June 2008 Archives

I just came across this opinion piece, published in Monday's San Francisco Chronicle, making a case for homeschooling as a constitutional right that California parents should be able to exercise -- and retain.

Yesterday, of course, was when the California Court of Appeal here in Los Angeles was set to hear arguments in the ongoing legal debate surrounding homeschool and whether parents should be required to have teaching credentials in order to educate their kids at home.

What do you think, folks?

Read today's Daily Breeze for reporter Melissa Pamer's story about the temporary return to campus of a once-ousted elementary school principal.

"Delores Buettgenbach, who was head of Gulf Avenue Elementary School for 24 years until she was placed on paid administrative leave by the Los Angeles Unified School District last June, was celebrated a week before her retirement by dozens of teachers, parents and hundreds of her former students."

The festivities came a year after "Mrs. B," as Buettgenbach was known, was removed from her job amidst allegations of financial funny business that were later found to be unsubstantiated.

That's right folks, they're at it again. Trustees of the Centinela Valley Union High School District on Tuesday night will meet -- this is actually their regularly scheduled meeting, not a special one like last week -- to, among other things, adopt a 2008-2009 budget.

An interesting discussion could easily ensue, considering their fragile state of financial affairs and the week-old installation of a county-assigned fiscal advisor there. Said overseer will be in attendance at the board meeting, though I'm not yet sure whether he'll simply observe from the audience or sit on the dais and actually participate. My guess is the former, but we'll find out tomorrow.

The public session kicks off at 5:30 p.m., with a public hearing about the aforementioned budget scheduled for 7 p.m.

Ok, so I just read this little Associated Press piece, via the San Francisco Chronicle, and simply had to share it. It's not an education story, per se, but I can justify its inclusion by calling it a cautionary tale (which it is, and how!) from which one can learn and possibly save oneself such a mishap in a similar fashion to the woman featured herein.

Capiche?

Basically the story is about how this stranded hiker used her bra to signal rescuers and it totally worked! It's so McGyver, I love it. And if I'm ever stuck in the Bavarian Alps for three days I will definitely remember this trick.

For all you HBO subscribers: The network tonight is premiering a documentary about a troubled Baltimore high school that is having more than a little trouble meeting the benchmarks laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act.

A recent New York Times review of "Hard Times At Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card" says that the controversial legislation doesn't actually figure that heavily in the film that "isn't really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It's asking whether anything can."

More from Neil Genzlinger's preview: "[Sixty-six] percent of the Douglass educators are not certified, we're told. The school is running on substitutes and other emergency fill-ins.

And that is the bottom line for schools like this. Bureaucrats can make all the rules and set all the benchmarks they want, but none of it will change anything if no one can be found to do the hands-on work of teaching. As seen in this film, it's not just a thankless job; it looks disconcertingly as if it might be an impossible one."

Wow. I know what I'm watching tonight.

I came across this short entry in the blog of Ezra Klein, associate editor at lefty political mag The American Prospect, wherein he relates that the eighth-grade students (his stepsister among them) being promoted onto high school in a ceremony that he attended were presented with "a sample college application, complete with essay and resume forms."

"This, the principal said, was to get the kids thinking about what types of questions colleges would ask, so they could plan out their high school years accordingly."

Interesting idea! It of course incited multiple and myriad opinions from commenters to Klein's blog, some giving props to the unnamed school who did so and others lambasting the action.

What do you think? Let me know anytime.

Whew!

I say that collectively on behalf of all our area grads and parents and school peeps, who after all the hype and excitement and planning and actually commencing are no doubt relaxing now that graduation season has come to close.

And I say it too for our very own Daily Breeze staff of writers and photographers -- especially photographers -- who busted their you-know-whats to cover as many local commencements as possible and give South Bay students a little love in our pages.

Congrats to all and good luck wherever you're headed next.

But in the meantime, you can revisit the glory of your graduation day -- or that of your friends or family or whoever -- by checking out the Breeze's compendium of grad photos and related stories.

If you haven't read the "prom memories" thing on our graduation page, you should check it out. I just went to see if anyone had added to the list since its original posting. My favorite quotes when I was compiling the list were all the ones about the dresses, probably because I spent so much time agonizing over what to wear to mine.

