Showing posts with label LAUSD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LAUSD. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Letter to the Editor: School Districts Ask Parents to Front the Costs

 


(Response to California Schools Are Going Broke -- No Surprise There!)

Mr Schaper-

I read your article on California school financing today. and based on the content I felt I should share a couple of anecdotes from my past (although you may already be familiar with both these examples)-

My daughter attended the Palos Verdes School district for 11 years and graduated from Pennisula High in 2016. During that time I had two interactions with the district that clearly defined the district's overall priorities.

The first occurred when I called the District office to register my daughter as a new student. After a couple rings, the automated "phone tree" offered several options to choose from. The first option stated "If you are a teacher with a payroll issue, please press 1." I found it quite telling that the number one district phone priority was staff payroll issues.

The second occurred anytime my wife or I called my daughter's school to report her absent due to illness. Each time the answering machine provided directions on how to properly report our child's abscence, including a requst that we write a check to cover the lost revenue related to our childs abscence. I forget the exact amount but it was around $90 a day. I always laughed at this silly request, but once again it demonstrated the district priorities regarding my daughter's education.

As I said, you may have already heard these stories, but if not I thought it was worth my time to share these real world examples of California school district policies.

Thank you,

Dave Skinner

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Mr. Skinner:

Thank you so much for your letter.

The phone tree anecdote I have never heard before. It sounds par for the course, sadly.

Teachers' unions hold incredible political sway over school districts, which is a crime, since most of the teachers don't live in the district; therefore, it's not their taxes paying for the schools!

Regarding the school's arrogant request that you compensate them for your daughter's absence, I have heard similar stories, and they all need to be reported.

Of course, the wealthier, higher-performing school districts like Palos Verdes USD are getting the shaft when it comes to state funding, so of course the district has to ask parents to chip in. I live in the South Bay (Torrance!), so I am all too aware of the Ed Foundations needed to help districts cover costs.

It's so unfair!

Arthur Schaper

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

LAUSD: Morally and Financially Bankrupt

 


Los Angeles Unified School District is having a hard time paying the bills, teaching the kids, and thus keeping its doors open.

Clearly, the administrators, bureaucrats, and the elected Board of Trustees don’t handle addition and subtraction all that well. The district is failing basic math, and not just for the students.

According to ABC News Los Angeles, LAUSD is on the brink of bankruptcy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District could run out of money within about a year and is showing severe signs of financial distress, according to county education authorities.

 

The nation's second-largest school district, which serves more than half a million students, faces possible insolvency, prompting the Los Angeles County Office of Education to take action.

 

The district's last student population estimate listed 497,105 enrollees. That’s LESS than half a million. Even ABC News is having number troubles.

 

 

What happened, and what could happen if the district doesn’t get its act together?

 

Officials cited massive union contracts estimated to cost more than $1 billion annually, along with declining enrollment and reduced state funding, as factors contributing to a growing deficit and the possibility of state oversight.

 

"Worst case scenario is the state takes over, and this goes under receivership under the state, and that takes a long time to get out of, and it is really hard to maintain any control over curriculum, over class size," Bacall said.

 

I am shocked---SHOCKED— (not!) that the school district is going belly up, and the parents are taking their students out.

The warning signs had been blaring for years.

The usual suspects cannot be ignored, and are easy to catalogue:

·         Plummeting Enrollment

·         Rising Inflation

·         Excessive Pensions and Salary Costs

·         Administrative bloat with Diminished Transparency and Oversight.

·         Lawsuit payouts

The biggest killer, obviously, is the plummeting enrollment. Los Angeles Unified kids aren’t learning, that’s for sure. According to US News and World Report, math proficiency scores have been plummeting across all grades. Reading scores show some progress from elementary to high school, but less than half of LAUSD high schoolers are proficient.

In the real world, companies without customers close down. In perverse contrast, government institutions get their money, whether they serve or not.

And LAUSD is not serving the public interest.

On top of that, LAUSD schools are not even safe. The students routinely run into abuse and harm from their peers—and sometimes their teachers! The rising rates of violence are frequently on the news. The feds could pull their funding because of the rising number of predator teachers who get transferred instead of incarcerated!

Getting a bad education from LAUSD was expected, but the student population was still relatively high.

