In This Issue:
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LAUSD’s
New Supe: WHY DON’T ANGELENOS TRUST HOMEGROWN TALENT? Unfortunately, To
Make It Big In L.A., You Often Have To Go Make Your Mark Elsewhere |
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TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢ |
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NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST - WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT - SAYS L.A. TIMES IS "TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST" |
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CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS |
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HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but
not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources |
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EVENTS: Coming up next week... |
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What can YOU do? |
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Featured Links:
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The moon is full. The surf is up. The tides are king.
The weather on the right coast is frightful – triggered in part by our
own Pacific Ocean El Niño – which is thankfully delivering snowpack to
the left coast Sierra along with chaos to the Atlantic Seaboard.
…and what is a seaboard anyway?
Politics is a spectrum disorder. Its professional practitioners and the
pundits thereof (...with the extra-added-detraction of the former
governor of Alaska) are in Iowa, New Hampshire and on cable news – in
utter lunar/lunatic synchrony. Because one New York City billionaire
espousing “New York values” is never enough, Michael Bloomberg is
considering a ‘what-the-hey’, billion dollar run. The pro football
playoffs are into their penultimacy. Pearson LLC – the largest
education company and the largest book publisher in the world – failing
because of errors in management, ethics and software design – is laying
off employees and its CEO. (Needless to say, its stock is on the rise.)
The Newport-Mesa School District is paying its assistant superintendent
extra retirement benefits to not retire. Glendale Unified has
discovered that poetry encourages English language learners. Governor
Brown gave his State-of-the-State address and for once educators and
budget nerds did not
hang on his every word, hoping for a scrap. (Never mind that financial
markets from Beijing to Wall Street are tanking!) Bankruptcy and
municipal/school district ‘emergency control’ have turned out as toxic
as a cup of green tea at the Pine Bar of London’s Millennium Hotel for
kids in Michigan. The State of Illinois is contemplating ‘emergency
control’ for Chicago City Schools – the birthplace of big-city mayoral
control.
Refugees are drowning on the beaches and straining the borders in Europe
and detention centers here; Cubans are marooned in Costa Rica and Pink
Floyds’ Wall may be the musical answer to the karaoke question: “What’s
next?” And something is amiss with the LAUSD audit …or is it?
And the same folks at Caltech who took away Pluto are giving us a new Planet Nine. Somewhere. Out there.
And Glenn Frey is gone. My favorite Eagles song is Ol’ 55 – which is really a Tom Waits song.
“Well, my time went too quickly…”
¿Well, what can a poor boy do…?
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No
…or you can volunteer to help out in LAUSD’s Academic Decathlon. They
need help next Saturday on January 30th and beyond as judges, proctors,
assistants, readers and general volunteers. See: http://bit.ly/1QlfU1k
Or contact Cliff Ker
LAUSD – Academic Decathlon
c/o Beyond the Bell
333 S. Beaudry Ave, 29th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Voice (213) 241-3503
Fax (213) 241-7562
Email: cliff.ker@lausd.net
And then just keep on keepin’ on.
¡Onward/Adelante! - smf
LAUSD’s New Supe: WHY DON’T ANGELENOS TRUST HOMEGROWN
TALENT? Unfortunately, To Make It Big In L.A., You Often Have To Go
Make Your Mark Elsewhere
By Joe Mathews | Connecting California Columnist in Zócalo Public Square | http://bit.ly/1ZHuUJv
Republished as: Why Can’t Los Angeles Trust Its Own? in the Jan 22 L.A. Daily News
January 21, 2016 :: Last week, Michelle King was appointed
superintendent of L.A. Unified, California’s largest school district.
But can we really trust her to lead the Los Angeles schools? After all,
she’s from Los Angeles.
Actually, that understates how suspiciously local King is. As a child,
she attended L.A. Unified schools. Then she got degrees from UCLA and
Pepperdine (and is even now working on a doctorate at USC). She has
spent her 30-year career in the L.A. school system, as a science
teacher, principal, and top deputy to the last two superintendents.
