LAUSD DEFICIT SWELLS TO $557 MILLION

By Barbara Jones, Staff Writer | LA daily News | http://bit.ly/Atpqka

2/7/2012 09:01:30 PM PST  ::  Los Angeles Unified's budget deficit has swelled to $557 million, and the district faces layoffs of up to 7,500 employees and cuts to some of its most successful programs without a revenue trifecta to bring in cash, officials said Tuesday.

An outline of the 2012-13 financial plan set for a vote next Tuesday shows the district will have only enough state revenue to fund core K-12 programs, along with district facilities and critical health and safety services.

Lower on the list of priorities - and with no funding source guaranteed - are some of the district's most popular programs. According to officials and documents, those include adult and early-childhood education, after-school and arts programs, and even the high-profile Academic Decathlon and All District Honor Marching Band.

The future of LAUSD's K-12 schools depends on at least three factors, including voters approving a statewide tax package proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

And whether the district can maintain any of its supplemental programs hinges on whether Los Angeles area voters approve a parcel tax of nearly $300 a year, a measure the school board is expected to put on the November ballot.

Officials say the district also needs help from a third source - either another tax initiative on the November ballot or concessions from the district's labor unions - to help stabilize local schools.

Word of the looming cuts has spread through the community, with advocates pleading with the board during recent meetings to save the preschool programs that have helped their youngsters get a jump start on kindergarten or the vocational schools that have taught them a trade.

Board President Monica Garcia hinted at the debate that could shape next week's budget.

"I'm concerned about the absence of adult education and of our preschool programs," Garcia said. "All of this is extremely concerning. We have to work to restore some level of revenue."

During a 90-minute presentation, Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly painted a bleak picture of the budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

This will be the fifth year of deficits for Los Angeles Unified, which has lost a total of $2.8 billion, and 8,000 employees, since the financial crisis hit California in 2008-09.

Facing a shortfall of its own, the state began issuing IOUs to school districts. By 2011-12, LAUSD received less than half of the $6,506 per student it was guaranteed under Proposition 98, which sets the formula for education funding.

Those funding deferrals, and Brown's decision to eliminate state funding for school-bus transportation, pushed the LAUSD's so-called structural deficit to more than a half-billion dollars for 2012-13.

The board's budget discussions will be complicated by the fact that the outcome of the various ballot measures will not be known until four months after the start of the new fiscal year.

Given the uncertainty about revenue projections, Superintendent John Deasy said the board may pass a budget that includes "trigger" cuts that could be imposed if voters reject the various tax initiatives.

"We'll have to have a `what-if' scenario for next year," Deasy said. "How can we return as much of the $557 million in the operational hole as possible with very few knowns."

Deasy said Brown's initiative, which would raise the sales tax a half-cent and boost the income tax for high-income earners by 2 percent, would go toward paying what the state owes for last year.

If the ballot measure passes, the district would receive $5,258 for each of its students, although it is guaranteed more than $6,700. If Brown's measure fails at the polls, however, the district's per-pupil allocation would fall to $4,888.

Deasy said he will present a financial plan next week that will include a proposal to issue layoff notices to as many as 7,500 workers. He also will seek authorization to put the parcel tax on the November ballot and a request to seek the restoration of state funds.

PARENTS, TEACHERS PROTEST PLAN TO SCRAP TRANSITIONAL KINDERGARTEN: Gov. Jerry Brown wants to eliminate the new grade to save money, but opponents call it unfair to 4-year-olds and a hardship on parents.

By Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/AxhES8

Emily Chun creates some artwork in her transitional kindergarten class at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Long Beach. The Long Beach district has been offering the grade in a pilot program. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times / February 7, 2012)

February 8, 2012  ::  The children painted Valentines, formed hearts with Play-Doh and made their own books in a colorful classroom at Long Beach's George Washington Carver Elementary School.

It may have looked like playtime, but the cognitive and academic skills of the 4- and 5-year-olds in her transitional kindergarten class are growing by leaps, said teacher Nancy Jarzomb.

"They're learning the routines of school and building confidence," Jarzomb said as she worked with a small group using a play oven and food made of wood. "Some of them had never held a pencil before, but they're developing a love of school and growing at their own pace."

Transitional kindergarten, a new grade level scheduled to start in most California school districts this fall, is being touted by educators as a means to boost children's future academic achievement and help level the playing field for low-income and disadvantaged students by giving them an extra year of preparation.

But Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed eliminating the program, saying it would save the state about $224 million. Those savings would grow to about $675 million annually by 2014 because there would be fewer 4-year-olds entering kindergarten.

On Tuesday, educators, parents and business and civic leaders gathered at Carver Elementary to condemn the proposal in the first of a series of statewide events being presented by the nonprofit group Preschool California, school superintendents and others.

Opponents say as many as 125,000 children — 40,000 this fall — would be kept from attending public schools, thousands of teaching jobs would be lost, school districts would lose state per-pupil funding and many struggling parents would have to come up with an additional year of child care.

Transitional kindergarten "is the greatest thing we can do to close the achievement gap in California," Long Beach Unified School District Supt. Christopher J. Steinhauser said at the Carver event. "This isn't something we can back off on."

The extra year of kindergarten is part of a law signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requiring that all children entering kindergarten turn 5 by Sept. 1 rather than the current Dec. 2 cutoff date.

The change will be phased in by moving the cutoff date a month earlier for three years, beginning in the fall. Youngsters who don't make the cutoff will be eligible to attend the free transitional program.

Brown's plan to scrap the extra year has put many school districts in a difficult spot: They must prepare months in advance without knowing whether they will receive the state funding since California's budget won't be adopted until July or later.

Long Beach Unified, which operates a pilot transitional kindergarten program at about 20 schools, is committed to fully implementing the classes this fall, Steinhauser said.

San Francisco Unified recently announced that, given the uncertainty, it was canceling the program. Los Angeles Unified, which has a pilot program at 100 schools, will decide by the end of the month how to move forward, said Nora Armenta, director of the district's early-childhood programs.

"At this point, we're planning for a variety of contingencies, from shutting down completely to keeping the 100 classes we already have to opening up more," Armenta said.

State officials sought to allay some concerns in an amended budget released last week, noting that parents can apply for waivers from school districts to enroll children younger than 5 in regular kindergarten. The state will pay districts for those students.

"We believe districts could use the waiver provision to provide some transitional-kindergarten-type program for children where and when appropriate," said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Department of Finance.

The governor's position was supported in a report this week from the state Legislative Analyst's Office, which concluded that it did not make sense to offer an extra year of school at the expense of existing K-12 services.

Proponents of the extra year say it's unfair for the state to take away the rights of thousands of 4-year-olds to attend school, then divert the savings to other uses.

"If we move in this direction, it's the worst kind of bait and switch," said state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who authored the Kindergarten Readiness Act. "The bargain we struck two years ago changed the kindergarten starting age but provided transitional kindergarten, and the proposal now is to take advantage of those savings without honoring the commitment to provide this. This is why people don't trust the government."

Iris Sung is one of the thousands of parents in limbo for the fall. The South Pasadena mother had planned to enroll her 4-year-old son, Nickolas, in transitional kindergarten but said she feels like the rug has been pulled out from under her. It would be a hardship to pay for another year of preschool, something she doesn't believe would help her son's academic progress.

"It's a disservice to my child," Sung said, "and a big burden not to be able to put him in transitional kindergarten."

Additional coverage  ::  google news:

Threat to Transitional Kindergarten Roils Calif.‎ Education Week News
Parents, districts oppose Brown's proposed transitional ...‎ Long Beach Press-Telegram
District Rallies For Transitional Kindergarten Classes To Continue‎ Gazette Newspapers
Blue Springs Examiner - 89.3 KPCC
all 32 news articles »

Letters to the editor: TURMOIL AT MIRAMONTE ELEMENTARY

LA Times: Turmoil at L.A.'s Miramonte Elementary School | http://lat.ms/zuYX5M

February 8, 2012

Drastic action
Re "New staff at troubled school," Feb. 7

I am more than horrified by the alleged actions of the two Miramonte Elementary School teachers accused of child abuse. But as a retired L.A. Unified School District teacher and former officer in the teachers union, I am appalled by Supt. John Deasy's drastic action of removing the entire teaching staff from the school.

