In This Issue:
 |
| • |
L.A. UNIFIED BEGINS SEARCH FOR NEXT LONG-TERM SUPERINTENDENT |
|
| • |
First new meeting of the new LAUSD Board of Ed: PLENTY OF COMPLAINING/PLENTY TO COMPLAIN ABOUT |
|
| • |
A LOOK AT LATINO CHARTER SCHOOL STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA |
|
| • |
E. L. DOCTOROW ON WRITING A NOTE TO THE TEACHER |
|
| • |
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but
not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources |
|
| • |
EVENTS: Coming up next week... |
|
| • |
What can YOU do? |
|
Featured Links:
|
|
|
|
The Times headline says it all: L.A. UNIFIED BEGINS SEARCH FOR NEXT LONG-TERM SUPERINTENDENT.
LAUSD hasn’t had a ‘long-term-superintendent’ since Roy Romer; when Roy
left he had been supe six years and was the longest-serving
superintendent in L.A. County. …and he wasn’t done with the work he set
out to do. Romer was forced out by politics – he had led the block on
the unconstitutional District takeover of LAUSD by Mayor Tony – but Tony
would win the extraconstitutional takeover and Roy could read the
handwriting on that wall.
The next superintendents were short term:
• David Brewer – who ultimately was fodder for Villaraigosa’s nascent political machine;
• The ‘second coming’ of Ray Cortines, direct from the mayor’s office
but quickly in Tony’s disfavor (In Ray’s defense, he had done battle
with Mayor Giuliani in NYC – Tony must’ve seemed an unworthy adversary!)
• If Ray had been the Superintendent-in-Waiting from City Hall, John
Deasy was the anointed Superintendent-in-Waiting from the Gates
Foundation by Way of The Broad Academy. His term was not short enough.
[●●4LAKids Quote o’ th’ Week – by the superbly pseudonymous online
commenter Edward Groovy in the L.A. Times: “J(ohn) D(easy) could not
have led a pack of cats if he was wearing a tunafish suit”.]
• …Cortines ‘third coming’ has been totally occupied with cleaning up the mess Deasy left behind.
Cortines v 3.0 made it clear from the outset he is not the “interim
superintendent”; the budgetary/fiscal/educational/ethical/legal quagmire
he continues to address is too great for provisional leadership. But at
the same time he made it clear to anyone who was listening that his
tenure would+should be limited.
When I asked last October if there was anything I could do to help him he asked that the succession be urgently addressed.
Giving the prior and current Board of Ed a slight benefit-of-doubt:
‘Urgency’ is perceived to be the problem of the prior regime. That… and
Hubris, Ethical Deficit Disorder and Sociopathy.
In the Board’s favor: They are in a unique position in that they have
two serving board members who were themselves superintendents; Drs
McKenna & Vladovic. They have witnessed firsthand how superintendent
searches work.
I am tickled that Sarah Angel of the California Charter Schools
Association says: "We want a superintendent who won't let politics
drive decisions and policy.” Someone has to believe in unicorns; it’s
charming that it’s an angel.
Doing the right thing is preferable doing nothing at all. Eventually is better than never.
THESE DAYS:
“Well I'll keep on moving, moving on
Things are bound to be improving these days, one of these days
These days I sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don't confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them”
smf: This is a strained musical segue in search of a destination I have been avoiding.
Jackson Browne is 15 months younger than I; he was a kid hanging out at
the Troubadour in West Hollywood when I was an 18 year old attempted
adult. He had obvious talent; I was hanging out. He had two really good
original songs in his repertoire at that time when he played on
Monday/Talent Nights – “These Days” was one of them. Counting time in
quarter tones and unforgotten failure calls to me over all those years
…but what could a sixteen-year-old possibly know of failure?
Talent night at the Troubadour in ’65-‘67 was about talent: There was
Linda Ronstadt and guys who would be Eagles and Buffalo Springfield and
Poco – and the Dillards were the house band Steve Martin was the MC. Jim
Morrison was drunk in the bar and that tall skinny guy with Peter Asher
was James Taylor …but we didn’t know it yet. Arlo Guthrie came one
Monday night and played eighteen-an-a-half minutes of “Alice’s
Restaurant” and walked out. That was the scene.