Twenty years ago, I was a French teacher in South Gate, in a new school built on the site of an old General Motors plant. New school, lots of students (almost 3,000!), and there still weren’t enough classrooms. I had 45 students in one class! I could barely move around the room, and some students feared for their safety if there was a fire. When I threatened to call the fire marshal, the union rep leaned on the assistant principal, who moved three students out and dumped them in a P.E. class—those poor teachers had to deal with 70 students per period!

 

See how only three students were removed. Not much help there! Notice the bureaucratic hustle to get something done, too.

 

Fast forward to now, and LAUSD high schools, on average, manage around 1,000 students. Some of the schools should have been closed by now!

 

What changed the student population, then, if the bad education wasn’t enough? The dam broke with the COVID outbreak, which ended parental non-involvement. COVID-19 may have shut down the schools, but the whole ordeal opened the eyes of parents throughout the state. They saw the left-wing garbage their children were forced to learn. They saw the bad curriculum, the lack of attention to detail, integrity, and success. Los Angeles parents had had enough, and they voted with their feet, sometimes moving their kids to local districts (Downey, Torrance, Wiseburn Unified in the LAX-area are some notable examples), or they just left the state entirely.

 

COVID was a tipping point for another reason. Five years ago, I joined LAUSD teachers and parents protesting the outrageous health mandates from the district to “protect the kids.” Political affiliation or ideological leanings didn’t matter to all concerned attendees. Employees, students, and parents across the district protested in front of 333 South Beaudry, demanding that the district rescind its onerous vaccine mandates and mask rules and keep the schools open!

During the main rally after our march around the district office, teachers complained about the increased burden of contending with discipline issues and health demands. Then one of the students addressed the crowd, and her comments worked out to something like this: She lamented all the woke nonsense being shoved down her throat. She was tired of hearing all the race nonsense. She was tired of learning about the LGBT agenda and sitting through all the sexual diversity displays. Her summation was crystal clear about LAUSD, that they were not teaching anything, and then they make them wear these stupid masks, too!

Despite the rallying cry of parents and teachers, the district kept cracking down on the holdout teachers, staff, and students who had refused the jab. Facing the dim prospect of never entering the classroom again if they refused the dubious poke, students left.

The district didn’t care. They were looking for absolute obedience from the rank and file. If you didn’t step up, you got the boot.

And the teachers union—ULTA (United Teachers of Los Angeles)—didn’t care.

Five years later, their wicked, progressive partisanship could not be clearer. They don’t focus on education. They focus on leftist politics and progressive activism. In 2025, I was stunned by the large number of UTLA teachers protesting at Elon Musk’s Tesla headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. Didn’t they have more important things to do, like grading papers, preparing lessons, and contacting parents?

Their most pressing concern was stopping federal cuts to public education and the Department of Education. What they refuse to talk about—and this returns to the bureaucracy issue—is that public education could accomplish great things for students and parents with half the overhead, more accountability, lots of school choice, and efficient hiring and firing practices.

UTLA shouts “DOA!” at all of these reforms.

And the parents say, “CU Later.”

And now LAUSD announces that they’re broke.

Frankly, this is a fitting end for one of the largest school districts in the country. This kind of disruption, the cold equations of supply and demand, will do more to clean out the left-wing corruption that has marred states like California and New York while also limiting (and perhaps one day) shutting down the inordinate power of the National Education Foundation and the attending teachers unions across the country attached like tentacles to this destructive interest group.

LAUSD has been morally bankrupt for a long time, much of it from a corrosive teachers' union, inept and cowardly politicians, and misplaced priorities. Now their fiscal bankruptcy has come, and not a moment too soon.

Saturday, August 6, 2022

CALLED IT: LA City Council Cracking Down on Homeless Because of LAUSD Plummeting Enrollment


Why is the LA City Council taking these drastic measures to curb homeless encampments around LAUSD schools and daycare centers?

It's not all hearts and flowers, good will and generosity. It's a cold necessity to keep LAUSD from imploding due to the plummeting student enrollment.

Check out LA City Council President Nury Martinez' comments on this issue:

Reality bites, and it is biting Los Angeles hard.

Government schools are not safe for kids anymore, that's for sure.

On many fronts, it will take years before the full toll of the coronavirus pandemic and the responses to it is understood.

The impact on education and the children who experienced learning loss due will certainly be something to keep an eye on.

