In This Issue:  | | • | AUDIT BOND USE: "Something is rotten in facilities" +●●¢ | | | • | LAUSD CANCELS ANOTHER CONTRACT: Deal would have paid $90,000 for 66 days of work +●●¢ | | | • | MOUNT OLIVE, N.J.'s DECISION TO DROP D GRADE GETTING AN A SO FAR + NJ SCHOOL DISTRICT: NO D-GRADES POLICY WORKING | | | • | NO MORE A's FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR | | | • | 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 100TH PSALM IS A SONG OF THANKSGIVING. It instructs us to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye nations; enter into His gates with thanksgiving - for His truth endureth to all generations.
Forgive the Sunday sermon, but so it is and so it should+shall be ...though perhaps the divine masculine should include the divine feminine.
I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving with all your generations, that the noise was joyous and the truth set you free - if only for a Thursday afternoon in November.
The Thanksgiving holiday is not as uniquely American as we would have it be. Every culture celebrates the bounty of the harvest and have before history and civilization and organized religion. Canada celebrated Thanksgiving last month - not mimicking their southern neighbor but taking the all 'ye nations' to heart.
Native Americans certainly celebrated thanksgiving before the Europeans arrived ....if only to fete the paucity of Europeans! The Virginia colonists in Jamestown not only celebrated thanksgiving in 1619 but proclaimed it an annual observance. The mythic First American Thanksgiving celebrated the harvest in Plymouth in 1621 when fifty-three Pilgrims and ninety Wampanoag and one Patuxet feasted, celebrated and made their joyful noise. The feast lasted three days - whether turkey was consumed is unknown, football was not played and no one got up and went shopping before dawn the next morning. But there was celebration and all generations and all ye nations available. It is a highlight worth remembering 389 years along .
In 1621 there were probably 12,000 Wampanoag in New England, today there are about 2000. The region is overrun with descendents of Pilgrims - and it is they that celebrate the true unique American observance: the forebodingly named Black Friday. It sounds like a John Carpenter movie; it is a Steely Dan tune.
The psalmist wrote no songs of praise for Black Friday. "Go forth and spend and fill the malls and Best Buys and purchase big screens and fill the landfills with discarded CRTs. Do so retailers will break even and revenues is collected and the economy will turn around and public education will be saved - and great shall be the employment thereof."
I AM NOT A FAN OF THE CONSUMER CULTURE AND I AM A HYPOCRITE. Friday I fell down the slippery slope into the undertow of retail. I went to Best Buy on and I bought big screen. There is enough of the Puritan in me - or perhaps the liberation theologian - to recognize the similarity between the Fatted Calf, the Golden Calf and the Wall Street Bull.
....But if the sales tax is 10% ...and 40% of the state tax revenues go to education (after the $25 billion deficit is paid off) ... so can feel good, right?
I hope your holiday/furlough/break went well and the joyful noise drowned out the "Welcome K-Mart Shoppers" announcements.. I hope you connected with friends and family and tradition and enough L-tryptophan-laced-poultry (Do they inject tofurkey with tryptophan?) to see you though the Blackness of Friday. And if you enjoy shopping I hope you shopped till you dropped yet stayed within your budget if not your waistline. I hope you are not so concerned about the things that should+must concern us (the unraveling+dismantling of LAUSD and privatization of public education in L.A., war, disease, crime, drugs, nuclear/biologic/chemical madness, RIFs, DCFS, PSC, gathering-of-signatures-for-ballot-petitions, 'Value Added" and the economy) -- that you missed the other things that truly matter.
The season entered+ahead is about many things, sacred and profane; secular and religious. Hope and Love and Peace; Giving and Receiving; consumption and retail; the Child in the Manger, the Miracle of the Lights, the fantastic fat man in the red suit, the community of man+womankind. It is about Family and Friends and Children - and for these things I am truly thankful
Bless us, every one. And ¡EverOnward/SiempreAdelante! - smf
AUDIT BOND USE: "Something is rotten in facilities" +●●¢
Daily Breeze Editorial | http://bit.ly/f7GYHV
24 November 2010 - Something is rotten in facilities. With apologies to William Shakespeare, it's the perfect way to sum up the concerns about the LAUSD department charged with spending more than $20 billion of our tax dollars to build new schools and upgrade the old ones.