Heck, she even sent three children to L.A. schools.
If she were any good, wouldn’t she have lived or worked someplace else?
Is that a ridiculous question? Yes, but it mirrors much of the reaction
in Los Angeles to her appointment. While politicians and interest groups
released official statements full of praise, everyone from education
professors to newspaper editorialists whispered their disappointment
that L.A. Unified had hired someone so achingly local and low profile.
One mover-and-shaker lamented to me that while there is a Michelle King
on Wikipedia, it’s the co-creator of the TV drama The Good Wife.
This is supposed to be the era when we celebrate the local—local
produce, local bookstores, local governance. But in Southern California,
we’re not so excited about locally grown leaders. It’s the dark side of
being a globally connected and welcoming place. We have for so long
been a city of stars from someplace else that we have little faith in
those boring grinds who are actually from here, painstakingly pay their
dues and then have the temerity to think they might run things.
And so King, who probably knows L.A. Unified better than any living
being, was labeled a disappointing fallback choice. Los Angeles elites
had been hoping for a star from the outside—a political figure like the
Obama cabinet member Julian Castro or a member of Congress who could
transition into schools; or some gilded creature from the
billionaire-backed reform movement; or a high-profile superintendent
from a city like Miami or St. Louis—both of which, it should be noted,
have far fewer residents than L.A. Unified has students.
Of course, Los Angeles’ contempt for its own is not new. Los Angeles’
locally grown police chief Charlie Beck, for all his progress in
crime-fighting and diversifying his force, labors under the sense that
he’s not in the same class of out-of-town predecessors. Once an internal
candidate, always an internal candidate.
And no matter who you are, making the New York Times has always been a
far bigger deal than getting written up in the Los Angeles Times—even
before our local paper was downsized by out-of-town owners. And
Hollywood has organized itself as an exclusive club that keeps regular
Angelenos at a remove; even in 2016, the entertainment industry remains
so distant from the diversity around it that it has turned the Academy
Awards, with another slate of all-white acting nominees, into a national
joke. When our movie stars do philanthropy, it’s more likely to be
directed to South Sudan than South L.A.
Los Angeles also has a nasty habit of outsourcing thorny problems: When
our big institutions get into trouble, we don’t knuckle down and fix
them ourselves. We bring in outsiders to fix them. Over the past
generation, our sheriff’s department, police department, the Dodgers,
and elements of our transportation and school district have had to be
taken over, or put under trustees. “Too much of the city has been taken
into receivership,” the author D.J. Waldie has written of L.A.
I’ve experienced L.A. self-contempt personally. When a source or friend
is introducing me to some powerful L.A. figure, I’m struck at how little
access my years of journalistic work in Southern California buy—and at
how many doors suddenly swing open when it’s mentioned that I went to
college at Harvard.
This is supposed to be the era when we celebrate the local—local
produce, local bookstores, local governance. But in Southern California,
we’re not so excited about locally grown leaders.
In this context, the reaction to King’s appointment, while frustrating,
is hardly surprising. You could argue that she’s the best prepared L.A.
Unified leader in a long time—having been a success as teacher,
principal, and administrator, most recently as a top aide to the past
two superintendents. Her expertise ranges from science education, to
instructional reform, to student discipline. And she’s hardly following
giants; the district has had eight superintendents in 20 years, many of
them outsiders, including a Navy admiral who had little idea what he was
doing.
And while elites don’t know her well—she was presumably too busy working
to write lots of op-eds and give speeches—regular people in L.A.
schools do. As the L.A. School Report site pointed out, King was far and
away the most frequently mentioned person in the district’s online
survey of what kind of new superintendent parents, staff, and teachers
would want.
This community support, however, counted as a strike against her in
editorials by the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Daily News after her
appointment. Both papers damned her credentials with faint praise (the
Times editorial called her “obviously capable” twice) and advised her to
pick fights and make enemies—the kind of tactics that backfired on her
predecessor and former boss, John Deasy. The only thing more
condescending than the editorials was a column in which the Times’ Steve
Lopez said the school board “decided on someone who has been a good,
low-profile soldier rather than a strong, independent voice, and for now
at least, I find that disappointing.”