How insulting to the hardworking men and women who have done nothing wrong, some of whom have worked diligently at the school for years. Deasy has tarnished every one of them.

What happened to innocent until proven guilty, or at least until accused? What happened to teachers' rights? And since when is the only answer to destroy the lives of innocent teachers to appear to protect children?

This is leadership?

Becki Robinson
San Gabriel

Lewd acts by teachers are tragic and represent a breakdown of the school as a community. But how can you even start to have a real community with 150 teachers teaching about 1,500 kids? That Miramonte Elementary exists is obscene.

I live between two of the most expensive high schools in the nation. One had a hard time finding a principal, its architecture marred by papers and signage plastering the windows and gates. The other sits on a gas field.

And Miramonte? Why wasn't that monster school broken up so administrators could know what was going on, so kids could feel they were in a close community and, yes, so test scores might reflect what we know, that small has value?

Don't let the school board off on this one. This is its shame.

Judith Markoff Hansen
Los Angeles

Steve Lopez: WILL L.A. UNIFIED’S RESPONSE TO ABUSE ALLEGATIONS PASS MUSTER?

Administrators removed Mark Berndt from the classroom last year, long after complaints were first raised. Now, parents are mixed on transferring the entire staff as the investigation continues and upset that information was kept from them.

 

 

Steve Lopez | LA Times columnist | http://lat.ms/w1UmbJ

Children and parents protest L.A. Unified plans to transfer all faculty and staff after two teachers were arrested on child abuse allegations. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / February 7, 2012)

February 8, 2012

• Did detectives move quickly enough?
• Did the school drop the ball on earlier complaints?
• Is Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy helping clean up a terrible mess, or making matters worse?

These are all fair questions in the sick and sordid case of Miramonte Elementary School, where two teachers were arrested in the last week and charged with lewd acts involving students. One of the cases, in which a teacher is accused, among other things, of feeding semen to blindfolded students, is about as depraved as it gets.

Understandably, parents at the 1,500-student elementary school near Watts are fuming not just about the shocking revelations, but about what's happened since.

"They didn't tell us anything," Maria Gervacio was saying Tuesday on the front lawn of the school.

"They" was a reference to L.A. Unified and the latest twist in the saga. On Monday, Deasy decided to transfer the ENTIRE workforce at Miramonte while the investigation continues. Teachers, clerical staff, janitors — they'll all be gone Thursday, and the school will be reopened with a whole new staff.

Deasy said the move was necessary to regain parent confidence and to allow the district to determine whether there was a culture of silence at Miramonte.

Some parents applauded the move. With others, it backfired, and they were protesting Tuesday morning outside the school. They were understandably concerned that bringing in new staff in the middle of the year, with little idea of what the kids were studying, was likely to disrupt learning at a school where scores are already significantly below the district average on standardized tests. They were also annoyed that they hadn't been consulted.

"If it's a new teacher on Thursday, I'm not going to come to school," said sixth-grader Brenda Alvarez.

Gervacio said she wouldn't send her three children to school either.

"It doesn't make sense" to turn the whole school upside down, Gervacio said.

Another mom held a sign that said: "Not All Teachers Are Criminals." One parent wept as she and others called up to a departing teacher who addressed them from a balcony.

"Read, read, read," the teacher reminded his students below, a parting assignment from an instructor who may or may not return. Temporarily, the staff will remain on payroll and be housed at a school that's under construction.

I understand that the first priority is to protect children from further abuse, but unless there's evidence of another predator on campus, why subject students to the shock of losing their teachers mid-year?

As the parent of an LAUSD elementary student, I can't help but think about how I'd react if this were happening at my daughter's school. Could it even happen in a middle-class neighborhood like mine?

Well, apparently so. Former Hamilton High music teacher Vance Miller was also fired by Deasy this week. Like third-grade teacher Mark Berndt at Miramonte, Miller had been removed from the classroom more than a year ago pending investigation after allegations of child abuse first surfaced.

At Miramonte, Berndt is suspected of spreading semen on cookies and putting cockroaches on children's faces, then photographing these atrocities. The same teacher had been the subject of a parent complaint in 1994 and another in 2008. In the earlier case, which involved the alleged fondling of a student, the D.A.'s office found insufficient evidence to file. In the 2008 case, a student's parents went to the Miramonte principal with strange photos of their daughter, ostensibly taken by Berndt. One showed a cookie with a shiny coating.

The parents say the principal waved off their concerns, telling them that it might have been some kind of class project.

The student was transferred to another teacher, who allegedly touched her in an inappropriate way, leading to another complaint that got nowhere. Last week, the second Miramonte teacher, Martin Bernard Springer, was arrested and charged with fondling a student.

Berndt finally got yanked out of class early in 2011, after a CVS photo clerk called authorities about some strange photos, and a sheriff's investigator found a blue spoon with an unknown substance on it in a Miramonte trash bin. So why did it take a full year for an investigation and the filing of charges?

Bill McSweeney, chief of detectives for the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, told me investigators didn't initially know the substance on the spoon was semen.

"Semen was a reasonable guess, but they were ruling out other things," he said.

OK, you've got an elementary school teacher suspected of feeding semen to blindfolded students. Shouldn't you drop everything and jump on it full force?

"It certainly seems like that now," McSweeney conceded.

But Berndt was already out of the classroom and under surveillance, he said, and the DNA testing was delayed while lab test priority was given to murder and rape cases. McSweeney said it wasn't until mid-2011 that the substance was identified as semen, and the case kicked into another gear, with investigators discreetly interviewing parents and children to avoid going public and contaminating the investigation as they worked to eventually identify 23 alleged victims.

Understood, but did bagging Berndt take precedence for the Sheriff's Department and district attorney's office over fully informing parents of what their children had been subjected to? Did they need all 23 victims before making the arrest and notifying the Miramonte school community?

I'd be fuming as a parent if I learned that school officials and police knew my child might have been a victim of, or witness to, unimaginable abuses but didn't immediately inform me. Was there a possibility of diseases for children who ingested semen, or psychological issues?

"This is a very emotional subject," McSweeney said, "without perfect answers for everyone."

It seems to go that way a little too often when the questions are put to LAUSD and Lee Baca's Sheriff's Department.

OUTRAGE 2/8: Today’s LAUSD “He said/she said” child abuse news | http://bit.ly/zse9L2

Outrage, updated: STAFF OF MIRAMONTE REPLACED PENDING SEX ABUSE INQUIRY

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy seeks to assure angry parents, who demonstrated at campus over allegations against two teachers. Officials say no other instructors are under suspicion.

BY Howard Blume, Sam Allen and Angel Jennings, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/yIaKPF

Angry parents demonstrate outside Miramonte Elementary on Monday. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / February 6, 2012)

February 7, 2012, 12:17 a.m. --In a dramatic move to quell parents' fears, Los Angeles school officials said they will temporarily replace the entire staff of an elementary school south of downtown Los Angeles, where two teachers have been accused of lewd acts against students.

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy announced the action at a tense public meeting Monday evening in which Miramonte Elementary School parents chanted "cover-up!" and accused the school system of failing to protect their children.

Some parents said they were alarmed by reports that students had complained about one of the accused teachers several times in the last two decades.

"My trust level is at zero," Cassini Quarles, the mother of a third-grader, said outside the meeting, which was held at a nearby high school.

The staffing shake-up marks an attempt to rebuild community confidence as detectives and school officials continue their investigations.

More than a quarter of the students enrolled at Miramonte didn't show up Monday as parents kept them home. On Monday night, some parents applauded the removal of the school's staff as a good first step.

Officials emphasized that no other educators at the school are under suspicion but that a bold act was needed to help remove the cloud over Miramonte.

"I cannot have another student tell me he is afraid," Deasy told parents at the meeting.

"The primary responsibility, bar none, is safety and support.... Clearly, several individuals have violated the most sacred trust we have," Deasy said.