Thomas Peele recently reported for Edsource on the findings of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho about the extent of public school enrollment declines over the last two years.

“California’s K-12 enrollment decline of more than 270,000 students since the pandemic began is largely attributable to people leaving the state, not enrolling children in transitional kindergarten or kindergarten, or deciding to home-school their children but failing to file the paperwork to account for them,” Peele reported.

For LAUSD, the biggest school district in the state and one of the biggest in the country, this decline merely hastened an ongoing decline in enrollment.

“The district has 58% of the student population it had at its peak in the early 2000s, now at 430,000 students,” Peele notes.

The disruption to the education of students across the state cannot be understated, despite United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz’s absurd claim that learning loss doesn’t exist.

LAUSD cannot lie about it. Everyone knows that LAUSD is in full free-fall.

Students missed out on the wide range of learning opportunities school allow, including socialization, and had to endure often subpar remote learning arrangements.

And the teachers unions didn't care.

California’s prolonged closure of in-person education didn’t help things. Nor did it help that California’s K-12 system is already among the worst performing in the nation. Since even before the pandemic, most students in California’s K-12 system couldn’t read and do math at grade level.

K-12 Education is a crock in California. It's base indoctrination, nothing more.

Meanwhile, increasing portions of education budgets will be going not to educating students but to cover pension debt for public school employees.  The ongoing trend of increased payments for pension debt and other obligations versus declining enrollment makes for a challenging fiscal situation and a challenging situation to ensure the K-12 system properly serves the needs of students.

The extra money was never about the kids. Ever.

No wonder people are leaving the system.

And now there are studies sounding the alarm on rising school violence. (Click here)


Saturday, July 30, 2022

More Winning: LAUSD Losing Students, Losing Money, Losing Parents, Losing Power to Indoctrinate and Harm

Loser Albert Carvalho of LAUSD
by way of Miami-Dade County, Florida

Working with MassResistance, I have been privileged to work with parents all over the United States. I even connected with a number of activists in Miama-Dade County, who had been fighting against their countywide school district earlier this year.

Miami-Dade County schools wanted to push all kinds of LGBT perversion in the children. They even wanted to replace Hispanic Heritage Month with LGBT History Month. Disgusting.

The parents also told me that their school district superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, was hired by LA Unified School District!

Wow, what a small world. 

Things are not working out so well for the new hire in Downtown Los Angeles, either. Check out this report from EdSource:

Enrollment decline: LAUSD's Carvalho says families leaving the state or choosing to home-school

Where have all the students gone?

They have fled from the poisonous, decrepit, failed system that is government-run education in Los Angeles County. That's what!

California’s K-12 enrollment decline of more than 270,000 students since the pandemic began is largely attributable to people leaving the state, not enrolling children in transitional kindergarten or kindergarten, or deciding to home-school their children but failing to file the paperwork to account for them, the head of the state’s largest school district and other experts said Sunday.

The pandemic allowed parents to see what their children were REALLY learning in the classroom. Parents from all over Los Angeles County alone showed me all kinds of terrible lessons that the SJWs disguised as teachers were pushing on their kids.

The fact that learning was Zoomed into the home gave parents unprecedented access to learn what their children were taking in, and these revelations helped parents rise up against all kinds of perverse lessons and curricula, including Critical Racist Theory, Critical Perv Theory (LGBT, Queer, etc.)

“In Los Angeles, in a very, very obvious and evident way, the greatest loss was in (transitional) kindergarten and kindergarten students,” LA Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told a gathering of education journalists.  “You have to really accept that parents made a decision, ‘I’m not going to send my kid to pre-k or kindergarten.'”

Notice how this report makes it seem as the parents' decision was unthinking, unfeeling, or arbitrary. The truth is that parents are taking into account the long-term needs of their children, and they don't want them to suffer in a pandemic-driven school system that puts the desires of government employees and politicians ahead of children and their parents.

Regardless of where the students ended up, their learning has been harmed, Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee said. Dee’s research described how the youngest students were most affected by not returning to school following Covid. His work was highlighted in a collaboration report that included EdSource, The New York Times and Big Local News, a data journalism project at Stanford.

Not sure what to think of this statement at first glance. How do academics measure real educational achievement nowadays? The metrics for assessing student performance in homeschools and home-school co-ops deserve more attention and a different kind of metric, I think, since it's about more than mere test scores.