And I find Lopez’s notion that a good local can’t be strong and independent to be maddening. And out of touch.
The reality is that, with all our diversity and strange ways of
governance (from ballot initiatives to our hundreds of regulatory
commissions), California’s institutions are getting more
complicated—making it harder for outsiders to step in. And with all of
L.A. Unified’s challenges, from its hundreds of thousands of poor
students to its big projected deficits, there may be no California
government more complicated and important.
In other school districts, local leaders or those elevated from the
ranks have succeeded. There may be no better big-city school district in
the state than Long Beach, run for the last 14 years by Chris
Steinhauser, who was both student and teacher in the schools he leads.
In San Francisco, Richard Carranza, who was the top deputy of his
predecessor, has done so well that L.A. Unified sought to recruit him
before choosing King. At San Diego Unified, Cindy Marten, a local
elementary school principal elevated to superintendent three years ago,
has made some political mistakes but also has pleasantly surprised many
with dramatic changes to culture, training, and personnel, including the
replacement of more than 70 principals and vice principals.
Of course, L.A. Unified presents a bigger challenge. Which is precisely
why a woman tough enough to negotiate the L.A. district as parent,
teacher, and administrator for 30 years stands a better chance of
succeeding than just about anyone else.
TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢
By Walt Gardner in EdWeek | http://bit.ly/1PoDFlU
January 18, 2016 7:35 AM :: The beginning of the new calendar year is a
propitious time to question whether the nation's largest school
districts can ever deliver a quality education ("Principals' Union Says
Mayor de Blasio Has Lost Focus on Students," The New York Times, Jan.
11, and "What new L.A. schools chief Michelle King needs to do now," Los
Angeles Times, Jan. 15).
The New York City and Los Angeles school systems, the largest and second
largest, respectively, are cases in point. Both have consistently
shortchanged students they are supposed to educate. I maintain that they
are ungovernable and will remain ungovernable because of their size.
I'll take each district separately.
The union representing the 6,000 members of the Council of School
Supervisors and Administrators has gone on record that it has lost
confidence in the Bill de Blasio administration. (In New York City, the
mayor is the head of public schools.) Principals in 94 of the
district's lowest-performing schools complain that they are swamped with
paperwork, meetings and micromanagement, to the point that they cannot
do what they believe is best for their students.
The district's chancellor, Carmen Farina, counters that autonomy has to
be earned. When it isn't, principals are replaced. To date, roughly one
third of principals in these underperforming schools have fallen into
that category. Adding to the problem is that the number of complaints
received by the special commissioner of investigation has reached an
all-time high of 5,566. Although graduation rates are at record levels
at 70 percent, taxpayers have not forgotten the New York Post's articles
titled the "EZ-Pass" scandal that documented grade tampering and
questionable summer-school programs ("The phoniest statistic in
education," Thomas Fordham Institute, Jan. 13).
The situation in Los Angeles is not much better. When Superintendent
John Deasy resigned in Oct. 2014, he was replaced by Ramon Cortines as
interim superintendent. Deasy's tumultuous three-and-a-half-year tenure
was characterized by a botched $1.3 billion plan to give iPads to
640,000 students in 900 schools and by his testimony in the
controversial Vergara v. State of California case. Although test scores
and graduation rates improved slightly, the LAUSD is reeling from
declining enrollment and a precarious financial status. On Jan. 11,
Michelle King was named the new superintendent after a five-month
nationwide search.
The district has long been known for heated politics and an assertive
teachers' union. The school board's members have only exacerbated
matters by failing to understand their job as elected overseers, which
is why there have been eight superintendents over the last 20 years.
Some have been outsiders and some insiders. But neither has mattered.
This time the board selected King, the consummate insider, because of
her experience as a student, teacher, high-school principal, and senior
administrator in the district.