This blog is rarely about me. It’s about what I publicly think and
think-about – and what I see+hear while paying attention in my strange
insider/outsider role in LAUSD and public education. I’m a writer and
we are most dangerous when we are listening, less so when we are writing
and safest when we are saying something. I am essentially a private
person who writes carefully and tries to make it seem spontaneous.[See
Doctorow, following] When I say this blog isn’t about me it’s
balderdash of course; when one writes about oneself and refers to
oneself as oneself it is totally about one!
I have pushed aside the curtain because I’m in a bit of bother.
A year ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, one-in-every-two-men/pretty mundane. Get a check-up.
Ever the overachiever mine was pretty advanced+aggressive. I met many
doctors who put on purple gloves and got far friendlier than I ever
wanted/expected. I had lived a life on the straight+narrow, consciously
eluding jail just to avoid this particular level of unwanted
familiarity!
My Brave Fight Against Cancer has been at the most inconvenient. For
eight weeks I got irradiated by giant machines that evoke Richard
Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” http://bit.ly/1KIDrXc.
Every day we cancer patients would gather at the crack-of-early in an
atrium at Kaiser and exchange pleasantries, waiting to be
called+irradiated. There was even a LAUSD contingent - “I know you!” -
who gathered and compared notes. Solzhenitsyn and “Cancer Ward” it was
not! Sometimes I felt a little tired, but it was nothing sleep couldn’t
fix.
Unfortunately that didn’t work as well as we (the first person plural of
“one” that includes an entourage of medical professionals) and my
cancer metastasized (a word oncologists avoid until one says it oneself)
spreading to my bones.
The treatment for this is chemotherapy and I have begun that regime.
They pump poison into your bloodstream to kill anything that might be
growing too fast. Dissent and Cancer are all the same to Docetaxel.
“How bad could it be?” one asks hypothetically. (“Your hair will grow
back” I am assured, even though I haven’t lost any yet.) The
hypothetical answer is “pretty bad” – sometimes I feel like I was run
over by a truck on the day after I was run over by a truck. I move like
a little old man and sometimes sitting still hurts almost as much as
getting up and moving around. If you’ve ever cracked a rib it’s like
that; coughing and sneezing and laughing really hurts and I used to
enjoy that last one a lot.
I really wish Mayor Eric would hurry up and fix all these potholes Mayor Tony left behind!
I write this not because I want your sympathy or prayers - but to say
I’m going to be fine even if move slow or I look like hell or wince at
the funny jokes. The idea of folks squeezing my arm and sincerely asking
“How you doin’?” seems abominable to me. Don’t worry about me; worry
with me about all these kids who need worrying about.
Don’t confront me; I haven’t forgotten.
VIOLENCE AS AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE: When you can’t sleep and the endless
cycle of FoxNews/CNN/MS-NBC is so much angry teasing for the next
segment’s repeated revelation, the plummy-modulated BBC becomes your
friend. Somewhere between the news of impending invasion of refuges via
the Chunnel and the cricket scores I picked up a story that essentially
said like the great infectious diseases throughout human history,
violence can be understood and treated better scientifically as an
epidemic disease, and the result must be a new strategy.
The Cure Violence Health Model uses the same three components that are used to reverse epidemic disease outbreaks.
1) Interrupting transmission of the disease.
2) Reducing the risk of the highest risk.
3) Changing community norms.
I like this thinking and I invite you to follow up with me on it: http://bit.ly/1ICJcX6
WHICH GOT ME THINKING of those earnest young people who disrupted the
LAUSD Board Meeting Thursday evening. [First new meeting of the new
LAUSD Board of Ed: PLENTY OF COMPLAINING/PLENTY TO COMPLAIN ABOUT | http://bit.ly/1KG0X7t]
First: in my misspent youth, student protests may have been facilitated
by teachers who left the mimeograph machine unlocked – but they were not
coordinated or organized by them …or by Community Organizers from named
groups with acronyms. And, I suspect, a salary+a budget.