The school has 150 teachers and administrators and about 1,500 students, making it one of the largest elementary schools in Los Angeles.

The move could be temporary. Many, maybe all, of the current Miramonte staff will be returned to the school eventually, officials said. In the interim, their places will be filled by teachers and other workers on a rehiring list.

The Miramonte staff will continue to be paid and for the time being will move to a nearby campus that is under construction.

Miramonte will be closed for the next two days during the transition. Officials plan to have the new teachers and administrators in place by Thursday. Once students return, each will be interviewed by the district, and a psychiatric social worker will be present in every classroom, Deasy said.

For the students who showed up for school Monday morning, it was a day like no other.

As students walked into the school, they passed a row of police officers, television cameras and a demonstration by angry parents. The protesters shouted into megaphones and hoisted a large banner that read: "We the Parents Demand Our Children Be Protected From Lewd Teachers at LAUSD."

Attorneys have also descended upon the campus, some holding an impromptu press conference on behalf of parents and alleged victims of the teachers.

Parents described days of talking to their children about the allegations and trying to determine if they were victims.

"Instead of asking, 'Did you learn something today?' I asked, 'Did someone touch you?'" said Nancy Linares, 41, whose granddaughter attends the school.

Every day since the scandal broke, Lisa and Eddie Carmona have been asking their son about his former third-grade teacher, Mark Berndt, who faces 23 felony counts for allegedly blindfolding, gagging and spoon-feeding semen to students; the evidence includes photographs he took of the students.

Each time, their son has said that nothing happened, that he was never touched or photographed. In fact, until recently, Berndt was one of his favorite teachers.

Still, Lisa Carmona can't help but ask again and again.

"I said to [my son], 'You don't have to lie to me. If he said he would threaten you or hurt you, you don't have to worry. He's locked up in jail now. He can't hurt you,'" Carmona said.

The investigation at Miramonte began in 2010 after the teacher took film to be developed at a drugstore. A clerk noticed disturbing images of children and called authorities. Detectives, who eventually seized hundreds of photographs that they say Berndt took in his classroom, set out to identify the children in the pictures, interview them and their parents and quietly piece together the case.

After Berndt's arrest, two families reported that a second-grade teacher, 49-year-old Martin Bernard Springer, had fondled their children in separate incidents within the last three years. He was removed from his classroom Thursday and arrested the next day.

Both teachers had spent their entire careers at Miramonte, Berndt starting in 1979 and Springer in 1986. Former students said the two men were friends, but the cases are not considered to be related.

When Berndt, 61, was arrested, school district officials said they had no record of any previous misconduct or complaints against him. But evidence of past warning signs has since emerged.

One former student said in an interview with The Times that during the 1990-91 school year a counselor told her and two other girls to stop inventing stories after a complaint that Berndt appeared to be masturbating behind his desk. In 1994, detectives investigated a complaint that Berndt had tried to touch a girl's genitals, though prosecutors deemed the evidence too weak to file charges. And one father said that he complained in 2008 to the Miramonte principal after his daughter brought home photographs that Berndt had taken of her. In one image, she was eating a cookie coated with what investigators now suspect is Berndt's semen.

The unincorporated Florence-Firestone neighborhood surrounding Miramonte is one of the poorest in Los Angeles County. Miramonte has struggled academically and is one of the last campuses in the school district to operate year-round because of overcrowding.

According to the school's website, 98% of the students are Latino and 2% are black. About 56% of Miramonte students are learning English, and virtually everyone receives free or reduced-price meals, a poverty indicator.

Many parents protesting Monday had been students there, including some taught by the teachers who have been arrested.

Karina Aguillon, 21, a parent of a kindergartner, remembered Berndt.

"I was shocked because I had that teacher," she said. "He was nice.... You don't know who to trust anymore. You can't even trust the teachers."

Deasy said it could take some time for the district to fully investigate what happened at Miramonte. He announced Monday that an independent commission would review the incidents, led by retired California Supreme Court Associate Justice Carlos Moreno.

"I have to understand how this could happen" Deasy said.

L.A. YOUTH SCHOOL CUTS SURVEY RESULTS: More than 1,850 students told us how budget cuts have hurt their schools.

—Felix Ruano, 16, Ambassador School of Global Leadership | L. A. Youth | http://bit.ly/wv5f4I

FEB 7, 2012  | In October L.A. Youth asked readers about budget cuts at their schools and more than 1,850 teens responded. I could relate to the students who took the survey because I’ve seen similar bad conditions at my school. We don’t have working light bulbs in some overhead projectors and when the Internet stops working there’s no one in the school to fix it. And all but one of the restrooms have been closed because we don’t have enough custodians to clean them.

When my school opened two years ago students in Koreatown were happy to have a neighborhood school. But we didn’t have any AP classes because there weren’t enough teachers. I wanted to take AP biology and world history but couldn’t. This year there are only four APs. Also, we have only one science teacher for the entire high school. He has a credential for chemistry but he’s teaching my physics class. He shows physics videos and we teach ourselves from our textbook.

I used to blame the bad conditions for my bad grades, like failing history last year and a getting a D in journalism. I felt that the school wasn’t doing enough for us, so there was no point for me to do well in school. Now I realize that I can still learn even without properly trained teachers and the best resources. But not everyone has the motivation to do that so they stop coming to school. From sophomore year to junior year we’ve lost about 30 students out of 120. Some transferred but some dropped out.

Despite how they answered the survey, I was surprised that almost all of the students planned to go to college. That’s good, but unless schools fix these problems, students could lose hope.

 

Here are the answers from the teens who responded to our survey (thank you for helping us out). We randomly chose three people to win $100 for participating. Congratulations to: Matthew Alvarez from L.A. Leadership Academy HS, David Baltazar from Belvedere MS and Trevor Ryan Ramirez from Redondo Union HS. Note: Some percentages do not add up to 100 because respondents checked all the answers that applied.

Download a PDF of the survey results.

RESPONDENTS WERE:

Gender:
Female 56%
Male 44%

Ethnicity:
Latino 79%
Asian 9%
White 9%
Black 7%
Other 8%

ANSWERS:

Do overcrowded classrooms make you feel like your teachers don’t have enough time to teach?
Yes  67%
No  33%

Have you been unable to participate in a program or class because it’s no longer offered at your school?
No  71%
Yes  29%

If yes, please list all the programs/classes that apply to you (here are some of the responses):

AP classes
Drama
PE class

ASL (American Sign Language) 
Field Trips
Physics

AVID
Football
Saturday school for the SAT

Art
Gymnastics 
Soccer

Band
Journalism
Softball

Choir
Leadership
Web Design

Cosmetology
Metal Shop
Woodshop

Culinary Arts
Nursing

If your school had to make cuts to save money, what should they cut first? (They are listed in order starting with what respondents would cut first.)

1. School newspaper or broadcast outlet
2. Summer school
3. Field trips
4. Security guards
5. Custodians
6. Libraries
7. Arts and music
8. Sports
9. Guidance counselors
10. Other
11. Administrators (like principals and assistant principals)
12. Teachers

Have you experienced any of the following in your classroom in the past two years?

Copied information from an overhead because there wasn’t 
enough paper to make copies of a lesson for everyone
57%

Not enough computers or enough working computers
52%

Students had to share textbooks because there weren’t
enough for everyone
51%

Not all the students had a desk to sit at
37%

None of the above
19%

What have you or your family had to pay for in the last two years at your school?

None of the above
42%

Sports uniforms
34%

Supplies in art class
22%

Buses for a field trip
21%

Participation on a sports team
18%

Music program like band/choir 
12%

Lab fees for science classes
  8%

Has your school cut any of the following journalism programs in the past two years?

My school doesn’t have any of the above
43%

No, none of the above has been cut in the past two years 
40%

Radio
11%

Television station
  9%

Newspaper club
  7%

Journalism classes
  7%

How many students are in your English class?
The highest number was 50 and the lowest was 14

How many students are in your math class?
The highest number was 50 and the lowest was 11

Do any of the following need repair at your school?