I don't think anything significant will ever change in New York or Los
Angeles unless both school systems are broken up into smaller, more
manageable districts. Behemoths cannot fulfill their obligations to all
stakeholders, no matter who is at the helm. I'm not saying that
dismantlement will result in miracles. But I believe that smaller
school districts will be in a far better position to serve students and
parents because they are more nimble and more attuned to their
constituents.
My proposal is not original. Over the years, there have been several
such proposals, but to no avail. For example, on Oct. 7, 2014, a
petition was circulated by the California Trust for Public Schools to
break up the LAUSD, but it met with fierce resistance from vested
interests ("Break up the Los Angeles Unified School District,"
GoPetition). On Mar. 30, 2015, Education Next called for an overhaul of
the New York City school district ("New York City's Small-Schools
Revolution"). If the goal is to create a governing structure that works
for students, shuffling leaders will not do the job. Something more
fundamental needs to be done. If not now, when?
●Walt Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School
District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education.
Follow Walt Gardner on Twitter.
●●smf’s 2¢: Quoting: “My proposal is not original. Over the years, there have been several such proposals, but to no avail.”
Really??
1. Drawing on a comment from an EdWeek reader “Been There, done that!”
In 1969, New York State devolved the New York City school system into 32
self-governing school districts, each with their own community school
board - for over thirty years the decentralized system staggered, the
lowest performing districts became patronage pools for the local
electeds, scandal after scandal, the middle class districts thrived, the
"haves" prospered and the "have-nots" were ignored.
Prior to 2002, the NYC Board of Education ran the schools, supervised
the 32 sub-districts and appointed the Chancellor (Superintendent). On
June 30, 2002, Mayor Bloomberg secured authority over the schools from
the New York State legislature, which began the era of "mayoral control"
over the city schools. The mayor then changed the name of the schools
agency from the Board of Education to the Department of Education, a
mayoral agency. http://bit.ly/1UgSoDS
Mayor Bloomberg began reorganization and reform efforts. The community
school boards were abolished and the Board of Education was renamed the
Panel for Educational Policy, a twelve-member body of which seven
members are appointed by the mayor and five by Borough Presidents. [http://bit.ly/1Pt2sW2]
When asked what recourse parents had if they didn’t like the way he was
running the schools, Mayor Bloomberg infamously said: “They can ‘boo’
me at parades!”
2. The NYC Principal’s Union isn’t asking for the District to be broken
up, they are asking for an end to mayoral control. It’s not the same
difference!
3. If LAUSD were to be broken up, how do were guarantee that the results
of the 1969 NYC Schools break-up aren’t replicated on the Left Coast?
4. And how will we equitably assign the $20.6 billionin bonded indebtedness held by LAUSD to multiple school districts?
NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST - WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE
SUBJECT - SAYS L.A. TIMES IS "TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF
INTEREST"
by Karen Wolfe from PSConnectNow.org |http://bit.ly/1QahtPQ
January 18, 2016 :: A member of a Facebook group that discusses
education asked journalism ethics expert Peter Sussman about the LA
Times coverage and posted this. Shared with their permission:
I asked a journalist friend about the ethics of the L.A. Times taking
money from Eli Broad while editorializing in favor of his project.
His response:
PETER SUSSMAN: "Was I tagged because this is such a tough ethical issue to parse?
"It is not.
"With this kind of entanglement with the subject of its news
stories, the Times has given up the right to expect any trust or
credibility for its journalism on education. They are trapped in a
massive conflict of interest, and no amount of pro forma disclosure will
fix that. It's so sad to see what has happened to that once-great
publication.
"You can add to the comment that trust and credibility are the
life's blood of journalism, and without it, a "news" organization is no
different than any other partisan in public disputes, with the added
problem that there is no major paper to hold it accountable, although in
this case a blogger has apparently stepped into the breach. People have
jeopardized and lost their jobs for defending their editorial
independence and standing up to such conflicts of interest.
"I haven't read the background on the issue you've highlighted, but
if all your information is accurate, the Times' problem extends beyond
opinions to reporting, however well-intentioned their education
reporters are."
--Peter Sussman, retired longtime San Francisco Chronicle editor.