And it's time that the Inspector General's Office stepped in to undertake an official audit to either confirm those suspicions, or to put them to rest before the Los Angeles Unified School District starts ramping up to spend the next bond.
There's evidence enough that contracts in the massive building department have been mishandled, both historically and currently. But whether it's a deep systemic problem or simply a few bad apples in a crate of good ones is not clear.
Last week, the school district canceled the second contract to a subcontractor in two weeks because of concerns over how the contract was awarded. In this case, the contract, for a former LAUSD executive, was for $90,000 over two months to work on a detailed plan for the district's next round of school construction funded by the $7 billion bond voters approved in 2008. The contract amount wasn't at issue. Superintendent Ramon Cortines canceled it because the district has banned subcontractors.
The week before, Cortines cancelled another contract for the same reason, this one for $3.7 million to Consilia LLC, owned by four longtime, high-paid LAUSD consultants. This contract was uncovered by the district's Inspector General, even though facilities officials tried to hide it by attaching it to another project that did allow subcontractors. The Inspector General's Office found the contract in a review of construction department charges, which were millions of dollars more than had been authorized.
These two contracts may be small potatoes in a $20 billion construction spree, and it may even be that these contracts were vital to the next phase of building. But the cavalier manner in which they were handled suggest that irregularities continue in a department that has had problems since day one. More recently, a former facilities chief was indicted on charges that he used his district position to benefit himself financially between 2002 and 2006.
This is not to say that LAUSD should not hire contractors for facilities work. The last thing the school district needs is to increase its public employee payroll for a specialty department that ramps up and down as bond money and need allows. But considering the sheer amount of taxpayer money spent, the contracting process must be beyond suspicion. Otherwise, the operations of this crucial department will become a political football.
If for no other reason than to reassure taxpayers that their money is being spent as wisely as possible, LAUSD officials must launch a full audit of the facilities department before the next bond is spent. The public, which entrusted $20 billion of its hard-earned money to this project, deserves nothing less.
●●smf's 2¢: As a member of the LAUSD Bond Oversight Committee I wish to second the motion and call for the vote.
Some of the details and understanding of the current situation in the Facilities Services Division by the DB editorial board is sketchy and incomplete – but the audit that is needed would be made by the Inspector General …not the editorial board!
The LAUSD Inspector General reports directly to the Board of Education and serves at their pleasure (they forced the previous IG out, and the one before that) …and the current board may be part of the problem – so a whole lot of caveat emptor needs to be exercised by the public.
However – the LAUSD IG is also called upon under state law to report to the legislature on the spending of state school construction bond monies – and it is here that the IG may be able to function independently.
LAUSD CANCELS ANOTHER CONTRACT: Deal would have paid $90,000 for 66 days of work +●●¢
By Connie Llanos, Staff Writer | LA Daily News | http://bit.ly/awgYah
●●NOTE: This story was a last minute addition to the "Highlights+Lowlights" of last week. As it is a smoking gun pointing to ongoing District shenanigans it has risen in importance to a required reading assignment ...I wouldn't want anyone to miss it!
11/21/2010 - Amid increasing scrutiny over the use of subcontractors in Los Angeles Unified's $20billion building program, district officials have canceled a second contract in as many weeks over concerns about how it was awarded.
The contract would have paid a former LAUSD executive $90,000 over 66 days to provide a state-required description of what educational features and services will be provided by the district's next round of school construction, funded through voter-approved bonds under 2008's Measure Q.
While the contract amount is relatively small, some district officials say the crackdown on questionable contracts sends a strong message against influence peddling and wasteful spending in challenging financial times.
But other observers with a long history in LAUSD's decade-old building program said too much nit-picking could jeopardize the massive construction program by ridding it of its most capable people.
