Author: Howard Blume

Local schools officials Tuesday ratified a deal with the teachers union that will shorten the academic year by five days both this year and next. The pact, approved 7-0 by the Los Angeles Board of Education, saves the jobs of 1,280 permanent elementary teachers.

As a result, class sizes are expected to remain at the current 24 students per teacher in the early elementary grades. (Prior to this year, the maximum class size was 20 at that level.)

Also spared are 85 counselors at middle schools and high schools and 56 school nurses.

“I realize that pay cuts are especially hard at this time,” said board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, who, like other top officials, commented in a district statement. “Our teachers and principals are heroes for agreeing to this necessary, but unwelcomed, change. It’s always good when people are not losing their jobs.”

The agreement saves an estimated $147 million. Other employee unions agreed to concessions in advance of the teachers.

Not all jobs have been saved.

Still at risk are 354 teachers without tenure protections. Many, if not all, had been rehired after being laid off last year, and they are likely to be laid off again.

Among hundreds remaining on the layoff list are psychologists, psychiatric social workers and librarians. Schools entitled to extra antipoverty funding will be able to rehire to fill some of these positions at their campuses.

District officials hope to preserve more jobs and services with a $100-per-parcel tax that voters will consider in June. That measure would raise $95.2 million annually for four years. The district has had to close a deficit estimated at $640 million for next year and $263 million the year after.

— Howard Blume

Two Los Angeles residents with deep roots in local battles over education reform are among four nominees to the state Board of Education, it was announced Monday.

Overall, the nominations by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signal his continued support for charter schools and his impatience with gradual reform, observers said.

A potentially controversial choice is Ben Austin, 40, who led a successful lobbying campaign last year for a state law that gives parents new powers to launch aggressive reforms.

His “parent trigger” allows parents to choose what will happen to a low-performing public school if a majority sign a petition. The options would include shutting the school down and starting over or converting it to a privately operated charter school.

The 11-member board sets education policy for California. The governor appoints its members.

Austin’s nomination is “an ongoing signal that the governor wants aggressive action and that he tires of process, that he wants someone in there who’s going to be slamming away,” said a Sacramento insider who asked not be named because of his position within the state bureaucracy.

Austin heads a parents group funded by charter school operators and philanthropists closely allied with them. He has a long history as a behind-the-scenes Democratic political consultant. A past bid for the elected L.A. school board was cut short over errors in his nomination petition.

He also won a version of the parent trigger in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He earned the ire of the L.A. teachers union through his role in helping to convert Locke High into a charter school and for lobbying in favor of last year’s school-control reform. Under it, poorly performing schools and new campuses could be turned over to outside operators.

Austin’s nomination won immediate praise from L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The other local nominee, veteran public relations executive Alan Arkatov, heads a company that is seeking to blend “the positive aspects of interactive games” into school curriculum.

Arkatov, 48, also sits on the board of the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools. The alliance has opened 16 charter schools in the Los Angeles area and was among a handful of charter operators singled out for a major Gates Foundation grant to link teacher evaluations to student performance. In February, the Los Angeles Board of Education denied the alliance the right to run a small high school in a new education complex east of downtown, overruling L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines.

Arkatov’s alliances are not strictly with pro-charter forces. He’s also been a longtime ally of former L.A. school board member Marlene Canter and at times has advised the leadership of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Also nominated was Jeannie Oropeza, 49, of Woodland. Oropeza has served as program budget manager for the California Department of Finance since 1998. She’s well known to Capitol insiders for her background briefings explaining the financial effect of the governor’s education proposals.

All three nominees must be confirmed by the state Senate, as must two re-nominated board members, David J. Lopez and state board President Ted Mitchell. The renomination of Lopez was part of Monday’s announcement. Mitchell had been renominated previously.

On the whole, the state board leans toward charter school allies, said Scott Plotkin, executive director of the California School Boards Assn.

“We know a couple of these nominees as very accomplished people,” Plotkin said. “But we’re looking for a little more balance on the board.”

— Howard Blume

The Los Angeles Unified School District has withdrawn a claim that sought millions of dollars in new state funding to keep student bathrooms clean, unlocked and in working order.

The district had sought $22 million — and about $9 million annually — in the wake of a 2003 state law requiring that restrooms “shall at all times be maintained and cleaned regularly, fully operational and stocked at all times with toilet paper, soap, and paper towels or functional hand dryers.”

The law also required that bathrooms be unlocked when students need them except when closed for specific repairs.

About a year later, L.A. Unified submitted a claim to the California Commission on State Mandates, which has the authority to decide that the state must foot the bill when a new law creates new costs for a public agency.

The nation’s second-largest school system said that in 2004 it had spent $13.7 million for repairs and upgrades and nearly $9 million for additional workers. The district’s new standard has been to “routinely clean bathrooms as often as every night and spot clean and restock them twice a day,” said district spokeswoman Shannon Haber.