The protesters Thursday had matching t-shirts+bullet-proof-vests and a
point …and they made it: Why does LAUSD School Police need 51 M-16
rifles obtained for free under the federal 1033 program?
Had the protesters+organizers really been paying attention rather than
chanting their rehearsed chants there might have been an opening for
future dialog …but disruption was the goal and the outcome.
Dr. McKenna addressed their demands and answered their questions. He
would rather have the tools he might need and never need them – than
need the tools and not have them. The bad guys, he pointed out, have
more+better guns than the school police. They have AK-47s and I daresay
more than 51 0f them.
And he reminded us all: “I have held dying children, shot by each other.”
The hashtag #100Days100Nights threat may be a Twitter/Instagram hoax [http://thebea.st/1OW2WG7], but it rings a little too true in communities where children sleep in the floor because it’s safer down there.
And LA School Reports commentary on the same board meeting makes a great
point as the District scrambles to find “convenient” meeting times:
“School board meetings, by their nature, are inconvenient. Whether they
are scheduled at 1 pm, 4 pm or 6 pm, they disadvantage large numbers of
people whose jobs and family responsibilities deny them the ability to
attend.
“That’s why televising and live-streaming them makes so much sense.
“It educates. It allows for participation, It builds trust. It provides transparency.”
¡Onward/Adelante! - smf
L.A. UNIFIED BEGINS SEARCH FOR NEXT LONG-TERM SUPERINTENDENT
SELECTING A NEW LEADER FOR THE NATION'S
SECOND-LARGEST SCHOOL SYSTEM IS A HIGH-STAKES DECISION FOR A POLITICALLY
DIVIDED L.A. BOARD OF EDUCATION.
By Zahira Torres | L.A. Times | http://lat.ms/1fTmgHQ
1Aug2015 4AM :: The next superintendent will have to take charge of a
system that has long struggled to find a unified vision to focus on
improving student achievement and teacher performance, and developing a
palatable plan for adapting to more technology-focused classrooms.
Nine months after Los Angeles Supt. John Deasy resigned under pressure,
the school board is beginning its search to find his long-term
replacement.
After meeting late into the evening Thursday behind closed doors, the
seven-member board directed staff to seek out companies qualified to
conduct the search. Selecting a firm to help identify potential
candidates could take until mid-September, board President Steve Zimmer
said.
A timeline has not been set for the lengthy search process, which
includes crafting the selection criteria for the new superintendent and
gathering public input. But under a scenario posed by Zimmer, the Los
Angeles Unified School District's next long-term superintendent would
not start until the 2016-17 school year.
That schedule raises questions about the staying power of current Supt.
Ramon Cortines, who came out of retirement in October to take the reins
after Deasy stepped down. The 83-year-old Cortines agreed to a contract
that runs through June 2016, but has said he'd prefer to leave by the
end of this year.
The school board has largely relied on Cortines to quietly guide the
district as it decides how to move forward after Deasy's high-profile
tenure.
The board said it was waiting for newly elected members to take office
before beginning the months-long search process. Zimmer said the delay
was also part of an effort to get the district back on track.
"We had to approach this from a sense of stability," Zimmer said.
Cortines helped the district mend a malfunctioning online student
records system, balance the budget and work out a contract agreement
with teachers that avoided a threatened strike, Zimmer said.
Board members must rally several political factions and find common
ground in selecting a leader who is not only a capable administrator but
whose ideology reflects their goals for the district.
Zimmer said differences among board members will not hinder the search
because they agree on the broader issues of providing an equitable
education and improving teacher performance, even if some disagree on
the approaches to reach those goals.
"Some of the ways that we might address a particular issue around a
labor contract or how we might approach a particular initiative around
teacher accountability may be different," Zimmer said. "But there is no
daylight between us in terms of the overall mission, and when you have a
decision and a process that has the weight of the superintendent
search, the individual conflicts and approaches will be overwhelmed by
the task before us."
cComments
Deasy had the backing of some school board members and wealthy donors
who wanted to overhaul public education through a set of priorities that
included supporting the growth of charter schools and using test scores
as a factor in teacher evaluations.
United Teachers Los Angeles, which contributed to the election campaigns
of some board members, led the charge against Deasy's leadership style.