Sussman has held a number of positions in the Society of Professional
Journalists, the nation’s oldest, largest and most broadly based
association of journalists. He was a 15-year member of the Society’s
national Ethics Committee and was a co-author of the organization’s 1996
Code of Ethics, which had generally been considered the primary ethics
code for the profession for almost two decades.
●●smf’s 2¢: Sussman’s comments have gone slightly viral in the
anti-®eform blogosphere, picked up and commented upon by Diane Ravitch
in her blog:
“This is not a small question. How can we have freedom of the press if
billionaires buy the media and/or subsidize the coverage that directly
affects their interests? | http://bit.ly/23kl9We.
A commenter opines: “This oligarchic virus has infected the entire LA
Times and is not confined to just Education news. This is no longer
journalism, but rather it is an advertisement for charter schools run by
the privatizers…”
– and excoriated by ®eformista cheerleaders including Alexander Russo who was briefly the editor of L.A.School Report. [http://bit.ly/1UhvNHa - or is that an ‘everybody-does-it’ apologia?]
Sussman himself is probably a little cranky; he questions recent changes to the SPJ Code of Ethics – but
recent events at ABC and CBS and NBC News (…and everything at Fox News) opens the journalism biz to scrutiny.
The New York Times is being questioned by journalists over “ethically
dubious” Iran tour packages the paper is offering with the apparent
approval of the Iranian government. http://bit.ly/1Qk4JpL.
Pearson Publishing used to own the Financial Times and the Economist.
And then there’s Rupert Murdoch.
Just because you’re cranky doesn’t mean you’re a crank. And when the ®eformistas and the ©harter $chool Crowd Howl….
“I saw the best minds of future generations destroyed by blandness,
neglected unheeded unheard unseen, tested by testers and subjected and
examined, write not who you are but who you think I think you should be,
credit derivative swapped into the supply side, toasted and sent naked
into the world, college unready and career unprepared, stoned immaculate
with an order of fries and a medium drink.”
…methinks we’ve touched a nerve!
CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS
166 SCHOOLS IN CALIFORNIA HAVE MORE THAN 25 PERCENT
OF THEIR KINDERGARTNERS ENROLLED AS CONDITIONAL ENTRANTS; 107 ARE IN THE
LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT.
Rebecca Plevin | KPCC 89.3 | http://bit.ly/1SbrFt5
January 21, 2016 :: In an effort to get more kids vaccinated on time,
the state of California says that it will financially penalize schools
that wrongly admitted a high percentage of kindergartners who were
overdue for their second dose of the measles vaccine.
The state acted because its data analysis indicates that many schools
are erroneously enrolling kindergartners who are overdue for one or more
vaccinations and by law should be excluded from class until they're up
to date with their shots.
Incoming kindergartners can be admitted as "conditional entrants" if
they are not fully immunized but not overdue for any shots, or if they
have a temporary medical exemption. Last fall, more than 24,000
kindergartners were conditional enrollees statewide, according to data
released by the California Department of Public Health. Nearly half of
them were in Los Angeles County schools.
Public Health says it analyzed a sampling of conditional entrants from
the 2014-15 school year last spring, and found that nearly 94 percent
had not received the minimum number of vaccine doses required for the
"conditional" classification.
Under a new policy published in July, state auditors will now review
schools with 2015-16 conditional kindergarten admission rates above 25
percent. The auditors will check whether these schools received state
payment for attendance of students who should have been excluded from
class for not meeting the conditional admission criteria.
If children entered school with only one of two required measles shots
and had not received their second shot within three months, as required
by state law, the guidelines require auditors to verify the students
were excluded from class. If they were not excluded, the policy says the
auditors should "disallow the [average daily attendance payment] for
any days after three calendar months and ten days from the first dose
until the date of the second dose."
The California Department of Education says it will audit 166 schools
statewide for having more than 25 percent of their kindergartners
enrolled as conditional entrants; 107 are in the Los Angeles Unified
School District.
Public Health is also helping local health departments educate school
staff on the proper use of conditional entrance criteria for measles.