Restrooms
64%

Graffiti-covered walls
49%

Air conditioning/heating
48%

Classrooms/desks
47%

Cafeteria
36%

Public address/bell system 
19%

No, all of the above are in good condition 
15%

Have you left or thought about leaving public school because of the budget cuts?
No 78%
Yes 22%

Have budget cuts affected your ability to get the classes you need to graduate?
No 87%
Yes 13%

Are you planning to attend college?
Yes 97%
No 3%

If yes, where are you planning to apply?
(Respondents could check up to three choices.)

Four-year public university in state 
64%

Community college
36%

Private college or university
35%

Four-year public university out of state 
31%

Trade school 
  4%

How do you expect to pay for college?

Scholarships 
73%

Work
60%

Family
54%

Loans
39%

Military
  7%

Download a PDF of the survey results.

When Los Angeles teens read L.A. Youth, the newspaper by and about teens, they say, “I relate to it.” That has been our greatest accomplishment since we started publishing student journalism in 1988. We have helped thousands of teachers make their classrooms more relevant, interesting places to learn by publishing the first-hand accounts of teens’ experiences with college stress, racial identity, homophobia, censorship, broken families and many more topics. We have investigated serious problems in our community such as teen pregnancy, teen prostitution, drug addiction and dilapidated schools.

Along the way, our coverage has earned honors and scholarships for many of our writers, artists and photographers, helping them with college admission and future job prospects. They have gone on to careers in journalism, teaching and other fields, and often stay in touch with us as they continue through life.

We have grown from a small, upstart publication produced at a kitchen table to an established non-profit with five full-time adult staff and more than 80+ teen staff members. A long list of funders and individual donors have supported our coverage of such tough issues as juvenile justice, foster care and sexuality. In addition to bringing these important topics to an audience of 350,000 youth in Los Angeles County through our newspaper and website L.A. Youth has been written up and had articles reprinted in other media from the Los Angeles Times to NPR.

L.A. Youth is a registered non-profit 501(c)3 corporation.

ENTIRE STAFF AT MIRAMONTE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL REPLACED

 

Schools chief announces entire Miramonte staff to be replaced

By Howard Blume | LA Times/LA NOW | http://lat.ms/zpBCIh

February 6, 2012 |  6:56 pm  ::  Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy told parents Monday evening that the district is replacing the entire staff of Miramonte Elementary School in the wake of the arrests last week of two teachers on lewd conduct charges.

The unprecedented move is intended to build confidence among the many families who have lost faith in their neighborhood elementary school. More than a quarter of students did not show up for classes Monday.

Officials stressed that no one else on the Miramonte staff is under suspicion of wrongdoing but that the chain of events has placed a cloud over the campus that can be lifted only with a drastic response.

PHOTOS: Parent uproar over sex-abuse claims

One of the largest elementary schools in the nation, Miramonte has about 1,500 students and a teaching and administrative staff of about 150.

The displacement could be temporary: Many, maybe all, of the current staff will be returned to the school eventually, officials said. In the interim, their places will be filled by qualified teachers and other workers already on a placement or rehiring list. There are plenty of available candidates: Over the last several years, thousands of instructors and other non-teaching staff were laid off because of budget cuts; the vast majority are considered fully qualified employees who lost work simply because they lacked sufficient seniority.

The displaced staff will continue to be paid and also will receive counseling for a series of events that also traumatized the Miramonte staff, officials said.

FULL COVERAGE: Mark Berndt

The restaffing is the latest development at Miramonte, which is south of downtown in unincorporated Florence-Firestone. A week ago, prosecutors charged a longtime teacher with 23 counts of lewd acts with a child. Mark Berndt, 61, allegedly spoon-fed his semen to blindfolded students and also took pictures of the acts. He has resigned from the district.

Later last week, sheriff's deputies arrested his colleague, Martin Bernard Springer, 49, on suspicion of  fondling two 7-year-olds in his class within the last three years.

Teachers union officials said in a statement that they have met with instructors at the school.

"We support a thorough, vigorous and fair investigation of all allegations. It’s everyone’s responsibility to ensure that any and all allegations are thoughtfully and carefully investigated," the statement said.

Parents packed the meeting Monday evening at a nearby high school. The district had closed the meeting to the media even though parents demanded that reporters and cameras be allowed in. The district refused.

Photo: LAPD officers are shown Monday at Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles. Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times  (smf: These are LAUSD School Police Officers – LAPD is not the law enforcement authority in the unincorporated area of LA county where Miramonte is.)

Entire staff to be replaced at LA school where 2 teachers were arrested

By msnbc.com staff and news services | http://on.msnbc.com/AlP7hL

Krista Kennell / AFP - Getty Images -- Eight-year-old Adrian Vital protests outside Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles, Feb. 6.

 

6 Feb 2012  |  Updated at 11:04 p.m. ET: The Los Angeles Unified School District is replacing the entire staff of Miramonte Elementary following the arrest of two teachers on lewd conduct charges last week, Superintendent John Deasy told parents at a meeting Monday night, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Positions will be filled by qualified teachers and other workers already on a placement or rehiring list, the Times report stated. But the displacement of the current staff could be temporary, according to the report.

Teacher Mark Berndt was charged last week with committing lewd acts on 23 children. Another teacher, Martin Springer, was arrested Friday on suspicion of fondling two girls in his classroom.

Deasy said staffers are being replaced because a full investigation of allegations is disruptive, and staffers require support to get through the scandal.

There will also be a psychiatric social worker in every classroom to help students and staff cope with any issues that need to be dealt with.

Many children stayed home Monday while parents demanded more protection at an elementary school where two teachers are suspected of molesting students in class.

More than a quarter of the students at Miramonte Elementary School were absent, with attendance reaching just 72 percent, according to figures from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Damian Dovarganes / Damian Dovarganes / AP  --  Students are escorted to a waiting bus as they leave Miramonte Elementary school after classes Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012 in Los Angeles.

About three dozen parents and supporters protested in front of the main doors of the school earlier Monday, some carrying a banner that read, "We the parents demand our children be protected from lewd teacher acts."

As night fell, about 100 angry parents marched from the elementary school to the nearby meeting with administrators.

School police watched and sheriff's deputies were on hand, but there was no violence.

The district set up a toll-free hotline on Monday to receive reports of suspected abuse at Miramonte, said school board President Monica Garcia in a statement.

Garcia added that the district would step up efforts to ensure students and staff realized the importance of reporting misconduct.

In the same school district, a janitor at a San Fernando Valley elementary school was arrested on suspicion of committing a lewd act with a child on a campus.

A Los Angeles public school teacher accused of engaging in lewd acts with students, allegedly had questions raised about his behavior more than 20 years ago. KNBC's Robert Kovacik reports.

Paul Adame, 37, was taken into custody after a mother told police on Sunday that he had inappropriate contact with her child during school hours Friday at Germain Elementary School in the Chatsworth area north of Los Angeles, police Capt. Kris Pitcher said at a news conference.

The captain declined to provide details but urged anyone who might know of other possible victims to contact police.

Adame was booked and released on $100,000 bail Monday. It could not be immediately determined if he had an attorney.

There was no immediate connection between the arrest of the janitor and the cases at Miramonte, which is 15 miles away in an unincorporated county area of South Los Angeles.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

WHY FRENCH PARENTS ARE SUPERIOR – or - Why American Parents are Inferior

by Edit Barry in re-Education in Baltimore | http://bit.ly/wOqoKZ

It’s remarkable how social supports for the middle class are shrugged off in this new article in the Wall Street Journal about middle class parenting anxiety in America and what dumb Americans can learn from the French. (“Why French Parents Are Superior” by Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press.)

Isn’t class anxiety precisely the reason we middle class Americans coddle our kids? My theory: We know how hard it will be to do better for our children than our parents did for us, so we give them whatever they want and let them drive us insane in the process. The author seems to think the cure is to use a firmer tone. I think the cure is a spoonful of socialism. (Though we won’t be reading about that in the Wall Street Journal. Sacre bleu!)

On a related theme, I’m cooking up a new post about four trends in American parenting and the struggles of the shrinking middle class. Subscribe to stay tuned.