This is my fave new quote that someone posted Monday:

In 1976 my budget for a prom dress was $20.00, buying a $100.00 dress and taking it back the next day and getting my money back, my Mom never new.
West High, 1976

Also, check out the photo galleries from this year's graduations around the South Bay. Our photographers have been knocking themselves out to get to as many graduations as possible. So far, they have posted galleries from 10 ceremonies and are planning to shoot several more. If we didn't get to yours this year, you can post your own pics on the grad page.

The Milken Foundation this afternoon announced its 2008 Milken Scholars -- who each receive $10,000 scholarships -- and five local students are on the list.

About-to-be Torrance High grad Diana Baik, who's bound for Johns Hopkins University; new Palos Verdes High alum Hong Ye (Sam) Mai, headed for UC Berkeley; plus Dora Duru (Stanford), Shahla Naimi (Yale) and Morris Vanegas (MIT), all new grads of CSU Dominguez Hills-housed California Academy of Mathematics and Science are among the 12 so selected.

The whole group with gather for a retreat in July, being held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where they'll meet and mingle with prior recipients and participate in panel discussions and workshops with foundation staff and various speakers.

Congrats, kids!

Last week we got an email from a reader wondering why no local news agencies had reported that Manhattan Beach's Mira Costa High School had suffered one or more fatalities (he wasn't sure the number) and seen one of its own students arrested in relation with whatever incident caused the death.

We hadn't heard anything about it, so I called over to Manhattan Beach PD, who quickly cleared it up: The day our worried reader heard of this hubub on his scanner was the very day local agencies and the school had teamed up on a drill run meant to hammer home what awfulness can result from drunk driving by simulating such a tragedy on campus.

The drill is called Every 15 Minutes and has become a popular program on high schools across the country. We ended up running a short "Ask Us" column wherein I informed the aforementioned reader and anyone else who may have been worried that the "fatality" was faux and the student was "arrested" for show.

Apparently the same sort-of recent event went too far down in Oceanside, where in El Camino High School's spin on the program many kids didn't know ahead of time that it was a simulation and positively freaked when police came on campus to report the drunk-diving deaths of a few of their peers.

A short chunk from an Associated Press story on the controversy:

"Classmates wept. Some became hysterical."

"A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving."

"As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far."

"At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

What do you think? Did they go too far or is shock and temporary trauma an effective way to teach the lesson without kids actually having to learn it the true hard way?

Write me anytime with your thoughts.

In my endless quest to find interesting education-flavored nuggets for you all to digest, I now and then stumble across other blogs in the genre, whether wonk-written or teacher-penned or student-run or otherwise.

Today's discovery (on the recommendation of my go-to ed blog, This Week In Education) is of the latter category.

Dubbed Students 2.0, it appears to be authored by about 9 different students from different states (and in one case from another country) and has of late touched on topics from philosophy to experiential learning to something called mini-term (wherein the student's school offered four-day sessions that encouraged teachers to "teach their passion).

One of their most recent posts, though, by a girl named Lindsea, addresses a concept being called edupunk, which she says is "sweeping the edublogosphere" and defines as "DIY education." She cites examples, courtesy of Wikipedia, including Legos, chalk and Moodle and trends like "students teaching their teachers how to use technology."

So apparently anything that at all turns traditional notions of education on its head qualifies as part of the edupunk movement.

Any edupunks lurking around here in the South Bay? If so, give a shout and let's talk. I'm going to continue my research herein, but as I just ran across this new-to-me-term, I wanted to toss the concept out there for y'all to nosh on until I can report back with more.

Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees will meet again today -- that's right, again today, I said -- in hopes of at last pushing through the fiscal recovery plan already a week overdue to the county.

The ever-ailing school system is hoping to stave off outside intervention in its financial affairs by immediately cutting about $3.8 million in expenses from its 2008-2008 budget.

After two meetings long meetings last week -- from which trustee Rocio Pizano was absent, for a family emergency, I'm told -- board members came to a 2-2 stalemate on the matter.

Rudy Salas and Frank Talavera are against the plan, saying it's vague and too heavily reliant on uncertainties (i.e., $500,000 in expected savings depends on an as-yet-unhired food-services director managing the deep-in-the-red cafeteria program into efficiency).

We'll see what happens today. The meeting is set for 3:30 p.m. in district headquarters in Lawndale.

Well happy new week, everybody.

