By Miki Jackson and Laura Gutierrez | Guest Commentary in CityWatch | Vol 8 Issue 43
June 1, 2010 -- More than a decade of work with Northeast Los Angeles communities to plan, fund, design, build, and open a Satellite Community College Campus of Los Angeles City College at the historic Van de Kamps Bakery has been trashed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District.
A year ago, Trustee Sylvia Scott-Hayes privately rejoiced to LACCD staff that the Van de Kamps Community Steering Committee was shut down and she did NOT want any further engagement of the community – people from her own neighborhood.
She and others at LACCD had another vision and it did not include the community Van de Kamps was intended to serve.
The Mayor and LACCD Board members like Sylvia Scott-Hayes say they know “better” than the community what we need.
And what we apparently need is to take the brand new $72 million community college campus away from Northeast Los Angeles minority communities and instead offer short-term certificate training programs to ex-gang members, recently released criminal offenders, criminal record expungement classes, and similar unemployment office-type services to thousands of people from all over the City.
The Van de Kamps campus is about to become a perverse type of “magnet school” for the most desperate of job seekers in Los Angeles – many with a criminal record.
At the May 26, 2010 Board meeting, just prior to approving this plan, Scott-Hayes gave the virtual “finger” to her own community by falsely claiming that the state budget crisis justifies LACCD grabbing the campus away from the competent LA City College faculty and handing the buildings to these very narrowly-focused workforce programs pushed by the Mayor.
Scott-Hayes knows she is tossing in the trash can multiple economic feasibility plans for Van de Kamps that are not dependent upon state funding during the current crisis.
There is a way to operate it without dependency on the state’s budget, but Scott-Hayes stubbornly refuses to acknowledge its existence. So instead false claims about the impact of the budget crisis flow from her lips.
The loss of the Northeast Satellite Community College Campus began on July 15, 2009, over strenuous objections from the representatives of Northeast Los Angeles organizations in the Van de Kamps Coalition.
On that day, openly endorsed by Deputy Mayor Larry Frank, Scott-Hayes and fellow board members Mona Field and Georgia Mercer led the effort to hand off a brand new community college classroom building to the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools – a private non-profit entity on whose advisory board Richard Riordan sits.
The Alliance Charter School lease will pour cash into LACCD’s coffers to allow the District to offer community college classes at other locations across the county but not at Northeast Los Angeles. Although LACCD promised the voters, in return for approval of bond measures, it would open a community college campus in Northeast, it is to be snatched away by the Mayor in another appalling and crooked deal.
Apparently, Northeast LA, which has a history of incompetent and shameful neglect by these same Board members, shall continue to be discriminated against in the use of our own bond funds.
Our young adults are not worthy of a full program of credit and non-credit community college classes taught elsewhere (including some Workforce activities).
We will be expected to continue to pay the taxes on our property but that money will be used to open community college facilities in other parts of town. This disparate impact of services offered by LACCD is discriminatory.
So there will be for at least five years, and probably much longer, a charter high school that has no business whatsoever being located at this taxpayer-funded community college site.
Could the Alliance High School go somewhere else to clear the way for community college courses for the intended beneficiaries of the campus? You bet.
Will Alliance leave? If you just stepped into a $24 million new classroom building built by the taxpayers for someone else who had been pushed out for you, would you want to move? Hell no. Life is so sweet at the VDK!
But as the sad sack history of LACCD political intrigue will soon demonstrate, the Alliance Charter High School and the parents of the children there are about to get a rude awakening. The adaptive re-use of the second building, the historic Van de Kamps Bakery building, is almost complete. And Trustees Sylvia Scott-Hayes and Mona Field have a surprise for the parents.
They are pushing a City of Los Angeles lease of this building, located a few feet from the charter high school, to improperly install more non-community college activities.
And they are trying to hide from the public the target beneficiaries of these programs: expungement classes for former criminal offenders, including sexual offenders; job search computer terminals for the most desperate low-skilled workers of the City; the training of solar panel installers to be shuttled into the ever-growing Department of Water and Power union control of IBEW 18 and “boss” Brian D’Arcy; and similar health care programs in the County Health Department under the union control of SEIU.
We and the communities of Northeast LA support and value the workforce and second opportunity programs being funded by a massive infusion of funds from the Federal government.
These programs are properly placed at more than 18 Worksource locations throughout the county including some a mile down San Fernando Road from Van de Kamps.
None of those Worksource centers are immediately adjacent to or in the same buildings where young ninth grade high school students are present. They will be at Van de Kamps.
We wonder if the parents of the students of Alliance High School have been told who are the target users of the historic Van de Kamps building. Are they comfortable with such a configuration? Are they demanding answers about who thought up such a plan? Do they know it was the Mayor and LACCD officials? Will they cheer when Villaraigosa shows up for the inevitable photo op or will he be booed as happens so often these days?
And what are the taxpayer/voters of Northeast Los Angeles thinking as they write their check to the County Tax Collector?
They already know that LACCD staff illegally used $7.1 million of community college bond funds to DESTROY CLASSROOMS at this site so that the Mayor’s program administrators could have their own private executive administrative office space in the bakery building.
Are they wondering if more competent candidates to replace Sylvia Scott-Hayes and Mona Field will throw their hats in the ring?
The Van de Kamps Coalition is not going to rest until this campus is properly used by the LACCD for those it is intended to benefit.
(Miki Jackson and Laura Gutierrez are members of the Van de Kamps Coalition … www.VanDeKamps.org ) -cw
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