 

Why French Parents Are Superior

By PAMELA DRUCKERMAN | The Wall street Journal |  THE SATURDAY ESSAY

FEBRUARY 4, 2012  ::  While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying 'non' with authority.

Emmanuel Fradin for The Wall Street Journal.

Pamela Druckerman's new book "Bringing Up Bebe," catalogs her observations about why French children seem so much better behaved than their American counterparts.

When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that's a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I'm American, he's British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

Journal Community

Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn't get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I'd lived in France for a few years, I couldn't explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn't just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

French Lessons

• Children should say hello, goodbye, thank you and please. It helps them to learn that they aren't the only ones with feelings and needs.
• When they misbehave, give them the "big eyes"—a stern look of admonishment.
• Allow only one snack a day. In France, it's at 4 or 4:30.
• Remind them (and yourself) who's the boss. French parents say, "It's me who decides."
• Don't be afraid to say "no." Kids have to learn how to cope with some frustration.

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn't French children throw food? And why weren't their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

I first realized I was on to something when I discovered a 2009 study, led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France. The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was more pleasant than child care.

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.

Nicolas Héron for The Wall Street Journal

Delphine Porcher with daughter Pauline. The family's daily rituals are an apprenticeship in learning to wait.

Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don't explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

One Saturday I visited Delphine Porcher, a pretty labor lawyer in her mid-30s who lives with her family in the suburbs east of Paris. When I arrived, her husband was working on his laptop in the living room, while 1-year-old Aubane napped nearby. Pauline, their 3-year-old, was sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in the task of plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. She somehow resisted the temptation to eat the batter.

Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family's daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn't allowed to eat the candy until that day's snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.

When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, "Just wait two minutes, my little one. I'm in the middle of talking." It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane.

It's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world's leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend's apartment. He agreed to meet me for coffee.

Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the "marshmallow test" in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4- or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he's going to leave the room for a little while, and that if the child doesn't eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he'll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he'll get only that one.

Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract themselves.

Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn't "tend to go to pieces under stress," as their report said.

Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?

Pamela Druckerman's new book "Bringing Up Bebe," catalogs her observations about why French children seem so much better behaved than their American counterparts. She talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about the lessons of French parenting techniques.

Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn't performed the marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French and American kids. In the U.S., he said, "certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids."

American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn't a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don't.

French parents and caregivers find it hard to believe that we are so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. When I mentioned the topic at a dinner party in Paris, my French host launched into a story about the year he lived in Southern California.

He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they'd met each other's kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge.

"What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said 'no,' " the husband said. The children did "n'importe quoi," his wife added.

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase "n'importe quoi," meaning "whatever" or "anything they like." It suggests that the American kids don't have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It's the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that's the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren't constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas as merely an invitation to exit.

Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was possible and pas possible.

Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn't be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

"That's true," I said. "But what can I do?" Frédérique said I should be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.

I pointed out that I'd been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes. Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my "no" stronger and to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the gate, I said "no" more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed and dragged him back. "You see?" I said. "It's not possible."

Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. "Don't worry," Frederique said, urging me on.

Leo didn't listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my "nos" coming from a more convincing place. They weren't louder, but they were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn't open it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to look disapproving.

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

"See that," Frédérique said, not gloating. "It was your tone of voice." She pointed out that Leo didn't appear to be traumatized. For the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed like a French child.

—Adapted from "Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting," to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press.

JERRY BROWN'S CALL FOR FEWER SCHOOL TESTS CONFLICTS WITH STATE'S NEW EDUCATION BLUEPRINT

by Diana Lambert, Sacramento Bee | http://bit.ly/yX0aN0

Published Sunday, Feb. 05, 2012  ::  Want to make a public school teacher cringe? Say the words high-stakes testing.

Tests, test and more tests.

Teachers unions rail against them. Parents complain about the time their kids spend taking them. Academics disagree over their value.

Gov. Jerry Brown joined the clamor, saying he wanted students to take fewer tests. He gave no real specifics during his State of the State address, but said he will work with the state Board of Education to make it happen.

"We think the governor is on the right track," said Dean Vogel, president of the California Teachers Association. "We think the emphasis on high-stakes testing has really got us on the wrong track. You see less emphasis on the arts, drama, music – those kinds of electives."

Brown's message may resonate with educators and some parents, but it seems in conflict with efforts to measure – through new tests – how the state's new education blueprint will be followed. That blueprint, called Common Core Standards, will govern teaching in public schools beginning in 2014.

The Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium – a group developing new tests – wants to add more exams annually, said Jamal Abedi, a UC Davis professor on its advisory board.

The consortium, which includes California and 29 other states, plans to offer formative and interim assessments, as well as year-end tests, he said.

Using only annual tests makes it difficult to get a clear picture of student achievement, Abedi said.

The additional tests will be optional, the California Department of Education said.

The consortium has been directed to create federal accountability tests in math and language arts for third through eighth grades and one test to be given in the 10th, 11th or 12th grade, said Deb Sigmund, a department associate superintendent.

"Smarter Balance is meant to replace what we currently have," she said.

The state can't cut federally mandated testing, so any reductions are likely to come from the list of state-mandated tests that include the California High School Proficiency Exam, physical fitness assessments and second-, ninth- and 11th-grade tests, among others.

California has "lots of assessments that aren't federally required that are required by state statutes," Sigmund said.

"Federal testing is the tip of the iceberg," said Monty Neill of Fair Test, an advocacy organization. "It's clear that teachers spend weeks of classroom time on test preparation."

So, how many tests do students really take?

Each spring California students are required to take standardized tests in math and English-language arts in second through 11th grades, as well as writing tests in fourth and seventh grades. A history-social science test is added in eighth through 11th grades and a science test in the fifth, eighth and 11th grades.

California students can't graduate without taking a state high school exit exam, and a physical fitness test is required in fifth, seventh and ninth grades.

But students are filling in the bubbles on their test sheets for even more hours. Pupils must take district, school and teacher assessments, as well as tests for college admission.

Elk Grove Unified and Sacramento City Unified are among the local districts that require teachers to give benchmark assessments throughout the year.

Elk Grove students take tests at mid-term, while Sacramento City students in first through eighth grades are tested in English and math three times a year. A fourth test is optional.

Sacramento City Unified Chief Accountability Officer Mary Shelton said the district tests are aligned to the state standards and give schools and their teachers feedback on how they are doing.

She believes in reducing mandated state testing, however. "The question is what do you put in place to see if our kids are learning," she said. "There should be some sort of assessment in place, so teachers know how they are doing and parents know how their schools are doing."

Sacramento City Unified doesn't get many parent complaints about the testing, Shelton said. "Occasionally, we get some concerns about the amount of time students spend taking tests, or by teachers on the amount of classroom time spent on tests."

There may be more complaints soon. California will try the new assessments on some students over the next two years, while still administering the current batch of required standardized tests, state education officials say.

Doubling up on testing is likely to upset some parents, already averse to the amount of time spent on testing.

Parents and educators opposed to standardized testing have started a nationwide movement using the Internet to educate parents about their right to opt their children out of testing. Websites offer computer-generated letters parents can fill out to keep their children from being tested.

"There is a surge (in the opt-out movement) right now," Neill said. "I think people are becoming really fed up."

While California allows parents to opt out of the tests, Neill said, few parents are made aware of the right.

School officials rely on the Average Yearly Progress scores, earned by student testing, to determine how schools are progressing. Parents look to the scores as well. If enough students opt out of testing, the school can lose its AYP score. If this continues for several years, a school could be deemed underperforming and could be closed or turned into a charter school.

Schools can lose AYP if 95 percent of the students at the school aren't assessed, Sigmund said.

"We have very few schools where this happens," she said, noting that fewer than 1 percent of California parents opt their children out of testing.

"My experience at the district level is that parents generally like to have the assessment piece as a piece of information about their child's performance, and they were generally glad to get that piece of information," she said.