“Enrollment data shows a disruption that students are experiencing, and those disruptions matter because research literature shows switching schools, particularly in a reactive manner, impacts development,” Dee said.

The disruptions are the fault of school districts and the administrators who shut students out of their education. Don't blame the parents!

And “missing out on early childhood educational experiences can be really consequential,” Dee added.

Kids are still missing out because in too many districts, they are still required to wear masks. Covering up a child's mouth impairs their speech and cognitive development. It's just so vile!

Across California, the number of students enrolled in the public school system dropped below 6 million this year for the first time in two decades. As districts navigated the sudden shift to virtual learning amid the pandemic, declines steepened as many families faced extra barriers, considered alternatives to the public school system or chose to delay enrollment for their youngest learners.

These barriers didn't come out of nowhere. These barriers are the result of selfish politicians and bureacrats--and teachers--who put their wants ahead of the needs of children. No, adult teachers do not need to wear masks, and NO, they have no right to demand that the students in their classrooms wear masks, either. They were perfectly capable of teaching without all the COVID-19 restrictions and regulations. A lot of greedy teachers unions and their enablers wanted to milk the government systems for as much taxpayer dollars as possible without having to work.

The enrollment declines, both in California and nationally, are going to lead to fiscal impacts and school closures in the years ahead, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

GOOD!

“You’re going to have to sell buildings when they become empty. You’re going to have to exit staff because you won’t need the number of teachers that you have,” Domenech said. “Parents didn’t want their children in school because they were afraid.”

GOOD! And they have only themselves to blame. This is some of the best news I have read yet, especially considering how difficult it is for parents to get pro-student responses from school districts, administrators, and teachers. They brought this mess on themselves, and they deserve to suffer from it.

But, he added, the impact of the pandemic on students is profound.

“The whole virtual learning experience was a fiasco because school districts were not prepared for virtual learning,” Domenech said. Nationally, there’s “a pulling away of students from the public school system because of the impact of Covid.” But he said it’s unclear how many of the students will return.

Virtual learning is that, virtual, i.e. not real. Children need constant contact and interaction with their teachers and peers to improve their learning and development.

The three men spoke Sunday afternoon at the national conference of the Education Writers Association in Orlando, Florida.

In Los Angeles, enrollment has been steadily declining for two decades. The district has 58% of the student population it had at its peak in the early 2000s, now at 430,000 students.

Los Angeles Unified is one of the worst school districts in the country. The learning outcomes are terrible, there is no accountability, teachers and administrators have a long record of ignoring, enabling, or even enacting abuse against students. The politics of the school board, the teachers union, the administrators, and the state legislature has created a hostile, untenable situation in which constant rancor is the norm, not the exception. Worst of all, the needs of the students is completely ignored.

But data shows those students did not migrate in large numbers to private and charter schools, the superintendent said. Charter schools in the district also had an enrollment decline of about 2% during the pandemic, he said.

Charter schools are going woke, too, and parents are breaking away from that mess, too. Charter schools alone are not the solution. School choice will impose competition on all schools, certainly, but most importantly curricular integrity and 

LAUSD’s enrollment decline has only increased since the pandemic hit. The district lost “9,000 kindergartners when the pandemic hit,” Carvalho said. “That’s a huge, a huge number.”

The district has hired people to go into neighborhoods to try to track down missing students and interview their parents, he said, describing a massive push in which he and other top administrators have joined others to try to keep track of 30 children each.

If this does not sound creepy to you, I don't know what to tell you. The school district spent more money that it does not have to hire people to "track down missing students." TRACK DOWN?! What is this? Now school districts are extending their police-state machinations outside of the classroom and pressuring/bullying parents! We all know where this is leading: these observers, "trackers" are going to find out whether the parents are providing any kind of education. If they think that the level of education does not meet their "standards," the CPS can come in and take the kids away. This is just awful.

Every parent who gets a visit from these trackers must slam their door in their faces and tell them to get off  their property.

In some cases, he said, district workers have found that undocumented families left the country during the pandemic “because there was no opportunity to work. The kids left with the families. And they left by the thousands.”

More good news! Illegal aliens are leaving the country. LAUSD worked so hard to attract illegal aliens, because for that corrupt district, it was never about love of California, the county, or the country; it was all about raking in more taxpayer dollars based on the attendance disbursements. This is beyond disgusting.

