School played out Monday in a fun and well attended protest rally in front of Beaudry on Monday - with chanting and horn honking and accordion music(!) - and "We Support Our Administrators" t-shirts. LAUSD and Local District 4 will make their case and tardy explanations ("The dog ate my parent involvement?") at a Community/Parent/Staff Forum at the school at 6:30PM next Monday (tomorrow the 26th) in the HS#9 auditorium.
more: http://www.saveblake.com
School’s Out Soon: LAUSD SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE PLANS TO RETIRE IN SPRING
by Connie Llanos - LA Daily News
07/22/2010 - Ending months of speculation, Los Angeles Unified schools Superintendent Ramon Cortines said Wednesday he plans to retire next spring from a career in public education that spans six decades.
Cortines, who turns 78 on Thursday, has already vacated his office, ceding the space to Deputy Superintendent John Deasy, the district's recently hired No. 2 who many believe will be the next chief of schools.
In an interview Wednesday, Cortines said it's time to step aside and let the district - plagued by high turnover rates among senior administrators - find a leader who can stay for the long haul.
"I have to lay the groundwork for transition...," Cortines said. "This district needs to have continuity, flexibility, accountability.
"It's never a good time to go," Cortines said inside his new compact office, about half the size of those occupied by most senior district administrators.
He admitted the last two years of budget cuts and rapid reform have been exhausting.
"I'm tired," he said.
Now in his sixth decade in public education - starting as a sixth-grade teacher in Monterey and moving on to superintendent posts in Pasadena, San Jose, San Francisco, running New York City's Department of Education and even working as an education adviser in the Clinton administration – Cortines said his last post has been the toughest.
In the last 18 months Cortines has had to slash more than $1.5 billion from the district's annual budget – laying off thousands of teachers, administrators, office workers, custodians and bus drivers.
Cuts have also reduced the school year by five days, eliminated or seriously eroded arts and music programs, increased class sizes and student to counselor ratios – all things anathema to Cortines' education philosophy.
At the same time, Cortines has also overseen LAUSD's most ambitious education reform effort in years. The School Choice plan allows non-profit groups and charter school operators to run district schools.
His calm during the storm has led everyone from school board members to union leaders to refer to him as "irreplaceable."
"He has singularly held this district together through the worst economic crisis and through some very politically turbulent issues, but our partners still come to table to speak with him and even call him at home," said LAUSD board member Steve Zimmer.
"I don't no any one else who can do that."
Many said Cortines ability to connect with all stakeholders in the education community comes down to the respect he's earned after spending more than a half century working in schools and for children.
"There is no denying that we have had our policy disagreements from time to time," said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter School Association.
The association is currently suing the school district for failing to comply with state laws for sharing public school space with the independently run public schools.
However, Wallace said he personally holds Cortines as "the definition of a public servant."
"He didn't have to take this job, and yet he's steered this district through some incredibly difficult challenges," Wallace said.
"People recognize him as an example of what public service is all about... And people are inspired by that."
A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers los Angeles, also said he has a great respect for Cortines, who this year helped negotiate a furlough deal with the teacher's union that saved the jobs of more than 2,000 teachers, counselors and librarians.
"Cortines handled the recklessness of the school board majority in a very sane and reasonable way and he's probably the only one who could have done that... Like only Nixon could go to China," Duffy said.
Cortines considers his ability to keep the district focused on kids and classroom instruction, even during these difficult times, his greatest skill.
A work-a-holic who starts his day at the office at around 4 a.m., Cortines has finally scheduled a vacation for himself – the first time since he's been at LAUSD.
District officials have said a nation-wide search will be conducted to find a replacement for Cortines.
However many believe that Deasy, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation director, was hired to step into that role later this year.
Deasy is expected to arrive at the district Aug. 2.