The latest contract to be canceled had been awarded to Kathi Littmann, a former executive in LAUSD's Facilities Department, which runs the building program.
The contract was awarded without a competitive bidding process. Because of inconsistencies with district policy in awarding work orders, Littmann's contract had to be reissued at least twice over the last four weeks to try to bring it in alignment with policy, according to district documents obtained by the Daily News.
The "lump sum" task order - which is a less descriptive work order reserved for smaller projects - was reissued once because Littmann was hired as a subcontractor, despite a district ban on subcontractors for that contract.
A third attempt to get the contract approved - using a different company name and making Littmann a direct contractor - was stopped last week by LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines.
"They tried to end run me ... but I'm not going to hire someone knowingly when we are laying people off," Cortines said. "I have made it very clear that when we hire consultants it will be because they have a specialty, but there was no justification here ... I know this individual and I like her, but I don't know what her specialty is here."
Contract confusion
Littmann, who worked for the district on three occasions over the last 11 years, said she submitted a proposal to the district to perform work only after being requested to do so by the district.
Littmann said she was not aware of the various attempts that were made to get her contract approved, adding she was upset to have her name linked to a mishandled contract.
"They (LAUSD facilities staff) jumped through hoops to convince me that they'd crossed their T's and dotted their I's ... otherwise I wouldn't have engaged," she said.
The sloppy handling of her contract made Littmann wonder if the district's construction program was falling into the chaotic state it was in during the late 1990s.
Also last week, Cortines canceled another contract after similar irregularities were disclosed in a report by the district's watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General.
Prompted by whistle-blowers in LAUSD's construction program, the inspector general's investigation focused on a pool of $65 million in building contracts. It found that the Facilities Department had increased its $65 million authorization by $31 million without school board approval; failed to slash total costs of new contracts by 20 percent as promised; and hired subcontractors to do work even though the use of subcontractors had been banned.
The report paid special attention to a $3.7 million lump sum task order for Consilia LLC, a company owned by four longtime district construction consultants.
That contract was supposed to pay for construction planning for Measure Q. Littmann's would have been a complementary contract, joining the description of classroom needs and goals to the long-term plans for the bricks and mortar construction.
Cortines canceled the Consilia contract because it listed the company as a subcontractor, which violated district policy.
Littmann's contract was not mentioned specifically in the inspector general's report, but it was part of the $65 million in contracts the report focused on.
James Sohn, LAUSD's chief facilities executive, said he was not aware of the various attempts to issue Littmann's contract. But Sohn said he did ask for the contract to be placed on hold to allow for further review and input from the board of education.
"Since then we've decided to not move forward with the contract," he said Friday, noting the contract had become "too much trouble."
"This is one out of hundreds of contracts ... we spend $120 to $150 million a month," Sohn added. "I am not undervaluing the fact that it is a lot of money, but in the context of what we do, it's a small percentage."
Subcontractor issues
A former middle school teacher and former head of LAUSD's new construction, Littmann helped create the educational descriptions that have been used by the district to fulfill state requirements for most of its new construction program.
Construction for Measure Q is not expected to start until about 2016, due to delays in accessing the money caused by the economic downturn.
Littmann said she encouraged the use of subcontractors in the early part of the decade to boost competition and curb nepotism.
"The reason we set up a system of subcontractors was to allow small firms to get a piece of the pie," she said. "When someone says they want to remove the middleman, it's usually because they want to move money somewhere else."
Connie Rice, a prominent civil rights lawyer and longtime member of LAUSD's bond oversight committee, said she was also concerned that in a rush to eliminate all consultants, the district was losing some of its best talent.
"We have dismantled the A-team that helped build all of these schools," Rice said in an interview last week. "What happens to Measure Q? We see the money wasted ... because there is no one left that knows how to spend it."
Rice also said that she was concerned to see more decisions in facilities driven by board members.
"We had to create a completely independent separate structure for facilities to get their work done," Rice said. "We had to get away from incompetence of the district. ... Could you imagine if the district had been handling the bond money?"