In other instances, he added, families left California for other states such as Florida “because of political ideology and lower taxes. If they had the means, parents made decisions.”

There! Finally someone has the guts to put in print that California sucks, and the Democrats own these failures.

They went to another state where “their child could go to a school that was more aligned with their own beliefs in terms of medicine and in terms of schooling.”

And let's not forget the fact that Florida opened up their schools throughout the entire season. They refused to shut down the schools, and they banned school districts from forcing students to wear masks. Best of all, Florida weathered the COVID-19 spread with little trouble and enjoyed comparable, if not lower rates of infection compared to hard-core lockdown blue states.

Perhaps the biggest problem in figuring out the decline student by student is the lag in parents letting the district officially know they have decided to home-school their children by filing an affidavit with school officials.

“Parents are taking their time to file the documents,” he said.

The parents should be more churlish. They should not have to tell anyone anything. Of course, the problem for the last seventy-plus years is that school districts have their parens patriae role, i.e. they can assert a limited parental role when the child is outside of the classroom.

Statewide, during the height of the pandemic, a record 35,000 families had filed an affidavit with the state to open a private home school, but the numbers dropped the following year, according to California Department of Education records. That level is still much higher than the 15,000 affidavits filed in the years prior to the pandemic.

Let's hope for more private schools popping up all over the state of California. No one in their right mind should want their children to suffer in a decrepit, underperforming government school.

According to LAUSD’s enrollment analysis conducted as a part of Carvalho’s 100-day plan that launched when he became superintendent in February, LAUSD has seen the most significant declines by grade at the elementary school level and the most significant declines geographically among west and central local districts over the last six years.

The spread of enrollment decline is really good news, because it goes to show that this decline is not just in supposedly white neighborhoods. Central sections of Los Angeles Unified have predominantly black and Hispanic populations. Parents care about their kids, period. It has nothing to do with skin color or income level. Parents care about their kids, and no amount of cultural marxist wrangling can change that.

The district has also noticed that the largest drops have been among middle-class families, but that analysis does not take into account the students who left to attend the City of Angeles virtual school during the pandemic.

WOW! Notice the journalistic sleight of hand here. More like a "slight," indeed, insulting poor and working-class families, as if they do not care about their children at all. Most of the kids who were the most affected by the virtual learning were no doubt poor and working class families, since it was much harder for them to have one parent at home to supervise the children during their in-home Zoom lessons.

LAUSD doesn’t consider private schools a large factor in its enrollment decline because local private school enrollment has also been on the decline for the past few years, dropping more than 6% since 2017. Reflective of the national trend, homeschooling in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan statistical area doubled to 8% in 2020.

Homeschooling has become so much easier because of the wide availability of resources via the Internet, social media, and trading applications online. What was a difficult transition for many parents twenty or even ten years ago has become so much easier because of the wide array of curricular choices and programs online and via homeschool co-ops.

Final Reflection

There is so much winning following the steady implosion of government school enrollment around the country. For decades, the school districts have been failing students and insulting parents. Bureaucrats, administrators, and politicians have put the demands of special interests ahead of the needs of children. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed parents past the breaking point,  and they finally rose up demanding the best for their kids. They do the right thing to the degree that they can homeschool their children AND deprive the local school districts of any further funding.


Friday, March 13, 2020

School's Out for the Next Two Weeks

The LAUSD Superintendent announced that schools throughout Los Angeles Unified School District will be closed for the next two weeks.

Last year, LAUSD schools were shut down for eight days because of labor actions.

Now, kids will be missing ten more days of school. Teachers will be conducting lessons and assigning homework via the Internet.

Could this temporary shutter shut down government schools throughout the state of California for good?

One can only hope!

Saturday, March 23, 2019

VICTORY: Huntington Park Corrupta Graciela Ortiz Shut Out in Bid for LAUSD School Board


Here's another happy victory for Los Angeles County residents, even though there is so little to celebrate at this time.

After LAUSD School Board Member Ref Rodriguez was forced to step down for campaign finance violations, the seat opended up a multi-candidate free for all.

One of the candidates running to replace Ref Rodriguez?

Graciela Ortiz of Huntington Park.UGH!