Ramon Cortines, a history lesson
Here are the highlights of Ramon Cortines' five decades in public education:
1972-1984: Served as superintendent of Pasadena Unified School District on two separate occasions
1993-95: Head of New York City Department of Education
2000: Interim superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District
2006-08: Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles for education
2009: Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District
Spring 2011: Anticipated retirement
L.A. UNIFIED SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE'LL DEPART NEXT SPRING
RAMON C. CORTINES, 78, DEFENDS HIS RECORD SINCE TAKING THE HELM OF THE NATION'S TROUBLED SECOND-LARGEST SCHOOL DISTRICT IN LATE 2008
by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
[photo: http://bit.ly/dnxudG | Los Angeles Unified Schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who turned 78 Thursday, shows off his new office, festooned with balloons bearing images of the school board members, given to him by staff. He announced that he will step down from the nation's second-largest school district next spring. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times / July 22, 2010)]
July 23, 2010 -- Amid persistent budget woes and increasing political pressure, Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines confirmed Thursday, his 78th birthday, that he plans to step down next spring as head of the nation's second-largest school system.
The news was not unexpected: Cortines had said he expected to serve two to three years when he took the job in December 2008, but this week he became somewhat more specific.
Cortines, whose high energy and endurance frequently outlasts that of his staff, had talked recently of being tired and said the political intrigues and public battles sometimes get to him: "Yes, I get frustrated. I am human."
Since joining the school system more than two years ago, initially as deputy superintendent, he has presided over relentless program cuts, salary reductions and layoffs caused by the state budget deficit and declining enrollment. He has also managed an array of school improvement efforts.
The financial crisis has engendered sometimes vitriolic rhetoric against Cortines from employees and parents. But most internal groups also express respect — sometimes grudging, sometimes effusive — for Cortines as someone who deeply understands education.
The more politically dangerous forces for Cortines include L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, education philanthropists such as Eli Broad, and some charter-school leaders and supporters who have powerful allies in both the mayor and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
All have fraying alliances at best with Cortines, although they acknowledge his strong administrative skills. They've concluded, however, that his pace of reform has been too slow or too incremental.
In an interview, Cortines took issue with those who "want to blow up the system."
"Why don't they improve the system?" he said. "That's what I've done."
Cortines also defended his pace.
"There isn't an area where we haven't raised the issue of accountability. You have somebody radical," he said of himself.
He personally oversaw changes at dozens of the lowest-performing schools. Employees have said they felt tremendous pressure, and some resent Cortines for it.
Last December, Cortines ordered all employees at Fremont High in South Los Angeles to reapply for their jobs. By July 1, more than half the teachers had voluntarily or unwillingly transferred out.
The mayor, for one, was not impressed.
"Let me tell you, there are a lot more failing schools in Los Angeles than one," he said at a news conference last month. "We've got to stop biting around the edges. We've got to be transformative."
On that day, Villaraigosa had joined critics who accused Cortines of watering down a process through which outside groups could take control of low-performing and new district campuses. The school board created the policy last year, but it fell to Cortines to carry it out.
On Thursday, Villaraigosa praised Cortines' "long and proud career serving students and families," said Deputy Mayor Joan Sullivan.
Cortines also has faced periodic pressure from school board President Monica Garcia, a Villaraigosa ally. Last year, she demanded that the superintendent give the mayor's education nonprofit a new campus without a formal review process, which rankled Cortines. More recently, Garcia "raised hell," as she put it, over enrollment issues at the new downtown arts high school.
The new regional district administrator, a subordinate to Cortines, recently sided with Garcia's concerns. He replaced the school's principal, Suzanne Blake, days after Cortines had said she could remain at the campus. Parents and school staff members are protesting Blake's removal.
All the same, Garcia has publicly described Cortines as the nation's best superintendent.
Garcia could not be reached Thursday, but other board members extolled Cortines, who previously led the school districts in New York City, San Francisco, San Jose and Pasadena. He also served as interim head of L.A. Unified for six months in 2000.
"I can't imagine going through the kind of budget cuts we have with anyone else at the helm," said Tamar Galatzan.
"It's good news for him and bad news for the district," said Richard Vladovic about Cortines' announcement.