The union sought a different set of changes, including smaller class
sizes and better teacher training.
"We do not want another person cut from the same cloth as John Deasy,"
UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said. "The next superintendent has to
be collaborative and connected."
Deasy's resignation last year followed a series of missteps including a
failed $1.3-billion effort to provide iPads to all students that became
the target of an FBI investigation, the troubled rollout of a new
records system that put students at risk of not graduating on time and
frequent conflicts with school board members and the teachers union.
Cortines managed to work with ideologically different sides to find
compromise, said Sarah Angel, a managing director with the California
Charter Schools Assn. The group expects the same type of leadership from
the district's next superintendent.
"We want a superintendent who won't let politics drive decisions and
policy," Angel said. "We want a superintendent who will help create more
high-quality options for families. We want a superintendent who
believes that families have the right to choose the best learning
environment for their children."
Board member Richard Vladovic said the board feels a sense of urgency
but wants to conduct an extensive search that's transparent and gives a
say to parents, teachers and others who have been clamoring for a chance
to help select the next leader.
But Vladovic said the board also has to do some soul searching of its own.
"We need to know where we're steering the ship, have a destination in
mind, before we hire a captain to get us there," Vladovic said.
First new meeting of the new LAUSD Board of Ed:
PLENTY OF COMPLAINING/PLENTY TO COMPLAIN ABOUT
from LA School Report
▲LAUSD BOARD MEETING LOST IN TRANSPARENCY
by Michael Janofsky, Editor, LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1MXYaq8
Posted on July 31, 2015 10:33 am :: For more than a year, students,
parents, community groups and even LA Unified members, themselves, have
demanded greater transparency in how the board conducts the business of
the nation’s second-largest school district.
Too often, critics say, the board moves with no apparent effort to
broaden the conversation or even allow the public to watch the process
unfold, let alone participate.
And now it’s happened again.
Maybe it’s only a small example, but it’s a perfect metaphor that
illustrates the sometimes cavalier approach the school board takes to
informing the public, thus strengthening community participation, input
and trust.
“School board meetings, by their nature, are inconvenient. Whether they
are scheduled at 1 pm, 4 pm or 6 pm, they disadvantage large numbers of
people whose jobs and family responsibilities deny them the ability to
attend.”
The LAUSD board had a meeting last night — an open session, followed by a
closed session. The agenda went up early in the week, along with the
reminder that the open session would be televised on KLCS and
live-streamed over the internet. Closed sessions remain private.
But when 6 pm came, time to start, screens stayed blank.
No video. No audio. Nothing.
A parent, a student, a community member who might have wanted to see
what the members were up to were shut out. And so they missed an update
on the federal government’s efforts to reauthorize No Child Left Behind.
They missed a flurry of committee assignments.
And they missed seeing a vivid example of democracy in action, a real,
live event of students protesting a federal program that has delivered
military-grade weapons to school districts across the country, including
LA Unified.
OK, so maybe these weren’t Man-Bites-Dog moments. But they were part of a
public agency’s work with publicly-elected officials in charge. That
means taxpayers have the right to see what’s up, but they got to see
nothing.
What happened? It’s not entirely clear, but it was hardly an anomaly.
Sometimes when the open part of a meeting is pre-judged to be too short
to turn on cameras and microphones, the people in charge of these things
decide not to turn them on. Saves money.
Last night, a decision was made to skip the video but provide audio.
Then word came from a district official, “The TV crew failed to throw
the switch to broadcast the audio.”
And so, we got blanks. And silence.
School board meetings, by their nature, are inconvenient. Whether they
are scheduled at 1 pm, 4 pm or 6 pm, they disadvantage large numbers of
people whose jobs and family responsibilities deny them the ability to
attend.
That’s why televising and live-streaming them makes so much sense. It
educates. It allows for participation, It builds trust. It provides
transparency.
The opposite of all that happened yesterday.
__________
▲STUDENTS FACE LAUSD BOARD, DEMANDING END TO MILITARY WEAPONS
by Mike Szymanski | LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1VRHzum
Posted on July 31, 2015 9:24 am :: The LA Unified board endured a
long and unusual protest last night as about 50 students demanded
specific actions to get military-style weapons out of the hands of
district school police.