"They couldn't even get their people paid right," she said, referring to a payroll problem that plagued the district for about a year.
LAUSD board member Steve Zimmer though, disputed those claims.
"In questioning these processes, I am not trying to control the bond money. I'm trying to ensure a modicum of transparency, legality and validity," Zimmer said.
Zimmer also said that labor agreements had been reached with district employee unions, who accepted furloughs and pay cuts to help the district cinch its budget deficits over the last two years. Zimmer said those agreements assured labor groups that consultants would be let go before district employees were laid off.
But he added that in these latest cases, the concerns had been more with the way the consultant contracts were handled than the hiring of the consultants.
Cortines, too, denied that the latest irregularities are indicative of deeper problems within the district's construction division.
"I think we are finally getting to the bottom of some of these issues," Cortines said. "People need to know that it can't be business as usual."
●●smf's 2¢: I'm sorry, but the superintendent seems to be assigning responsibility/blame for "the latest irregularities" to previous regimes.
These are new screw-ups - screwed-up in the past couple of months - on Cortines' watch. Good people - who know what they're doing - are being blamed for others incompetence. Or misfeasance. Or malfeasance.
It is the current leadership - or, to be frank, the lack of leadership from the 24th floor of 333 Beaudry - that has led to current misbehavior in the Facilities Services Division/Contracts Office. Expedience and compliance is getting in the way of doing the right thing. Bad decisions are being validated - and the fingerprints of political meddling are obscuring+undoing the good work done previously.
In a few months time the most effective and respected Public Works program in the nation has returned to its sad old self of a decade ago. We are back to the corner-cutting and internal incompetence that led to The Belmont Learning Complex/"Hazmat High" fiasco.
The IG's report (link follows) identifies quite clearly where the error lies.
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J.'s DECISION TO DROP D GRADE GETTING AN A SO FAR + NJ SCHOOL DISTRICT: NO D-GRADES POLICY WORKING
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J.'s DECISION TO DROP D GRADE GETTING AN A SO FAR
By VANESSA VERA ROMAN • STAFF WRITER • Morris County NJ Daily Record | http://bit.ly/fFo7i3
November 28, 2010 - MOUNT OLIVE — The number of failing grades for Mount Olive middle and high school students dropped 42.5 percent in the first quarter of the school year, Superintendent Larrie Reynolds announced this week, trumpeting the data as proof that a new grading policy is working.
This fall, the district eliminated the D grade, raising the failing grade to anything below a 70. Reynolds said the policy, intended to challenge students to work harder, is pushing students to do just that. In addition to fewer failing grades, he also said more students earned As and Bs, although he did not have that specific data available yet.
"The elimination of the D, and raising the standard, generally improved student performance across the board," Reynolds said.
As part of the policy, hundreds of students were able to retake exams and redo assignments following an initial failing grade, bringing their scores up, and prompting a school board member and Mount Olive educator to question what the data really shows.
Steven Spangler, president of the district's teachers union, and school board member Sheryl Licciardi-Colligan said it's too early to declare the policy a success, based on one marking period. At least a year's worth of information is needed to analyze the new policy, Spangler said.
"There's far too little data in to determine whether this is a good policy or a bad policy," Spangler said.
Licciardi-Colligan, also a French teacher at Dover High School, said while she's encouraged by the student data, she's reluctant to judge a policy based on just the first marking period.
"The first marking period isn't necessarily a strong indicator of how the kids will do by year's end, but I'm very encouraged by the results that Dr. Reynolds shared," Licciardi-Colligan said.
At the high school, the total number of grades below a 70 in all four grades fell from 1,024 last year, to 618 this year. At the middle school, the largest improvement was reported in the seventh grade, where failing grades dropped more than 60 percent, from 123 failures last year, to 49 this year.
Students who receive a 69 or lower on an assignment or test are being given extra chances to bring up their score before the end of a marking period. Students are offered peer tutoring and the opportunity to redo the assignment or retake the test. In addition, parents are notified of the failing grades via e-mail.