"The superintendent has been irreplaceable and almost remarkable in his ability to provide a sense of steady, strong and stable leadership on every level," said Steve Zimmer.
Before he goes, Cortines said, he may restructure other schools using the Fremont model, which the teachers union has characterized as unfair and academically unsound.
Still, the union president expressed gratitude that Cortines had been in charge.
Cortines deftly handled a school board "that created chaos and confusion when it wasn't necessary," said A.J. Duffy, who heads United Teachers Los Angeles.
The superintendent said he would stay at least long enough to get the district through the next budget cycle, putting his departure in the March-through-June range. His contract runs through 2011 but can be terminated with 30 days' notice.
He has already moved out of his office, which he likened to a "mausoleum," for a space half the size. The new nameplate on the door is John Deasy, the deputy superintendent who begins work Aug. 1. Insiders have mentioned Deasy, a veteran superintendent, as a possible successor, although board members said they are keeping their options open.
Times staff writer Jason Song contributed to this report.
Architecture Criticism: L.A. UNIFIED’S FAULTY VISION FOR SCHOOLS ON AMBASSADOR SITE
THOUGH THE OVERALL DESIGN MESHES WELL AS A PUBLIC CAMPUS, THE DISTRICT'S PUSH TO RE-CREATE THE LOOK OF THE OLD HOTEL WINDS UP FEELING LIKE AN EMPTY GESTURE TO HISTORY.
by Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times Architecture Critic
● Price tag for schools complex at former Ambassador Hotel site now tops $578 million Price tag for schools complex at former Ambassador Hotel site now tops $578 million
July 18, 2010 -- Along one edge of the old Ambassador Hotel site, where the Los Angeles Unified School District has been building a controversial collection of schools, there is a new park dedicated to the life and work of Robert F. Kennedy. Created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt and running parallel to Wilshire Boulevard, the park includes a series of quotations from Kennedy, who was shot and killed inside the hotel on a June night in 1968, and a few others.
Among the lines by Kennedy is one that seems tailor-made to address the controversy that has followed the LAUSD's attempts, adamantly opposed by the Los Angeles Conservancy and other preservationists, to knock down Myron Hunt's 1921 hotel complex and replace it with a new campus costing more than $578 million, a streamlined but conservative piece of work by Pasadena firm Gonzalez Goodale Architects. "The world," it reads, "demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease."
For most of its civic life, Los Angeles has been propelled — even defined — by those qualities. They made the city a center for forward-looking, innovative architecture; they also meant that L.A. rarely paused to worry before knocking down aging buildings to make room for new ones.
The way the Ambassador dispute unfolded made one thing clear: That city is gone. Los Angeles is no longer a young city quick to raze its architectural treasures. The growing prominence of institutions like the Conservancy meant that we were at least going to have a broad conversation about the value of the hotel and its architecture.
But that conversation was neither especially sophisticated nor terribly productive. And it led to a solution that was tone-deaf architecturally: After failing to reach any common ground with the Conservancy, the district directed Gonzalez Goodale, in designing a new high school building, to match as closely as possible the size and shape of the old hotel. Other elements of the historic campus, which included contributions from Paul R. Williams and Gordon Kaufmann in addition to Hunt, have been re-created in ersatz fashion, including the old Cocoanut Grove nightclub, which has been reborn as a kitschy auditorium.
L.A. and its cultural guardians, in other words, had the decisiveness neither to save the original hotel complex as a school nor to make a clean break with the past by building an ensemble of entirely new buildings. Instead the LAUSD settled on an architectural path — confused, expensive and a little macabre all at the same time — that suggests that the city has now entered a kind of limbo when it comes to cultural maturity. It is neither young enough to energetically (if blithely) embrace the future nor self-aware enough to fully protect its architectural heritage, particularly when that protection requires significant investment from cash-strapped public agencies.
What other city would knock down a major cultural landmark — a hotel where half a dozen early Academy Award ceremonies were held, to say nothing of the site's architectural and political significance — but then insist that the school replacing it squeeze into the same shape, so that anybody who remembers what used to be there is confronted not with tangible history but a ghostly shell of the original?