How it got here so quickly, I'm not sure, but I guess when one is an education writer in the midst of graduation season, it's easy to get busy and find time flying by. Of course one week from now school will be out, things will be slow and I'll be pounding the pavement for good stories. Unlike now, when they're coming at me constantly, in bigger numbers than I can get to.

Anyhow, here are three tasty local news bites to whet your appetite until I get ramped back up:

*State Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell is set to be the commencement speaker at Torrance's South High School on Wednesday. Apparently his nephew attends there. Who knew?

*It looks like LAUSD is downgrading its plans for a new high school at the Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro. Previously proposed as a 1,215-student site, the agenda for an upcoming public meeting (June 24, 2 p.m.) of the district's facilities department says they're seeking to revise that figure -- and reduce the scope of the project, apparently -- to max out at 810 students.

*About-to-graduate Redondo Union High School student Aisha Sheffield has not missed a single day of school in the last 12 years -- a devoted pupil from kindergarten on -- according to her aunt, Michelle King, who emailed me. Impressive!

This story from the San Francisco Chronicle I think will prove interesting to many folks here, in light of recent losses at the polls by Hermosa Beach and Centinela Valley school districts.

I don't want to say too much, because you must find out for yourself. But here's just one teaser: Reporter Jill Tucker's lede goes like this: "Students in Alameda are getting a real life lesson this month of an old civics adage: Every vote counts."

Intrigued? Go read it, I say! Immediately!

If you're in the mood for a ribbon-cutting ceremony tomorrow, uber-exciting events that they usually are, LAUSD is throwing one Wednesday afternoon at Narbonne High in Harbor City, to show off the campus's fancy new athletic facility.

A new track and field, bleachers and restrooms are the highlights of the project paid for by funds from general-obligation bond Measure K.

Board member Richard Vladovic, local district Superintendent Linda Del Cueto and LAUSD facilities executive Guy Mehula will be on hand for the 2:30 p.m. unveiling.

Narbonne is located at 24300 S. Western Ave., in Harbor City.

Teacher and parent demands for the ouster of Dolores Street Elementary School (LAUSD/Carson) Principal Anna Barraza are continuing this week, with a public rally and protest scheduled for Wednesday at Scott Park.

The Daily Breeze two weeks ago covered the first official activity against Barraza, who's being called a "lemon principal" by United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing LAUSD educators.

Barraza has twice before been the subject of such outcries at prior campuses where she's worked -- the Riordan Primary Center and Dena Elementary.

UTLA says it's filed a combined 16 grievances and 2 interventions against her on behalf of those schools, but Barraza has never officially run the gauntlet of LAUSD's grievance procedure.

The principal herself previously told the Daily Breeze that it's common for principals to move campuses as they continue their careers and claimed that complaints about her -- "a belligerent management style, a seeming indifference to student safety and an unhderhanded and uncooperative attitude toward school stakeholders," says UTLA -- are just sour grapes from teachers resistant to change.

The Wednesday-scheduled (6:30 p.m.), UTLA-led "rally to remove" Barraza will be held at Scott Park, 23410 Catskill Avenue, in Carson. The union wants her bounced from Dolores before the school year ends next week.

The Monday night special session of Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees was a two-plus-hour affair -- standing-room-only at that -- that saw a financial advisor walk board members through a proposed, 15-part fiscal recovery plan.

Total savings -- or, more accurately, spending cuts -- would run to the tune of $3.8 million for the district that's basically been bleeding money for the better part of the last 15 years.

The plan's so-called "big ticket" items include $1.2 million in savings generated by raising the average student-to-teacher ratio by 1 student (a move tenatively agreed to by the teacher's union) and a $500,000 rollback in funding for the district's athletics programs.

A slew of other things are in the proposal -- like cutting classified overtime and several summer school classes -- but more on that later. Trustees tabled their full-out discussion and decision until tonight, when approval of the plan is again agendized in the regular meeting that kicks off at 6:30 p.m.

A board-approved recovery plan is due to the county asap (actually, it's technically due today). If no such approval is made, can the county's fiscal invervention team be on its way to Centinela Valley?

Time will tell. And soon.

Watch Thursday's Daily Breeze for more details.

Six Torrance teachers are among 90 educators from the Southern California region awarded cash grants from BP America's "A+ For Energy" program which awards teachers for "creative classroom, after-school, extra-curricular and summer activities involving energy education and conservation," according to a press release.