Officials say the new rules are partly a response to the measles
outbreak that began at Disneyland in Dec. 2014. It sickened 131
Californians and shined a light on the low vaccination rates in some
communities.
The number of conditional entrants statewide and in L.A. County were
down by about one-third this fall from the 2014-15 school year. Public
Health partly credits the threat of the financial penalties, first
communicated to schools last summer, for the reduction.
Ellen Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District,
denies that the new rules spurred the district to track conditional
enrollments more carefully. Rather, "we have always strived to utilize
all our resources to comply with immunization policies," she says,
noting that district officials review vaccination records and "run
bi-monthly immunization reports to keep track of when the next doses of
immunization are due," among other tactics.
Morgan says the district is not concerned that the state's crackdown could reduce its attendance reimbursements.
"We are confident that we will be able to review student records and
assist parents and guardians obtain the resources needed," she says.
While the overall number of conditional entrants is down, numerous L.A.
Unified schools still enrolled a high percentage of conditionals for the
2015-16 academic year. At Union Avenue Elementary, 57 percent of the
school's 236 kindergartens were classified as conditional. At Virginia
Road Elementary, 55 percent of the school's 81 kindergartners were
conditional. At Stanford Primary Center, which only has pre-kindergarten
and kindergarten classes, 75 percent of the 170 kindergartners were
conditional entrants.
KPCC and the Center for Health Reporting last year reported that while
state law compels schools to track conditional entrants and exclude
those who don’t get fully vaccinated, L.A. Unified was failing to track
all of them. In the wake of KPCC's story, the school district said it
was hiring more permanent and temporary nurses to bolster its tracking
efforts.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T
FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other
Sources
WI-FI ENABLED BUSES LEAVE NO CHILD OFFLINE: Coachella
Unified Superintendent, a Former LAUSD Music Teacher, Strives to Close
the Digital Divide
2016 LAUSD Academic Decathlon Volunteer Application + Job Description
http://bit.ly/1QlfU1k
INCENTIVE PAY TO KEEP NEWPORT-MESA UNIFIED OFFICIAL FROM RETIRING HAS TOPPED $273,000
http://bit.ly/1PdZM2P
KIDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD FIND COMMUNITY, LEARN ENGLISH THROUGH POETRY
http://bit.ly/1QrAoHL
LAUSD AUDIT SHOWS DISTRICT DEBT OUTSTRIPS ASSETS BY $4.2 BILLION +smf's 2¢
http://bit.ly/1PdZvwM
ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS PROPOSE TAKEOVER OF CHICAGO SCHOOLS FROM MAYOR ...AND EVENTUAL RETURN TO ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD
http://bit.ly/1NsjIJE
FOUR KILLED IN SASKATCHEWAN SCHOOL SHOOTING
http://nyti.ms/1NrT184
CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS
http://bit.ly/1SbrFt5
TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢
http://bit.ly/1ZL4WtO
NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT SAYS L.A. TIMES IS TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST
"@LATeducation receives funding from a number of foundations...Under
terms of the grants, the Times retains complete editorial control"
http://bit.ly/1V3pR4F
COURT OF APPEAL TO HEAR ARGUMENTS IN VERGARA LAWSUIT NEXT MONTH
http://bit.ly/1ZEROq7
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
►Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 2:00 P.M.
BOARD OF EDUCATION/COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE
1. Welcome and Opening Remarks: Dr. George McKenna, Chairperson
• Special Recognition: Narbonne High School Football Team
2. State Legislative Budget Update: Ms. Leilani Yee, Director of Government Relations
• Federal Legislative Update: Mr. Joel Packer, The Raben Group
3. Discussion: Public Records Act Requests: Ms. Christine Wood, Office of General Counsel
4. Public Comment
5. Adjournment
►Thursday, Jan 28, 2016 – 10 A.M.
REGULAR MTG OF THE SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND CITIZENS’ OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE
*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 • 213-241-8333
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 the Superintendent:
superintendent@lausd.net • 213-241-7000
...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. Volunteer in the classroom.
Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child -
and ultimately: For all children.
• 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!
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