This corrupta has no business serving anywhere or in any capacity on a governing board. She oversaw and approved the appointment of two illegal aliens to city commissions. She has been head-deep in local and LA County corruption for the last four years. She works with "Puppet-Master" Efrain Martinez, who presided over her swearing-in as the new mayor in 2016.

Please help us!

I could not stand the idea of her having any kind of chance of getting elected to the school board--of course, in the long run it doesn't matter who serves, since it's another liberal Democrat who will do more harm than good for the students.

Thankfully, Ortiz was shut out of the Top Two run-off, and the margin was oh so close!

Check out the report from MyNewsLA.com for more information:

Repenning Places 2nd to Secure Runoff Slot with Goldberg in LAUSD Board Race

Former teacher and mayoral aide Heather Repenning appears to have finished in second place Friday and secured a runoff slot for a vacant seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.

With 100 percent of the votes now reported to be counted, Repenning has 31 more votes than Huntington Park City Councilwoman Graciela “Grace” Ortiz. A second place finish means the right to enter the runoff with the top vote getter, former LAUSD board member Jackie Goldberg, who far outpaced the competition in the March 5 election with 48.17 percent of the vote, although a recount of the final results is possible.



Goldberg dominated the 10-candidate field, but with less than 50 percent of the vote, she fell short of the majority needed to avoid a May 14 runoff election.

An updated vote tally released Tuesday showed Repenning with 4,334 votes, or 13.13 percent, compared to 4,299 votes, or 13.02 percent, Ortiz. The final tally was 4.341 votes for Repenning to 4,310 for Ortiz and 15,929 for Goldberg.

On election night, Ortiz originally emerged in second place with a 54-vote lead. But as county officials continued tallying mail-in, provisional and other ballots, Repenning jumped into second place late last week with a 133- vote lead over Ortiz.

Repenning, a former teacher and aide to Mayor Eric Garcetti, expressed confidence Tuesday that she would make the runoff election, despite her narrow lead.

“In case there was any question how much every vote counts, we just received the most recent update on last Tuesday’s election results,” she wrote on Twitter. “We are on pace to make the runoff by a margin of just 35 votes — with fewer than 100 ballots left to count. These results show how critical every last vote is, and how important your support has been.”

OUCH!

So much for ballot harvesting and public corruption getting the La Raza faction back onto the School Board.

This is a welcome victory! I can breathe one more sigh of relief!

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Extended Reflection on the Upcoming UTLA Strike

I worked in Los Angeles Unified for a little over one year, although I student in an LAUSD School when I got a second chance at it.

I worked in the new school, South East High School, located on Tweedy Blvd. in South Gate. An old General Motors plant was turned into a middle school and high school, both situated right next to each other.

Finally, I had survived my second student teaching assignment. I was at Dana Middle School in San Pedro, a school which has stood in the San Pedro area for decades, and connected to San Pedro High School right up the hill next door.

Within two months, I was hired as a French teacher at South East High School. Like many teachers, I cried every day for a week, a month, a year blah, blah, blah. The stress was beyond unreal even then.

I ended up walking off the job a year later. I tried working in other school districts, and I even scored a job at a charter school. I ended up walking off that job, too. I was in the wrong profession, to put in mildly.

At any rate, I know what goes on in Los Angeles Unified. It's an overwhelming bureaucracy, there is so much micromanaging, there is also so much unrepentant liberalism that it is sickening.

I taught in classrooms that were bursting at the seams with students. I worked in classrooms that had a grand total of 17 students. I have seen the worst and the best. The charter school paid me a much better salary, and yet it was still a misery.

At any rate, let me tell you what I have learned from a teacher who lives near me.

He really hates his job now. If he had a choice, he would not be a teacher anymore. He would do something else with his time. Today, he just hopes that he can hang on long enough so that he can get the lifetime benefits which LAUSD currently provides to its employees.

During my short time with the district, I attended some of the UTLA meetings. They were on the whole quite boring, and most of the time it seemed that the lead teachers recruited to help new teachers were more interested in getting out of the profession. They get the term "Dead wood" because they just hang around like dead wood, waiting to retire so they get the full pension, benefits, etc. Not good.

I would imagine that many of the teachers striking are in the younger generation of teachers right now.



What I have heard from one of my contacts, however, may suggest that this strike will not play out as well as the other one had in 1989.