PARENTS PROTEST HAZING-RELATED SUSPENSION OF LONGTIME L.A. HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL COACH

Bob Cook, Contributor Forbes | http://onforb.es/wHqOFs

2/06/2012 @ 4:18PM  :: At 7:30 a.m. today (Feb. 6), a group of parents marched outside of Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, Calif., to show their displeasure with the three-week suspension of baseball coach Manny Alvarado, who is being sent home a second time over an alleged hazing incident. It’s not that the parents are pro-hazing. It’s that they’re smelling a rat in the way Alvarado is being treated.

Alvarado has coached since 1988, winning five Los Angeles city championships and guiding such players as major-leaguers Garret Anderson and Jon Garland. However, Alvarado in November was put on administrative leave while an investigation took place regarding two students in his baseball class “engaged in a fighting ritual outside the school’s weight room, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The protesting parents (joined by players), who weren’t exactly on board with believing there was hazing going on, are ticked that Alvarado — who didn’t see the fight, but was in the weight room and was in charge of watching the students — is getting tossed out again after having paid his (unnecessary) penance already. Alvarado has denied any hazing took place, and he is appealing his latest suspension. From the Los Angeles Times (which has video of the protest):

[Baseball parent Cindy] Kuykendall said [Kennedy principal Suzanne] Blake told parents at a Dec.14 meeting that her investigation found prior hazing incidents in the baseball program. Blake punished the team by barring Kennedy from playing in two tournaments this spring, a loss of eight games, and required players and Alvarado to attend bullying-awareness classes. Alvarado was reinstated.

“We didn’t agree that there was hazing, but we accepted it,” Kuykendall said.

Alvarado and Kennedy players attended two classes on bullying last month. That was supposed to be the end of things. At least that was the impression parents and players were given. Then came word of Alvarado’s suspension.

“We’re not backing off any more,” Kuykendall said [Feb. 3].

The Times’ Eric Sondheimer writes that Alvarado “has been known for his integrity and old-school values,” which sometimes is code for “yells a lot and doesn’t exactly discourage players from pounding each other.” However, Sondheimer is catching the same whiff of rat stench the parents are inhaling. Alvarado has denied any hazing took place, and he is appealing his latest suspension.

The question is what is Blake and the Los Angeles Unified School District trying to do to Alvarado? Blake is a former middle school principal who was briefly principal at the new downtown arts high school until being replaced in 2010.

On [Feb. 3], the LAUSD communications department released a statement: “The District responded to concerns, investigated and took appropriate action to ensure the safety of students on the Kennedy campus. Coach Manny Alvarado remains the baseball coach at Kennedy. Any litigation or personnel matters concerning Alvarado are confidential and cannot be publicly discussed.”

Hazing and bullying are unacceptable activities in sports or anything else. Coaches and teams are warned before every season about the issue. But they continue to happen, and the consequences can be severe.

The problem at Kennedy is there’s a lack of trust on all sides. This could have been a valuable moment to teach. Instead, it is rapidly deteriorating into a nasty tit for tat. The principal appears to have lost control and credibility. The school is being divided, and Blake is about to find out what Alvarado and the baseball team mean to a proud community.

Blake should already know what happens when parents get riled up over administrative decisions. Blake herself was the beneficiary of parental protests against the school district sending her packing as principal of the aforementioned arts high school.

Baseball: Parents, players rally at Kennedy

Los Angeles Times (blog) - ‎

Chanting, "Save our coach," players, parents and alumni from Granada Hills Kennedy held a rally in front of the campus Monday morning in support of longtime baseball Coach Manny Alvarado, who is facing a three-week suspension without pay following an ...

Kennedy High Students Rally Against Suspension of Star Baseball Coach Manny ...

LA Weekly (blog) - ‎

By Simone Wilson Mon., Feb. 6 2012 at 1:15 PM ​Parents, students and star alumni gathered in front of Granada Hills Kennedy High this morning to protest the pending suspension of Manny Alvarado, the school's beloved (and wildly successful) baseball ...

Suspension of Manny Alvarado riles parents

Los Angeles Times - ‎

Longtime and highly successful baseball coach at Granada Hills Kennedy High has been suspended for three weeks for his role in an alleged hazing incident and it's not sitting well with supporters of the program. By Eric Sondheimer Break out the ...

VALLEY SCHOOL JANITOR ACCUSED OF LEWD CONDUCT

by  Victoria Kim | LA Times/LA Now | http://lat.ms/zRRqUC

February 6, 2012 | 12:53 pm  ::  A janitor at a Chatsworth elementary school was arrested early Monday on suspicion of committing a lewd act on a student at the school, police said.

Paul Adame, 37, was arrested at 1:15 a.m. after the mother of a student at Germain Street Elementary School went to a police station Sunday afternoon to report “inappropriate contact” between her child and a janitor at the school, according to an LAPD statement.

Adame, according to jail records, was released later in the morning on $100,000 bail. His arrest follows uproar over allegations that two teachers at Miramonte Elementary, also in the Los Angeles Unified School District, engaged in lewd conduct with students.

Detectives with the LAPD's sexual assault unit investigated the claim and identified Adame as the suspect, according to police. Authorities said they were not releasing information about the alleged conduct or the name, age or gender of the child because the investigation was ongoing.

Police asked that parents of students enrolled at the school speak with their children about Adame to find out if they were subject to potentially criminal behavior.

Anyone with information was asked to contact the Devonshire Sexual Assault Unit at (818) 832-0609, or (877) 527-3247 during nonbusiness hours.

Anonymous calls can be made to (800) 222-8477 or by texting 274637 with a message beginning with the letters “LAPD.”

Janitor at Germain Elementary in Granada Hills arrested in student...

Los Angeles Daily News - ‎

By Daily News staff A janitor at Germain Elementary School in Chatsworth was arrested early Monday on suspicion of molesting a child at the school, according to Los Angeles police. The mother of the unidentified youngster went to the Devonshire Area ...

LA school janitor held for alleged child molest

San Francisco Chronicle - ‎1 hour ago‎

A Los Angeles elementary school janitor has been arrested for investigation of committing a lewd act with a child on campus — the third such arrest in the district in two weeks. Thirty-seven-old Paul Adame was booked Monday and released on bail.

BREAKING: Janitor at Germain School Booked for Alleged Lewd Act on a Child

Patch.com - ‎

A 37-year-old janitor at Germain Elementary School in Chatsworth was booked Monday on suspicion of committing lewd acts on a child, authorities said. Paul Adame, who was released after posting $100000 bail, has a Feb. 27 court date in San Fernando, ...

LAUSD janitor Paul Adame arrested for lewd acts, victim details withheld

89.3 KPCC (blog) - ‎

A press conference was held Monday afternoon to address the latest LAUSD sexual abuse arrest, this time in Chatsworth. 37-year-old Paul Adame, a Germain Street Elementary School janitor, was arrested on Sunday on investigation of lewd acts against a ...

Los Angeles grade school janitor arrested on suspicion of molesting student

Pocono Record - ‎

By NewsCore LOS ANGELES -- A janitor at a Los Angeles elementary school was arrested Monday on suspicion of molesting a student. Paul Adame, 37, was released from custody after posting $100000 bail, the Contra Costa Times reported.

Germain Elementary School janitor arrested for inappropriate sexual contact ...

abc7.com - ‎

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- An elementary school janitor was arrested Sunday on suspicion of inappropriate contact with a child, the LAPD announced Monday. Paul Adame, a janitor employed at Germain Elementary School, was arrested in an investigation by LAPD ...

School Janitor Arrested for Lewd Acts With a Child

KTLA - ‎

Police say the mother of the unidentified victim reported there had been inappropriate contact between her child and a janitor at Germain Elementary School. On Monday police arrested 37-year old Paul Adame of Encino on suspicion of committing a lewd ...

Chatsworth school janitor released on $100000 bail

Annenberg TV News -

A 37-year-old janitor at Germain Elementary arrested on suspicion of lewd acts with children is out on bail. By Alexis Medina Paul Adame, an employee of Germain Elementary School, was released on a $100000 bail and is set to appear in a San Fernando ...

Elementary School Janitor Arrested On Suspicion Of Child Molest

LAist - ‎

South LA's Miramonte Elementary isn't the only local school making unfortunate headlines in connection with a child sex abuse scandal. A janitor at Germain Elementary in Chatsworth was arrested today on suspicion of committing lewd acts on a child.