But the commission’s staff was unmoved, noting, among other things, that since 1948, state law has required “sufficient patent flush water closets.” The new law merely clarified “sufficient” and established a new complaint and response process, according to the staff analysis.

The law itself resulted from a broadcast news investigation of poorly maintained bathrooms at more than 50 schools. Bathroom issues have periodically plagued L.A. Unified. In 2000, interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines pledged a “books and bathrooms” initiative. (The books portion referred to textbook shortages.)

The subsequent furor, in 2003, prompted calls for outside inspections and forced Cortines’ successor, Roy Romer, to pledge more resources. And that’s when the district also filed its claim.

“We were trying to take advantage of every opportunity to get projects funded,” said Mark Hovatter, director of maintenance and operations. “We saw this as a chance to get state money because we were doing something above and beyond what we were what doing before. We never had a 100% expectation of being successful. It was more like applying for a grant.”

By 2010, the expectation had dropped to near 0%, so officials gave up rather than wait for the seven-member commission to reject their claim. The commission was scheduled to act Friday; L.A. Unified withdrew the claim Thursday.

The district’s current challenges include preserving efforts to keep bathrooms clean during an ongoing budget crisis. Overall custodial services are cut 20% in the tentative budget of Supt. Cortines, who returned to the top job in late 2008.

–Howard Blume

About 400 students took part Monday in a peaceful sit-in and walkout to protest the scheduled closure of their South Los Angeles charter school at the end of the academic year.

The school, Animo Justice Charter High School, is operated by Green Dot Public Schools, one of the city’s best-known charter operators.

Green Dot officials said the school was losing too much money because of under-enrollment and said students would be able to enroll at other Green Dot schools in the area. They also said Green Dot teachers in good standing would still have jobs.

Animo Justice would be the first Green Dot school closed by the rapidly growing nonprofit, which runs 19 schools in the L.A. area and one in New York City.

— Howard Blume

About 100 Los Angeles adult school students and some of their teachers demonstrated Friday near their campus in Pico-Union to protest its possible closing.

The Menlo Avenue site is threatened because, like some other adult-school locations, it operates out of leased space.

The leased sites assist with outreach to members of a low-income community with limited means to travel far from their neighborhood.

The adult-school division is one of many flash points as the Los Angeles Unified School District struggles to close a $640-million deficit.

Projected budget cuts also have raised alarms among other groups, including parents worried about fewer classes for disabled students, families who could lose permits allowing students to attend schools outside L.A. Unified, teachers who could be laid off and librarians who may see their jobs disappear.

The adult division serves tens of thousands of people, including immigrants learning English and former dropouts trying to complete degrees.

The Menlo Avenue site uses 14 classrooms in a two-story building behind a private Japanese-language school. Its focus is English instruction.

“I want to help my children with their homework,” said Ricardo Estrada, 31, who has made it to upper-level English by attending classes five days a week, four hours a day. “I need to learn more English to communicate with their teachers.”

Blanca Perez, a 37-year-old community organizer for a nonprofit, struggled to say much the same in English, while also welcoming the chance to practice.

“I need to learn English for the future,” she said.

The adult school also had its budget cut last year. Among the sharply reduced programs were enrichment classes for seniors.

A letter on the school district website asserted that further reductions are unavoidable.

“Current budget conditions require the [adult division] to reduce its leases to an absolute minimum, and redirect lease savings to support classroom instruction” on district property or at a cost-free location, wrote Ed Morris, executive director of the district’s division of adult and career education.

— Howard Blume

A new list of California’s lowest-performing schools includes 39 from Los Angeles County, and a few surprises are among them.

California education officials released their preliminary list Monday
and 23 are part of the Los Angeles
Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest.

State officials are required to compile the list as a result of state and federal law to make these schools eligible for federal improvement grants. The list represents the lowest-performing 5% of California schools.

Five of the schools are in the Compton Unified School District and two in Lynwood Unified.

California is expected to receive about $415 million from school improvement grants this year. The state, in turn, will hand out grants to schools ranging from $50,000 to $2 million annually per campus for up to three years, officials said. About 190 schools are eligible.

But there are strings attached: Schools that accept the money must adopt one of four federally approved reform models.

The most aggressive include, for example, shutting down a school entirely, but even the least disruptive “transformation” model involves replacing the principal and linking principal and teacher evaluations to test scores.

The preliminary list of schools included some surprises because the formula for selecting schools roped in some higher-performing schools. Federal officials may yet allow the state to remove some of these relatively high performers.

Workman High in the City of Industry, for example, ended up on the list even though it far surpassed its specified improvement target this year on the state’s Academic Performance Index.

The list of 23 L.A. Unified schools did not include six of the 12 that district officials themselves had singled out as bad enough to warrant a possible takeover, including Garfield and San Pedro high schools. Nor did the list include Fremont High, at which the district is requiring staff to re-interview for jobs.