That logic is a bit like cutting out a piece of paper the exact size and shape of a dollar bill and trying, with a straight face, to buy a newspaper or a pack of gum with it. The lesson it teaches is that what matters is not historical substance but its flimsy outline.
For all the constraints the firm had to work with, certain elements of the Gonzalez Goodale design, collectively known as the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, show initiative and strength. Among them is the decision to flatten much of the site's rolling topography and knit the schools into the street grid of the surrounding blocks.
Given that the campus is really a collection of neighborhood schools that most students will reach on foot, that change makes a good deal of sense. It is also an implicit recognition of how this part of Los Angeles has changed since the hotel's heyday. No longer a glamorous and essentially suburban outpost removed from the life of the city, the school site now sits in the middle of a diverse, crowded mid-Wilshire residential district whose families had been sending their children on long bus rides to other LAUSD schools.
Still, shifting priorities and inconsistent leadership within the LAUSD have undermined the architecture, just as they did at Coop Himmelblau's arts high school in downtown on Grand Avenue. Originally, Gonzalez Goodale — joined on the project by preservation architects from Tetra Design — was asked to design separate but adjacent campuses for an elementary school, a middle school and a high school. That allowed for a sense of progression over time as students moved from the smaller and more open scale of the lower grades toward the denser, more imposing forms of the high school. The Gonzalez Goodale scheme was in many ways centered around this progression, which also subtly symbolizes the maturation of the larger city over time.
Then the district decided, even as the campus was under construction, to use parts of it to test a new pilot-schools program, the LAUSD's in-house answer to the growing charter-school movement. As a result, the concept of three separate yet connected campuses has been noticeably watered down. Seven separate schools, with a combined enrollment of 4,200, will fill the finished campus.
As a mediating presence between past and future, the Gonzalez Goodale design manages well enough, and a collection of public art woven into the campus effectively engages the hotel's complex history without having to mimic its architectural forms. The new construction, for the most part, is confidently contemporary and free of ornament, if also decidedly risk-averse. The dominant formal gesture is a series of oversized entryways wrapped in zinc.
Open-air staircases behind colorful perforated metal panels will take students to the upper-floor classrooms, many of which have fantastic views. The classrooms themselves are attractive if straightforward. On the western side of the site, the height of the new buildings feels particularly dramatic. Between the school and Wilshire Boulevard, meanwhile, a large campus green flanked by playing fields makes the sheer scale of the 24-acre site clear.
It's where the architects had to re-create the older design, and where those simulations meet a few remnants of the original hotel, that cracks in the logic of the campus and its attitude toward history really begin to show. The historic tile lining a preserved porte-cochere, for example, has real beauty and presence. The rebuilt spaces — the auditorium as well as the old ballroom, which has become a large library — feel hollow by comparison. In preserving architecture, as in writing history, primary sources make all the difference.
Of course, the attempt to re-create historic architecture is a familiar enough strategy in Southern California to have its own long history. (Hunt's original Ambassador, don't forget, was a lightly abstracted version of Mediterranean Revival.) And there is no architectural task trickier than dealing with cultural and civic memory.
But the full impression given by the new Ambassador campus is not just an attempt to make new look old but an odd mixture of progress and guilt. The final result wraps both ham-handed reverence for history and naked disdain for it inside a single architectural package.
That guilt, it should be noted, came with a big price tag: at nearly $600 million, the new campus is the most expensive that LAUSD has built. In the end, the district's decision to commission elaborate replicas of the hotel's best-known spaces added to the cost of the project without managing to save very much actual architecture. That's a pretty good definition of the worst of both worlds.
MOVING THE FUNNY PAPERS TO THE EDITORIAL PAGE: Not funny.
by smf for 4LAKids News
Sunday, July 18, 2010 - The cosmic coincidence theory of the universe goes that empty space isn't really empty, but rather filled with virtual particles constantly popping in and out of existence. All this activity imparts energy to empty space, termed vacuum energy.