First of all, there is a growing cohort of teachers right now who simply cannot afford to go on strike. The housing costs are outrageous, and on top of that there are other quality of life concerns that have made Los Angeles nothing short of unaffordable. The teachers want a 6.5% raise retroactive to 2016. Wow! That's a long time not to have a stable contract.

They also want more support staff, including nurses, psychologists, etc. They want smaller class sizes and fewer testing demands. I could not agree more. What teachers are expected to deal with is nothing short of outrageous. What teachers have to contend with when it comes to other teachers, parents, administrators, and legal demands is just unreal. It was bad enough when I was there. Now it has gotten so much worse.

I have yet to read what the absenteeism rate is for Los Angeles Unified. I have no idea how many teachers show up to work, or even how bad the teacher shortage has become. The student absence rate will skyrocket going into the strike tomorrow. It's not going to be good, I can tell you that. UTLA and other left-wing interests throughout Los Angeles County are urging parents, students, and other community leaders to show solidarity with the teachers and not go to school.

To be honest, more parents should be boycotting the crappy public schools throughout the state of California. There is so much abusive, perverse indoctrination happening in government schools, I can't think of a better way to hold them accountable than for parents to keep their children at home. Imagine the loss of revenue for the districts and the regressive, left-wing agenda they have been pushing on the students!

But back to the plight of the teachers ...

My contact in the district informed me that teachers are expected to picket outside of their assigned schools from 7:30 in the morning until 4:00pm. How many teachers can stand to stay in their classrooms for that length of time?! They usually don't, but they are expected to stay on strike for that length of time.

On top of that, union leaders have informed their members that if they are not outside their schools on strike, they won't get any money from the union fund to help through their financial difficulties. Also, teachers who don't strike can expect to see their cars scratched up. Unions rely on violence and intimidation, not just against their bargaining opponents but also against their members if they don't get in line and picket.

Los Angeles Unified School District practically doubled the salary of their board members. They have too much bureaucratic bloat which takes away from the classroom, from teachers, and thus from the students. The corruption, the waste, the misappropriation of funds is beyond ridiculous.

The whole LAUSD/UTLA conflict is a big mess, and a massive result of too many greedy special interests investing in improving their own lot at the expense of doing what is best for students and parents.



Honestly, taking students out of Los Angeles Unified is precisely the way to go forward. Parents should not allow their children to suffer in such crappy schools to begin with. On top of that, I hope that LAUSD does collapse. This maneuver is precisely what it will take to put an end to the fiscal lack of discipline and the corrupt indoctrination which has overwhelmed the district for the last 30 years.

The federal government has been shut down. The Second largest government-run school district is about to shut down. It looks like a true revolt against government overreach and overspending is going to be working in our favor.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

WHAT? Anti-Israel Workshops Approved For Our Schools


Below is a report by Shiri Moshe, Associate Editor at The Tower Magazine, published online by The Israel Project.  Mark Dubowitz (Foundation for Defense of Democracies) describes the magazine and its regularly updated arm, TheTower.org as "unique and credible".  Even liberal-biased Newsweek has called The Tower Magazine "an indispensable new English-language source on the Middle East."

Read it carefully. This report should alarm and disgust all intelligent citizens.

If we do not protest this outrage, the indoctrination of our teachers and students will only grow worse. 

Having called Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Michelle King's office this morning, I was transferred first to Joshua, then to Maria, his supervisor, then to Yolanda in the Human Services Department. Yolanda told me Peggy Presley in the Teacher Support Unit is handling complaints about this program.  Imagine that!  They already have assigned a person to handle complaints.  Not suprisingly, Ms. Presley does not care to speak with the public, as her number offers a recording inviting callers to leave a message.   

I urge you to call Peggy Presley TODAY at  (213) 241-5495.  Let her know in strong terms this kind of anti-Israel propaganda will not be tolerated.  Refer to the article below as you leave your message.  And ask her to call you back. We must burn up her phone line with calls.

Sharon




 

Report: Los Angeles School District Approved Workshop With Readings Accusing Israel of ‘Genocidal Policies’

avatar by Shiri Moshe

Email a copy of "Report: Los Angeles School District Approved Workshop With Readings Accusing Israel of ‘Genocidal Policies’" to a friend
Jeff Cooper speaking at an “Israel/Palestine” session during a Fellowship of Reconciliation workshop in October 2013. Photo: Salary Point – Teacher Workshop.