All 15 related articles »

LOS ANGELES ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CLOSES FOR SEX ABUSE INVESTIGATION: Miramonte Elementary School will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday for authorities to investigate a sex abuse scandal involving two teachers.

 

by Talia Ralph - Global Post | http://bit.ly/zcGFtU

Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Patrick Gannon (2nd L), Los Angeles Unified School District's Steve Zipperman (2nd R) and Gardena Police Chief Ed Medrano (L) hold a news conference. The LAPD and LAUSD district officials are closing Miramonte Elementary School this week to investigate allegations of sexual abuse. (Kevork Djansezian/AFP/Getty Images)

February 6, 2012 17:53  -- LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles elementary school will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday as authorities investigate a sex abuse scandal involving two teachers.

Miramonte Elementary School teachers Mark Berndt and Martin Springer were both arrested for allegedly sexually abusing their students. Officials are trying to learn more about what the school's other teachers may have known about the incidents, according to the Los Angeles Times.

• More from GlobalPost: Los Angeles teacher Mark Berndt charged with molesting 23 children

Mark Berndt, a veteran teacher at Miramonte, has been accused of feeding his students semen, blindfolding them and placing cockroaches on their hands and faces, and taking lewd photos. He was put on leave a year ago, and arrested on January 30 after a photo processor tipped off authorities, who found incriminating pictures of the incidents in Berndt's home.

Martin Springer was arrested on Friday, and is accused of fondling two girls, including one who was also allegedly abused by Berndt before being transferred into Springer's class when her parents filed complaints in 2008, KPCC reported. Both girls were approximately 7 years old when the incidents occurred, the Times reported.

Parents of Miramonte Elementary students celebrated the district's decision to close the school for two days this week, The Los Angeles Times reported.

“The school should be closed, but not just for two days,” Miramonte parent Graciela Garcia told the Times. She said she believed that all the school’s teachers should be investigated.

Berndt remains in jail on $23 million bail, and faces life in prison if he is found guilty, CBS News reported. Springer, 49, is being held on $2 million bail.

Investigators said they have not found any connection between the two scandals, other than that Berndt and Springer knew each other and took their classes on at least two joint field trips in the past 10 years, CBS reported.

Many parents say they are angry over how school officials have dealt with the abuse cases, KPCC reported.

“You trust the people that take care of your kids when they are in school. It’s unbelievable,” Beatrice Diaz, a parent of a second-grader who was in Springer's class, told the Times. “My son is saying, 'My teacher is on TV.' How do you explain that to your kid?”

John Deasy, Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, will hold a meeting with concerned parents at 6 p.m. Monday night at a high school near Miramonte, CBS reported. The scandal has brought national attention to the country's second-largest school district, which is reeling from the sexual abuse allegations.

The closing comes as the Los Angeles Police Department launches another sexual abuse investigation at Hamilton High School, KPCC reported. The LAPD is looking into allegations that a music magnet teacher, 59-year-old Vance Miller, showered naked with students at a local gym, LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Monday.

The department is looking into Smith after a former student reported that Miller showered with him and two other students when he was a 17-year-old junior, according to KPCC.

BUSING MONEY RESTORED: All districts cut $42 per student instead

By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess | http://bit.ly/ypguTX

2/02/12 :: With unaccustomed speed and bipartisanship, the Legislature restored a $248 million midyear cut to school transportation Thursday, agreeing to an alternative plan to spread the pain equally among all school districts by cutting funding by about $42 per student. Through his staff, Gov. Jerry Brown signaled that he’d sign SB 81.

The vote was 60 to 8 in the Assembly, with 12 legislators not voting, and 26 to 8 in the Senate, with 6 senators not voting. It was backed by the Education Coalition, consisting of the school boards and school administrators associations, the California Teachers Assn., and the state PTA.

In passing the budget last fall, legislators agreed to cut home-to-school transportation if revenue projections came up short in December, which they did. But districts that get the lion’s share of bus funding ­ – hundreds of dollars, even $1,000 per student in the case of a few small rural districts – howled that busing was indispensable, and there was no way they could reasonably cut elsewhere instead. A few indicated that a cut of that size could force them into bankruptcy. Brown and legislators recognized, albeit late, that they had created a political headache.

The average cut of $42 per student in funding for the state’s 1,042 districts equals 0.65 percent of districts’ revenue limit – the base funding they receive.

In his proposed 2012-13 state budget, Brown proposes cutting all funding for home-to-school transportation ­– $500 million. SB 81 doesn’t deal with that, but Stephen Rhoads, an education lobbyist active in the issue, said he took its passage as “as a guarantee that there will be a transportation program next year in some form.” Rhoads said he couldn’t predict whether there will be more or less money or whether it will be distributed differently.

Legislators now recognize that the formula for distributing bus money is outdated. The formula is based on what districts received years ago; high-growth districts since then have found their per-student reimbursement shrinking.

Brown has proposed folding most categorical programs into the revenue limit, starting next year, and then redistributing the money based on populations of disadvantaged students. But rather than include bus transportation in the mix, he cut the funding.

The Legislature could duplicate the action it took this week to restore the bus money, but that would require doubling the revenue limit cut for the entire year: $84 per student. More likely, it could add $500 million to the education budget, by reducing the $2.1 billion that Brown had earmarked for wiping out a short-term debt owed to the schools, known as deferrals. Over the next four years, Brown wants to eliminate $8 billion in deferrals owed to schools. Restoring bus money would stretch out the repayment.

VALUE-ADDED TEACHER EVALUATION ON TRIAL: A Groundhog Day hypothetical

from Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet in the Washington Post | http://wapo.st/yixgzY

Posted at 12:00 PM ET, 02/02/2012 :: This was written by David B. Cohen, who has been a teacher since 1993 and is in his 13th year of teaching in California public high schools. He is National Board Certified, and is associate director of the Accomplished California Teachers group.

This is part of a post that Cohen wrote on the group’s InterACT blog about value-added teacher evaluation in reaction to stories about a possible lawsuit in Los Angeles to force the Unified School District to use the value-added method of evaluating teachers. It uses student test scores to supposedly determine the “value” a teacher contributes to student achievement. Assessment experts say the method is highly unreliable, but that hasn’t deterred policymakers.

In the following, which is one of those laugh-while-you-cry pieces, Cohen puts the value-added evaluation method on trial. Literally.

By David B. Cohen

- High school English teacher and academic advisor at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA. - National Board Certified Teacher, Adolescent/Young Adult, English Language Arts

I’ve taken the liberty of dreaming up the court transcript ahead of time (using Q for the defense attorney’s questions and A for the plaintiff’s answers). Enjoy this cross-examination.

Q: You are demanding that LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] use measures of student growth in teacher evaluations, is that correct?

A: Yes.

Q: And you believe that student test scores are a measure of growth that would reflect teaching quality, correct?

A: Yes.

Q: If LAUSD were to adopt a policy that attributes the growth or lack of growth in student test scores to the student’s teacher, and uses the scores of all students to evaluate the teacher’s effectiveness, you would drop this lawsuit, is that correct?

A: Yes.

Q: How often are these tests administered?

A: Once per year.

Q: And the district has no way of knowing if the student’s performance on that day reflects the student’s ability or perhaps reflects some trauma, distress, boredom, distraction, or rebelliousness?

A: No.

Q: And for students who have changed schools, or changed teachers during the year, there’s no way to factor that into the analysis of data when a student simply shows up on one roster or another, right?

A: That could be adjusted.

Q: There’s no study that would guide you in how to do that with any accuracy, is there?

A: I don’t know.

Q: No evidence that a move at the mid-point of the year gives each teacher half the responsibility for the student’s learning, or that each week has a proportionate effect?

A: None that I know of.

Q: And would the degree of change in a certain classroom affect students in that classroom who had not been part of any change?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Does it seem likely that changing the students in a class would change the class itself and affect some of the students who had been there all along?

A: I guess so.

Q: But you would have no way of knowing which students were affected or how they were affected?

A: Not really, no.