None of this explains the harmonic convergence today when the editorial boards of the Daily News and the L.A. Times chose this Sunday to write editorials lambasting lame duck politicians for being lame ducks and exhorting them to suck it up, buck up and kick butt.
The Times in DOWN, BUT NOT OUT: California Budget or California Dreamin'? | http://bit.ly/dtyZlv presses The Gübernator to get his charisma together and force the legislature to reach a budget. Good luck on that.
The Daily News in IT'S TIME TO QUIT MONKEYING AROUND AND GET TO WORK | http://bit.ly/aSPrIy implores Mayor Tony (pictured with a bit of red carpet arm candy on each arm at the Grammys) to do the same, citing school reform as an example of his prior success:: "Los Angeles schools are currently undergoing a much-needed, if bumpy, reform, due in large part to the efforts of Villaraigosa..." Discounting that three courts (Superior, Appeal and Supreme) have ruled Villaraigosa's attempted efforts unconstitutional (which is the same as illegal, only worse), there is nothing about his subsequent efforts remotely reformative. Giving his Partnership for L.A. Schools a passing grade is pure social promotion. PLAS has been marginally statistically successful in some categories ....as has LAUSD. It's more of the same-ol'-same-ol' -- with a crisp white shirt, pastel tie and cufflinks.
Schwarzenegger and Villaraigosa are parts of the problem, not the solution.
If it quacks like a duck and limps like a duck - termed-out with approval numbers interchangeable with local unemployment statistics - it's lame, waterfowl-wise.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources
● FEWER LATINO STUDENTS SELECT FOUR-YEAR COLLEGES | http://bit.ly/bpUgTZ
"I wanted a full experience of going to a four-year college," says Doris Gonzalez Gomez, 21, who currently attends Oregon State University. According to an unpublished analysis of federal education data by the Pew Hispanic center, Latinos are the least likely of any other major racial or ethnic group to attend a four-year college or university. —Stephen Voss for Education Week
● SAME OLD “NEW STANDARDS” | http://bit.ly/96pI6L
Themes in the News for the week of July 19-23, 2010 | By UCLA IDEA Staff 07-23-2010 - Last week the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released “Common Core Standards.” These academic standards are of critical interest to the nation’s schools, and their adoption can shape public education for years to come. Academic standards are specific goals that
● BOY’S SUICIDE REVEALS CONTINUED PROBLEMS WITH L.A. COUNTY SOCIAL SERVICES: Social workers met with 11-year-old hou... http://bit.ly/bmtAQF
● L.A. UNIFIED SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE'LL DEPART NEXT SPRING: Ramon C. Cortines, 78, defends his record since taking ... http://bit.ly/dx9WTU 11:12 PM
● School’s Out Soon: LAUSD SUPERINTENDENT SAYS HE PLANS TO RETIRE IN SPRING: By Connie Llanos, Staff Writer | L.A... http://bit.ly/bbidL3
● Letter to the Editor: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?: Letter to the LA Times Re "Principal replaced at arts scho... http://bit.ly/anP1JN
● UPDATE ON MARTY GALINDO LEAVE-OF-ABSENCE AND MOVE TO BASSETT USD: by smf July 19 - smf wrote previously: 4LAKids ... http://bit.ly/bnOOG5
● MOVING THE FUNNY PAPERS TO THE EDITORIAL PAGE: Not funny.: by smf for 4LAKids News Sunday, July 18, 2010 - The co... http://bit.ly/bDkCSW 10:54 PM
● REMOVAL OF PRINCIPAL @ VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS HIGH SCHOOL/CLAHS #9: Picket Protest Scheduled For Monday 7/19 3-8... http://bit.ly/c4yrKA
● More on Marty Galindo: BASSETT UNIFIED SELECTS NEW SUPERINTENDENT: By Maritza Velazquez, Staff Writer San Gabriel ... http://bit.ly/alrDZr
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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