The largest public school district in California approved a workshop for teachers containing inflammatory content on Israel with an organization that supports boycotts of the Jewish state.
The voluntary workshop — titled “Learning about Islam and the Arab World” — includes courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for educators belonging to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), The Israel Group first reported. It was organized by the LA chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FORUSA), an interfaith organization that supports the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, according to its website.

The first session took place on October 14 at the United Teachers Los Angeles development center, with a second portion scheduled for October 21. LAUSD teachers are incentivized to attend the workshop by the prospect of gaining one “salary point” — helping them earn higher pay — if they complete the required assignments.



Upcoming classes at the workshop include “Palestine/Israel,” taught by Jeff Cooper, according to an agenda obtained by TIG.

A 40-page primer Cooper reportedly assigned for his lesson calls Israel a “supremacist ethnic state” and “a State of Oppression,” alleges that Palestinians are “at the mercy of the Israeli war machine,” and claims that non-Jews in the country “do not possess equal rights with their fellow Jewish citizens.”

It also accuses Israel of implementing “ethnic cleansing and incremental genocidal policies,” and posits that “the Zionist vision, since 1896/97, [was] of a Jewish state in all of historical Palestine, with very few, if any, native Palestinians living in it.”

Copies of the primer, which TIG indicated it obtained from a workshop participant, can be found here and here.

Another class — “Palestine Today: No Way to Treat a Child” — is led by Rola Karam, who previously presented at a conference for the pro-BDS group Sabeel. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Sabeel’s past “efforts to demonize Israel and Israelis have … featured charges of deicide against Jews.”

None of the courses related to Israel are listed on the workshop’s homepage or its registration form, TIG reported, but only on the class agenda distributed to participants.
Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for LAUSD, told The Algemeiner that “‘Learning About Islam and the Arab World’” was reviewed for multicultural awareness, respect for diversity, dialogue, and non-violent conflict resolution, and alignment to the California History Social Studies Standard 7.2.”
While the standards referenced by Haber — adopted by the California State Board of Education for seventh grade history and social science content — touch on material related to the birth and development of Islam and Muslim civilizations, they do not mention content related to Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Classes are approved in 5-year increments; this class was last approved in 2013,” Haber added. “Meeting the criteria for inclusion does not constitute an endorsement of the L.A. Unified.”
FORUSA has held multiple workshops for educators on Islam and the Middle East, and not only in conjunction with LAUSD.
The Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) has promoted a two-day workshop — also on “Islam and the Arab World” — held by FORUSA for educators on October 4, with a second session scheduled for October 25.
As was the case with the LAUSD workshop, event details on OCDE’s website include no mention of Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Carl Petersen: Obsessed, Triggered Leftist Loser

It just gets better and better for Trump supporters, even in California.

I have a new groupied named Carl Petersen.

"You're a racist ... because you're a racist!"
For some reason, he started attending Huntington Park City Council meetings, especially since We the People Rising, LA County for Trump, and other pro-enforcement groups have been making a difference, putting incredible pressure on the rampant lawlessness of that city council.

Reminder: Huntington Park appointed two illegal aliens to city commissions, and they dismissed all the legal residents, citizens, duly appointed members for political gain. Sad but true, that's what they did.

Our efforts are getting more attention from rabid leftists all over Los Angeles County.

Check out the attempted smear by NoBS Media below following the July 5th City Council meeting:

Petersen has done his fair share ot smear, and it has all failed.

Check out this great video that Carl took of me:


He is a failed school board candidate.

He is also a perpetually enranged regressive.

Check out his unseemly behavior at Politicon 2017:



Then when I confronted him on the race card that he continously plays ... he fell silent:



This man ran as a school board candidate for Los Angeles Unified.

He flips people off with his middle finger. He throws a temper tantrum like a child every time his point of you is undermined by something called ... reality.

He has no dignity or self-respect in his bearing. Yet he wants to smear pro-American, pro-enforcement people as lacking character.

When I confront him on his racism smears, he falls silent.

What could I say? I told him very plainly: "I am glad that you did not win that school board seat."

He is the racist, precisely because he wants to play the race card--and for what I understand, he has no interest in allowing children of all backgrounds to choose the schools they attend.

He basically thinks that the majority of black and Hispanic students in Los Angeles Unified do not deserve to choose the best schools. Isn't that racist?