The students, some of them wearing bullet-proof vests, chanted for 20
minutes at the start of a meeting — “Back to school, no weapons” and “We
want justice for our schools” — in protesting the federal 1033 Program,
a federal effort that provides school districts with surplus
military-grade weapons. LA Unified has been a recipient.
Board president Steve Zimmer let the chanting continue and at one point said, “Let them go on.”
The demonstration inside the board meeting followed two hours of
drumming and shouting outside LA Unified headquarters, with students
holding signs bearing the face of President Obama and Superintendent
Ramon Cortines.
Manuel Criollo, a protest organizer from the Labor Community Strategy
Center, told the board that he wanted an end to the program, which had
given the district a tank, three grenade launchers and dozens of M-16s.
The district returned the tank and grenade launchers last fall, but has
kept the M-16s. In a June letter the Criollo’s group, Cortines said the
district had ended its involvement with the program.
Brillo called for the board to be more public about the weapons and demanded that they be returned.
“It’s ironic that we have surplus weapons but we do not have surplus books,” he said.
Inside, the crowd called out to the only black school member, George
McKenna, and he responded by recalling his own experiences with civil
unrest while defending the need for school police to be prepared for any
occasion in which student safety is at risk.
“First of all, in 50 years of going to schools from Inglewood to
Compton, I have never seen such weapons,” McKenna told the crowd. “I
have always seen gang members with weaponry that exceeds the police. I
have held dying children shot by each other, not by police.”
He challenged, “I have not seen this school police with M-16s on school
site, and neither have you. I would hate the school police to make a 911
call because they cannot stand down to an over-armed person on campus.”
In response to the crowd’s calling for more money for books and not
weapons, he said, “If weaponry is given to us, we’re not paying for it,
we’re not taking it away from book money.”
Then, he said, “I would rather have what we don’t need than need it when we don’t have it.”
McKenna talked about teaching at Jordan High School in 1965 when the
Watts Riots broke out. “We did not have police officers,” he said. He
pointed out he was against metal detectors at schools, but then saw the
proliferation of violence and then changed his mind.
“I saw Tookie start the Crips right there in my neighborhood,” he said,
referring to the notorious gang leader Stanley (Tookie) Williams, who
was convicted for two murders and executed in 2005. “It kills me that
they may not be safe in schools, but they will not shot by police.”
Board member Mónica García also addressed the students.
“I have to tell you, you are effective,” she said. “You may not get the
‘yes’ now, but you were heard, we heard you. You are right to be
leaders.”
She pointed out that the school district has fewer suspensions and fewer expulsions than ever before.
“You have caused that to be true,” Garcia said. “You young people have
cause that to be true, and I have the pleasure of chairing the School
Safety Committee and we will take this up. We also have solution; it’s
called literacy. When kids read they chose different.”
After the meeting, Criollo said he was disappointed that Zimmer didn’t
take more of a stand. “Silence says a lot, and only one board member
spoke in public, and they seem to be supporting the arming of their
police,” he said.
Ashley Franklin, who helped organize the students, said it was a good
civics lesson, even though they may be walking away disappointed. She
held a debriefing with the students where they expressed feeling
helpless, and talked down to, or even ignored.
“You were vocal, you were more vocal than those who have to power to be vocal, and that is a good thing,” she told the students.
Then, she added, “We are a starving army, and we are out maneuvered at this time. So, let’s go get some pizza.”
A LOOK AT LATINO CHARTER SCHOOL STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA
by Natalie Gross |Latino Ed Beat Blog at the Education Writers Association | http://bit.ly/1hdkx0U
July 28, 2015 :: “The spread of charter schools throughout the East
Bay and California is often viewed as a blessing or curse, depending on
whom you ask,” a recent Contra Costa Times article begins.
But among Latinos in the area, it would appear to be the former,
according to the newspaper’s analysis of charter school demographics in
Oakland, California, where charter schools have seen their enrollment
nearly triple over the past decade.