The lucky locals, their schools and their winning projects -- for which they'll score either a $5,000 or $10,000 cash grant -- are:

*Barbara Heughins | Van Deene Elementary | "Robotic Energy"

*Sue O'Donovan | South High | "Harnessing the Wind at South High"

*Kathleen Flynn | South High | "Exploring Solar Energy"

*Holly Evans | Hickory Elementary | "Think Green"

*Lorena Woo | Halldale Avenue Elementary | "Solar Scholar Club"

*Debbie Park | South High | "Energy Conservation Year 2: Using Media for Public Service Messages"

The flackage goes on to say: "BP will provide winning teachers with a scholarship to attend a three-day energy training conference, sponsored by BP and presented in partnership with the National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The all-inclusive scholarship will cover the cost of travel, meals, lodging and a kit of instructional materials (tools and resources for teaching energy activities) valued at $500."

And finally: Winning teachers will be honored at a special ceremony on Thursday, June 26 at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

Congrats, all!

An assortment of other recent education headlines I found interesting. Maybe you will too.

1. The New York Times had a short story Saturday about a federal audit of the nonprofit Teach For America. The gist: "Government auditors scrutinized $1.5 million in Teach for America spending, of a total of $6 million the group received in three government grants from 2003 through 2005. The group was unable to provide documents to support roughly half its claimed spending, $775,000 of the $1.5 million sampled, the report said."

2. The Los Angeles Times on Sunday ran this piece about the current turmoil surrounding the mayor of Denver's years-ago promise to find a way to fund college for Colorado kids who studied hard and gained entrance to an in-state school. Writes DeeDee Correll: "... the deal has soured for some students in the group: those who are illegal immigrants. Because they would be required by Colorado law to pay out-of-state tuition, it would cost much more to pay for their college educations."

3. And from the Las Vegas Sun, a nice feature about a school there -- Whitney Elementary, in East Vegas -- that has started providing its poorest kids services from haircuts to basic healthcare, hoping that if all their basic needs are met they'll be better able to learn. Impressive stuff.

Education headlines that appeared in the Daily Breeze over the weekend:

1. A scoop from reporter Beth Barrett at our sister paper, the Daily News: "Facing massive proposed state budget cuts, Los Angeles Unified schools chief David BrewerIII is weighing a mandatory, unpaid furlough program for all district workers - including teachers."

2. From our top-notch intern Catherine Cheney, this feature on the San Pedro High surf team, which was waiting to hear its fate: "The district (LAUSD) had planned to cancel P.E. surf credits for ninth- and 10th-graders in the fall of 2010. Without the underclassmen, the surf teams at Narbonne and San Pedro - the only two LAUSD schools in the South Bay Surf League - would likely be disbanded."

3. I wrote about Redondo Beach resident Lisa Youngworth, who graduated El Camino College on Friday alongside the twin sons she raised solo.

4. City reporter Kristin Agostini wrote about Redondo Beach's decision to prohibit the ongoing use, by the company Community Auto Display, of the South Bay Adult School parking lot as a display and sale area for cars. The business effort was also a money-maker for Redondo Beach Unified, which received rent from the company and a portion of the proceeds.

5. Today's School Notebook feature offers highlights from last week's science competition hosted by Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo.

Also in the "How are we going to come up with as much cash as we need?" category: I'm told that when the Hermosa Beach City Council tomorrow night takes up the issue of the city's budget, a slew of parents and teachers from both View and Valley schools (the two campuses that comprise the tiny Hermosa Beach City School District) will appear to ask the municipality for money.

Sort of.

They're not going in to make demands, per se, but only to ask for council's assistance in managing the budget crisis that has almost every district in the state begging for financial mercy of some form.

The Hermosa district, of course, just like the earlier-mentioned Centinela Valley, was hoping to pass a parcel tax to help fund programs that may otherwise face extermination. Their measure scored only some 46 percent approval with voters (it needed 66 percent to win).

The Hermosa Beach City Council meets at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

The trustees of uber-cash-strapped Centinela Valley Union High School District are holding a special meeting tonight with just one big item on the agenda: Approving a financial recovery plan.

The school system by tomorrow must submit to the Los Angeles County Office of Education its to-do list for getting back on track money-wise. Interim Superintendent Jose Fernandez last week told me that they need to cut about $3.5 million immediately to be solvent for next fall.