Q: Now, if I were a high school English teacher, I would be responsible for teaching in four standards areas, but would the test cover all four of those areas?

A: No.

Q: How many does it cover?

A: Two.

Q: You’re including writing when you say “two” but in fact there’s no writing on the tests currently used, is there?

A: No.

Q: So more accurately, the test covers one out of the four standards areas?

A: Yes.

Q: Does the test cover every standard in reading?

A: No.

Q: So, you’re proposing basing a significant part of an English teacher’s evaluation, for example, on a test result that covers a small fraction of the standards?

A: It’s the only objective way.

Q: So your answer is yes?

A: Yes.

Q: By objective, you mean it’s the same for every student and teacher?

A: Yes.

Q: Does every teacher have an equal assignment, equal students, classes, and resources?

A: No.

Q: So, you do not concern yourself with objectivity in all of the factors affecting the teacher’s work, but you figure you can evaluate different teachers working with different students and different classes using the same test that covers only a fraction of their standards?

A: Yes.

Q: So is that an objective process for evaluation, or an arbitrary process with an objective element in it?

[Plaintiffs’ counsel objects to argumentative question. Judge upholds the objection.]

Q: Do the words “objective” and “fair” have the same definition?

A: I couldn’t say.

Q: I could give an objective geometry test to every student in an algebra class, but would that be fair?

A: Okay, I see. They have different meanings.

Q: So your claim that the test is objective doesn’t cover the question of fairness, does it?

A: But it is fair!

Q: Please answer the question. A claim of objectivity is different from a claim of fairness, correct?

A: Yes.

Q: So an objective test may be inappropriate for certain students and therefore unfair, no matter how objective?

A: I would say that the test is fair to everyone.

Q: Like a geometry test for algebra students?

A: Well, no.

Q: Does a student’s linguistic skill relate to their success in a test that requires use of language?

A: Of course.

Q: So a test given in an unfamiliar language might yield a result that reflects linguistic confusion rather than conceptual confusion, or poor teaching?

A: We could adjust for language in a teacher’s evaluation.

Q: In what way?

A: If the student is still learning English their scores could be separated out.

Q: What if a student did well on the test despite being new to the language?

A: Well, we can’t just use the scores that help the teacher. We have to be fair.

Q: You mean objective?

A: Yes.

Q: Because actually, it would be fair to use the results that are valid and exclude the results that are invalid. Are you suggesting that such a determination could be made for each student, or that we should come up with a single formula and stick to it?

A: Just use a single formula.

Q: So regardless of the student’s actual linguistic knowledge, you would suggest making assumptions based on a certain number of years for students to learn enough academic English.

A: That would be logical.

Q: No matter the variables in the student’s instruction in English or the amount of time it actually takes them to learn English?

A: It’s the only fair way.

Q: Fair, or objective?

A: Objective.

Q: Objective regarding the student’s knowledge and skill, or objective regarding only measures of time?

A: Time.

Q: Is it fair to use value-added measurements to rank teachers even when numerous studies show that it is a volatile measure with error rates exceeding 25%?

A: It would only be one of multiple measures.

Q: That wasn’t my question. Is it fair to use an error-prone measure?

A: It’s not fair to exclude student performance from evaluations.

Q: Your Honor, would you instruct the witness to answer the question?

A: I’ll answer. It may not always be fair in every case, but no method is perfect.

Q: You’re suing the Los Angeles Unified School District to compel them to use a teacher evaluation method that is prone to errors and unfair to perhaps a quarter of the teachers evaluated in this manner, is that correct?

A: Yes! The alternative is the status quo, which is intolerable.

Q: But there are thriving, high-quality schools around the U.S. and around the world that are not using value-added measures. Doesn’t that prove that there are alternatives to the LAUSD status quo that are something other than the remedy you seek to impose?

[Plaintiffs’ counsel objects to argumentative question. Judge upholds the objection.]

Q: Have you heard of the National Council for Measurement in Education, the American Psychology Association, the American Education Research Association?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you aware of their position on the lack of validity in using tests designed for one purpose and then used for another purpose?

A: More or less.

Q: I’m quoting from their joint position statement on this topic: “Tests valid for one use may be invalid for another. Each separate use of a high-stakes test, for individual certification, for school evaluation, for curricular improvement, for increasing student motivation, or for other uses requires a separate evaluation of the strengths and limitations of both the testing program and the test itself.” Does that sound familiar to you?

A: More or less.

Q: In other words, you’ve heard this argument before?

A: Yes.

Q: Is it fair to say that these are the three leading organizations for educational measurement and research?

A: I suppose so.

Q: Are you a professional organization for educational research and measurement?

A: No.

Q: Do you think it’s advisable, or even responsible, to ignore the policy position of these leading organizations?

A: But we know that teachers are the most important in-school factor on student performance!

Q: Okay, no argument there. But you have no basis upon which to argue against the validity issues raised in that quote, do you?

A: No.

Q: Now, taking up your contention that the teacher is the most important in-school factor, could you say most important out of how many factors?

A: No.

Q: You don’t know how many factors influence student performance?

A: No.

Q: If I threw out a number, like five, would you guess that it’s too low, too high, or about right?

A: That sounds too low.

Q: How about ten?

A: I don’t know, that might be right.

Q: Fifteen?

A: Maybe.

Q: Just hypothetically, could we proceed on the assumption there are ten factors in schools, other than teachers, that affect student performance?

A: Okay, yes.

Q: Would you expect every factor to have the same influence on every student, or would some factors have strong influences on one student and almost no influence on another student?

A: It would vary.

Q: If you wanted to design a fair formula, you would take those ten factors into account?

A: Yes.

Q: Even though you can’t say for sure how much each factor affects the student?

A: Yes.

Q: You can’t even say with certainty that a specific factor has any effect on a certain student or group of students?

A: No.

Q: So, let’s assume that each of those ten factors could play out in only two different ways: how many possible combinations do we have for each student?

A: Twenty.

Q: I’m sorry to correct your math, but actually, that would be ten-squared, or one-hundred possibilities.

A: Oh, yes, one hundred, I see.

Q: But we don’t know for sure how many factors to consider and what they are. And if we could actually identify fifteen variables instead of ten, and if each variable could play out in three different ways, would it surprise you to know that there would be 3,375 possible combinations?

A: That sounds like a lot, but you’re just playing with numbers.

Q: “Just playing with numbers.” I see. So just because something is true mathematically or statistically, it doesn’t necessarily translate into an actionable policy?

A: That’s not what I said.

Q: Of course you wouldn’t say that. Your case is predicated on the idea that because you can make value-added calculations that show some teachers are less effective than others, it therefore makes sense to use the numbers in policy that leads to the outcomes you want. Though again, the actual experts in educational measurement would warn against that, correct?

[Plaintiffs’ counsel objects to argumentative question. Judge upholds the objection.]

Q: That’s what you need to do if you use test scores and value-added measures in teacher evaluation, isn’t it? Play with the numbers? You would need to come up with a formula that makes certain assumptions about the effect of each factor, even though you can’t test your assumptions?

A: They’ve been researched!

Q: But you just said that we can’t assume factors are the same for each student – or did you mean that these students in this hypothetical school will have been researched before any formulas are applied to them?

A: No.

Q: Okay, to be fair, let’s assume that we can come up with a formula for each of these individual factors. Wouldn’t it also be necessary to know about the interactions of the variables?

A: What do you mean?

Q: Well, perhaps we can apply a statistical control for homelessness, another to control for the time of day that the student studies a certain subject, and another to control for the change from last year’s 50-minute class periods to this year’s 90-minute class periods. Is it likely that there is any research on the effects for homeless students in longer classes at different times of day?

A: No.

Q: So when we combine factors, we not only make assumptions about each one, but also assume that these factors do not influence each other in any way, is that right?

A: You can’t study every little thing.

Q: So, if this were a medicine, you’d be comfortable saying that we have plenty of science about the ingredients and we don’t need to study them in this particular combination in order to assume the effects the medicine will have?

A: I don’t know anything about medicine.

Q: Have you ever been a teacher?

A: No.

Q: Thank you. No further questions.