The article in the Contra Costa Times reveals charter schools in the
state’s eighth largest city enroll a higher percentage of Latino
students than the district’s public schools: 53 percent compared to 44.
The numbers reflect the growing push by Latino families to improve their
children’s education without turning to pricey private schools, Noel
Gallo, a city councilor and former school board member, told the
newspaper.
Studies have shown that Latinos in the United States place a high value
on education, and with groups like the Walton Foundation-funded Chicanos
Por La Causa (Chicanos For The Cause) working specifically in Latino
communities to educate parents about school choice, Gallo’s assertion is
certainly plausible. The National Council of La Raza, a prominent
Latino advocacy organization, is also pro-school choice, and so is the
Florida-based Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, to
name a few.
The organizations look at school choice as a way to close the
achievement gap between Latinos and their peers, and according to
2012-13 data reported by the California Charter Schools Association, the
strategy might work. According to their “Portrait of the Movement”
report, most Latino, English-language learner and black students in
California attend charters that are among the top-performing schools in
the state.
According to the U.S. News & World Report ranking of the best
charter high schools in the nation, three of the top 10 are in
California. American Indian Public High School, ranked third, is 20
percent Latino; Pacific Collegiate School is No. 4 on the list, and 13
percent of its students are Latino. Coming in ninth with a student
population that’s 69 percent Latino is Preuss School.
The six California charter schools that are ranked among the 10 best
high schools in the state average a Latino student population of nearly
31 percent.
According to information on the California Department of Education’s
website, approximately 6 percent of the state’s public school student
population attend charter schools, which tend to reflect the
demographics of their communities. In Oakland’s case, about a quarter of
its residents are Latino.
E. L. DOCTOROW ON WRITING A NOTE TO THE TEACHER
Interviewed by George Plimpton in the Paris Review, Winter 1986 | http://bit.ly/1HfzAvW
●●smf: The author E. L. Doctorow had passed away last week at the age of
84. His novels, vibrant+alive with historical and fictional characters,
blended history and social criticism
GEORGE PLIMPTON, Interviewer:
You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was
a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or
instructions to a cook.
E. L. DOCTOROW:
What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school.
It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade.
I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch
box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence
note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.”
She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful.
So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter
Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s
my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again.
Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a
deposition.
This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a
state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my
wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.”
She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off. I had been trying
to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating
experience.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T
FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other
Sources
ELI’S COMIN’ …better hide your heart girl
http://bit.ly/1Dgw5ub
First new meeting of the new LAUSD Board of Ed: PLENTY OF COMPLAINING/PLENTY TO COMPLAIN ABOUT
http://bit.ly/1KG0X7t
LAUSD SUPERINTENDENT SEARCH FINALLY UNDERWAY
http://bit.ly/1SoL8Jj
SIR IAN McKELLAN, HAL HOLBROOK JOIN PAST+PRESENT STUDENTS IN VIDEO APPEAL FOR “TEACHER-JAILED” RAFE ESQUITH
http://bit.ly/1IrgAeP
BLOOMBERG IS NO LONGER NYC MAYOR, BUT HIS/MURDOCH/KLEIN/STUDENT FIRST’s SCHOOLS ®EFORM AGENDA THRIVES IN ALBANY
http://bit.ly/1MysieS
AGENDA FOR THURSDAY’S SPECIAL MEETING OF THE LAUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION
http://bit.ly/1ghALWI
The price of testing: HARLEM PRINCIPAL, A SUICIDE, SAID SHE FORGED 3rd GRADERS TEST ANSWERS, NYC ED. DEPT. SAYS
http://bit.ly/1ghyCKP
CHARTER SCHOOLS: Division in some communities, others begin to embrace the independent campuses
http://bit.ly/1LM75MS
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
Nothing scheduled,
*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:
Scott.Schmerelson@lausd.net • 213-241-6386
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Ref.Rodriguez@lausd.net • 213-241-5555
George.McKenna@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Monica.Ratliff@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Richard.Vladovic@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
Steve.Zimmer@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
...or your city councilperson, mayor, county supervisor, state
legislator, 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 Brown: 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 at http://registertovote.ca.gov/
• If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. THEY DO!
|