Centinela had been hoping for a parcel tax measure to help make up a big chunk of their deficit. The effort flamed out in last week's election, by garnering a majority vote (about 56 percent) but not the two-thirds approval it needed to pass.

Tonight's special session -- open to the public, natch -- gets underway at 5:30 p.m. in the board headquarters located on Inglewood Ave., behind Lawndale High School.

An insider who shall here remain nameless guessed the meeting would be "possibly long and probably nasty." (The newest board members and two of the three holdovers haven't exactly been getting along so well.)

Regardless, it should be interesting to see what gets cut and what gets saved. Everything from salary reductions to eliminating athletic programs have been floated as within the realm of possible reductions.

There are three money-oriented school measures up in local elections tomorrow: Hermosa Beach City Schools' parcel tax, Centinela Valley Union High School District's parcel tax and Hawthorne School District's $20-million general-obligation bond.

The parcel taxes require two-thirds approval for passage; the bond needs just a 55-percent majority.

Do you think they'll all win, all fail, or will the final result be a combination of the two? I'm inclined to think it's option C, but I've definitely made erroneous predictions in past elections.

Time will tell. In the meantime, feel free to tell me what you think!

In fact, green is a lot more than that. It's become a movement all its own, of ever-spreading proportion, as everyone and their mother is embarking on efforts to "go green."

Case in point: I even heard today on NPR, where they were discussing the launch of some new Discovery cable network that's totally green-focused but with a Hollywood angle (i.e., rapper Ludacris in some reality show about going green?), that Hummer, gas-guzzling monstrosities that they were, will be advertising there because the company has "green messages" even though it's not so perfectly green itself. Interesting.

But anyway, my whole point here is actually to give props to a group of Torrance teens, homebase: South High, who are making a local push to eradicate plastic and paper shopping bags by encouraging folks to use reusable totes.

Their campaign, Totes4Torrance, is the brainchild of students in South's environmental science program, which is working on a variety of projects aimed at aiding the community in some way.

I don't yet know how this particular project will unfold, but the students say they will soon hold a rally at the South campus to bolster their visibility.

Good luck! And FYI, I'm already a convert to the reusable-bag thing. Totally into it.

There are something like 12,000 names of grads, 94 bios of valedictorians and factoids about graduation from A to Z. We've been busy people getting that thing ready for you.

In the meantime, check out the graduation Web page. It's got dates and times for all the high school graduations in the South Bay, plus quotes from readers that we got during our online poll. Add your advice for graduates and your favorite prom memories if you missed your chance before.

It will also have photo galleries from our staff and from readers, if we can inspire you to upload some...

Ok, folks, for those of you who didn't read the Breeze over the weekend (which is very, very few of you I'm sure), here's a summary of school-related stories that appeared in print and respective links to each online:

1. Principal Anna Barraza, who since fall has been leading Carson-based Dolores Street Elementary School, was the subject of picketing and protests on Friday. The school's teachers and many parents say she's a lemon who should be squeezed off campus; Barraza rebuts that the teachers are just afraid of change. Check it.

2. Crime reporter Larry Altman had an update on the fate of a former Wilmington Middle School vice principal who was accused of inappropriately touching a 14-year-old student.

3. I put together one story previewing two issues in tomorrow's election: the Hawthorne School District's $20-million bond attempt and Centinela Valley Union High School District's parcel-tax effort. Both will affect many of the same voters, since both districts have schools inside Hawthorne city limits.

4. Our colleague Connie Llanos from sister paper the Daily News did this feature about veterans finding the GI Bill isn't so much living up to its promise.

5. And finally -- five stories should be plenty to get you going -- our School Notebook piece today is about St. Lawrence Martyr school third-grader Katie Kaessinger's almost accidental raising of more than $6,000 for earthquake-relief efforts in China. Sweet kid, sweet story. Awwww...

So I've been away for a bit ... not away away, as in out of town and not at work, but away from the blog for most of the last couple weeks, so slammed have I been with stories and other things.

But suddenly, at the end of last week, I get an email from someone in Westchester (David, thank you, David) reminding me it had been several days since I've posted and all the sudden it hit me: There actually are people who read this thing!

And so I resolved to get back on track, starting today.

New items to come shortly, peeps, swear!