That so many students retook tests and did assignments over "dramatically changed the landscape" of student performance, Reynolds said. "If they didn't understand the first time, they'd have a second chance. The best they could get the second chance was a 70," he said.
Because many students did retake exams to improve their scores, the two educators questioned whether this was a valid way to measure the policy's success.
If you want to really gauge student performance and improvement, Spangler said, retaken test scores don't prove much.
"If we're actually looking for improvement in the students, that would actually be reflected in the first test, rather than the makeup test," Spangler said.
Licciardi-Colligan, who voted against the policy last summer, said if a retake of a new exam suggests increased proficiency, it's a good thing. "If the retake is the function of a duplicate test, it has no purpose."
Next month, middle and high school students who still failed after additional tutoring and retake opportunities will be able to enroll in an after-school tutoring program. At a cost of $150 per class, the nine-week, 30-hour Sunset Academy, will give students a chance to replace a failing grade in English or math with a grade no less than an 80. Any students who qualify for the federal free- and reduced lunch program will have the fee waived.
_______________________________________________
NJ SCHOOL DISTRICT: NO D-GRADES POLICY WORKING
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS • http://bit.ly/gtN69a
November 28, 2010 *MOUNT OLIVE TOWNSHIP — A New Jersey school district that eliminated the "D'' grade for students says the change has been a success.
The new policy in Mount Olive, which took effect in September, raised the failure score to anything under a 70.
Superintendent Larrie Reynolds says the number of failing grades for district middle and high school students dropped 42.5 percent in the first quarter. And more students earned A's and B's.
Reynolds had proposed the policy last summer, saying he was tired of kids getting credit for not learning.
But some school officials and teachers say it's too early to declare the policy a success, since its only been in effect for one marking period.
They note the new policy allowed hundreds of students to retake exams and redo assignments following initial failing grades, often bringing up their scores and grades.
NO MORE A's FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR
By PEG TYRE | New York Times | http://nyti.ms/gGzoaG
November 27, 2010 -- A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
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Roderick Mills
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
Some of the discrepancy between grades and test scores could be explained by test anxiety — that some students have trouble showing what they know in a standardized, timed environment. And some teachers simply may have done a poor job teaching what the standardized exam tested. But Austin’s school superintendent, David Krenz, and the principal at Ellis, Katie Berglund, said the disconnect between semester grades and end-of-the-year exams was too large and persistent to be the result of such factors.
“Over time, we began to realize that many teachers had been grading kids for compliance — not for mastering the course material,” Ms. Berglund said. “A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.”
Last fall, over protests from parents of some of the above-average students, the eighth-grade math teachers at Ellis tried a new, standards-based grading system, and this fall the new system is being used by the entire middle school and in high school for ninth graders.
As test scores fast become the single and most powerful measurement by which educational outcomes are being judged, more schools might find themselves engaged in what has become a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?
For Sandra Doebert, a superintendent who oversees a high school with 1,500 school students in Lemont, Ill., a middle-class suburb southwest of Chicago, the answer is clear. “In this age of data and with so much information available to us we can no longer confuse how students act with what they know.” She, too, is revamping the grading policy so that grades reflect subject mastery, not compliance.
At the urging of President Obama, more high schools are making “college readiness” a goal. The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared. Federal data shows that fewer than 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges in six years. Among students at a community college, only one in three earns a degree. Recently released data from ACT shows that only 24 percent of high school seniors knew enough in four subjects — math, reading, science and English — to do college-level work.
There are no national statistics about the number of schools shifting to standards-based grading. But the idea has been around for a while, and Ken O’Connor, a former Canadian high school teacher turned grading consultant, said that more schools have been adopting the approach. It’s an inevitable extension, he says, of standards-based learning.
“Schools are finally realizing if you don’t have standards-based grading you really do not have a standards-based education,” said Mr. O’Connor, author of “A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades.” “We are focused not on exposure to content and activities for their own sake but on outputs” — what students can show they’ve learned.
When parents of students at Ellis Middle School look over their children’s report cards, they will find a so-called “knowledge grade,” which will be calculated by averaging the scores on end-of-unit tests. (Those tests can be retaken any time during the semester so long as a student has completed all homework; remedial classes that re-teach skills will be offered all year.) Homework is now considered practice for tests. Assignments that are half done, handed in late or missing all together will be noted, but will not hurt a student’s grade. Nor will showing up late for class, forgetting to bring your pencil, failing to raise your hand before shouting out an answer or forgetting to bring in a permission slip for the class trip — infractions that had previously caused Ellis students’ grades to suffer.
(In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship. )
Some parents welcome the change. Nitaya Jandragholica says her son Clyde, an eighth grader at Ellis, finds the new grading plan more equitable. “He saw that teachers had favorites. Kids — even ones that were not that smart — could get good grades if the teacher likes them,” Ms. Jandragholica says. The principal, Ms. Berglund, says that some students’ grades have gone up and some have gone down but that she’s confident — and has the data to prove it — that their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, “not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom,” a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past.
After a high-performing public school district in Potsdam, N.Y., began changing its grading formula, 175 parents and community members — many of them professors from local universities — signed a petition in protest. Carolyn Stone, an adjunct professor of literacy at SUNY Potsdam and a mother of a Potsdam high school freshman, was one of the protesters. She says the new policy, which makes daily homework, even when it is handed in late, account for only 10 percent of the grade, encourages laziness. “Does the old system reward compliance? Yes,” she said. “Do those who fit in the box of school do better? Yes. But to revamp the policy in a way that could be of detriment to the kids who do well is not the answer.” In the real world, she points out, attitude counts.
But Mr. Krenz, the superintendent in Austin, Minn., said that parents — as well as kids — would be the winners. Conversations between parents and teachers can now focus on what students need to learn, rather than classroom attitude or missing homework. “Before we started this, a teacher could complain to a parent that their child slumps in the back of the classroom and doesn’t bring a pencil,” he said. “Now the conversation is about the fact that the child doesn’t know how to calculate slope, and we can put our heads together — parents and teachers and administrator — to figure out how to help that child obtain that skill.”
The superintendent in Potsdam, Patrick Brady, who has been rolling out a revamped grading system this fall in his 1,450-student district, said it would allow teachers to recognize academic strengths where they often are not discovered — among minority students, or students from poorer families, or boys — subgroups whose members may be unable or unwilling to fit in easily to the culture of school.
“We are getting rid of grade fog,” Mr. Brady said. “We need to stop overlooking kids who can do the work and falsely inflate grades of kids who can’t but who look good. We think this will be good for everyone.”
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest of the Stories from Other Sources
If you only read one story about the California education budget and Prop 98, read this one - its only hidden down here in the pantry with the cupcakes because it's a little long ....and a little scary for the children:
JOHN MOCKLER ON PROP 98’s RELEVANCE: Initiative's father looks back & bleakly ahead: By John Fensterwald - Educa... http://bit.ly/gBcyzg
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IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL CHOICE + TROUBLE WITH VOUCHERS + smf's 2¢: IT'S TIME FOR SCHOOL CHOICE By Terry Paulson | ... http://bit.ly/gyAUIQ
CARTOON: by smf for 4LAKids with apologies to Picasso y Cervantes http://bit.ly/gIgQ6c
Editorial: AUDIT BOND USE - "Something is rotten in facilities" + ●●smf's 2¢: Daily Breeze Editorial | http://bi... http://bit.ly/h5PRHs
L.A. FILIPINO-AMERICAN SCHOOL TO RECEIVE NATIONAL BLUE RIBBON AWARD: Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Commun... http://bit.ly/e88lDU
Big Man on Campus: VALLEY SCHOOL NAMED AFTER ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: By Connie Llanos, Staff Writer | L.A. Daily ... http://bit.ly/eQluUQ
EDUCATION BRIEFS: Gardena schools develop math strategies, Palos Verdes High adopts Murchison ES, Two Carson cha... http://bit.ly/d6QWGP
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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