The state’s “worst” list does include some schools that did not make L.A. Unified’s list: Crenshaw High, Washington Preparatory High, Manual Arts High and Miguel Contreras Learning Center.

The reason for the discrepancy is the use of different rubrics. L.A. Unified looked only at performance last year. The state averaged the percentage of students proficient in math and English over the last three years. And a school also could exit the list if it had shown steady gains over five years.

— Howard Blume

About 100 students staged a peaceful sit-in at Carver Middle School on Tuesday to protest the school falling under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The protest came one week after the L.A. Board of Education voted to shift Carver, a persistently low-performing school, to the control of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit controlled by Villaraigosa.

"We are trying to show the mayor that we are well-educated and we don’t need any partnership schools to come here to educate us," said eighth-grader Arturo Macias, 14.

Macias said he and fellow organizer Reyes Bravo — also a 14-year-old eighth-grader — didn’t rely on Facebook or Twitter to get the word out: "I’ve been telling my fellow students about this rally for a couple of weeks now. The mayor thinks he’s going to make our school better. He thinks he can run the schools. He can’t even run a city."

The partnership now runs 12 schools, and added three more last week through a groundbreaking bidding process. Under it, groups inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District vied for control of 18 new campuses and 12 existing ones, including Carver, located in South Park.

The competing proposal for Carver came from a group of Carver teachers working closely with the school’s principal.

“There is much anger and frustration,” said one staff member, speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution. “We feel betrayed. Many of us worked on our plan for months. We neglected our families and our health … to try and come up with a really meaningful and usable plan that would be the beginning of turning our school around.”

Discomfort in the Carver community clearly has reached students, who began to gather on outdoor steps inside the school grounds at lunch, then declined to return to class. Students listened as Macias laid out concerns for the future through a microphone. About 30 minutes later, a school staff member (who’s also a parent) asked students to return to class, and they did.

The mayor’s team has insisted it wants to work with the current Carver staff members, but they wanted the opportunity to lead their own improvement effort. They were excited about the prospect of more local autonomy than the school had ever enjoyed.

Before the school board’s decision, the mayor’s representatives were greeted with an anti-mayor demonstration at the school and some catcalls at a public presentation. The local plan also trounced the mayor’s in non-binding school-level elections among parents, employees and community members. But L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines gave the mayor’s group the edge, saying it produced a higher-caliber proposal, and the school board ratified his verdict.

— Mark Boster and Howard Blume

Photo: Eighth-grade student Arturo Macias addresses students gathered on the steps of George Washington Carver Middle School. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

More than half of  the faculty at Fremont High School have pledged to leave the school rather than participate in a mandated improvement plan.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is requiring all school employees to reapply for their jobs. It’s an aggressive attempt to alter what district officials describe as a school culture grown complacent with poor student achievement.

Most teachers have signed a petition saying they won’t go along, staff organizers said.

The ongoing rebellion was underscored at a Friday morning news conference near the school, which is located south of downtown in Florence. A small group of teachers, students and parents took part.

“If new teachers come in, they won’t know anything of the past history of the community,” said Mirna Rico, the parent of a ninth-grader. “There’s a certain stability that students need and, as it is, the school has been very unstable. But it’s getting better.”

Veteran administrator George McKenna countered that progress has been too slow and inconsistent.

“The data is dismal,” said McKenna, the senior administrator for the local region. “And it’s been going on so long long it feels normal to people.”

Only 13.6% of the school’s students tested as proficient in English language arts. Math was worse: Of 3,226 students tested in 2009, only 45 were proficient. Only two students scored as advanced.

Fremont senior Patricia Gonzalez said she had 50 students in her calculus class, which she said was emblematic of a shortage of resources. She said blaming the staff by making them re-interview for positions is the wrong approach.

She, too, said things have improved, which she credits for the recent graduation of her 19-year-old sister and her own academic success. Not all of her siblings have done as well. Of the six that preceded her at Fremont, only two graduated. The others dropped out largely because they felt lost, uninvolved and uncared for in the large school, Gonzalez said.

L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon C. Cortines has said he will not back down from the restructuring plan, which McKenna will oversee in conjunction with the principal.

The teachers who refuse to reapply would be assigned to fill vacancies elsewhere.

“We’d like most of the staff to be rehired at Fremont," McKenna said. “They can all be rehired if they participate. We’re still asking them to participate in the restructuring process.”

–Howard Blume

The fate of nearly 40,000 students is at stake Tuesday as the Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to decide who will take over 12 struggling schools and 18 new campuses scheduled to open in the fall.

Bidders inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District have been vying for the schools under a reform plan that the board adopted in August.

The main competitors have been groups of district teachers and charter school operators. Charters are independently run schools that are free from some restrictions that govern traditional schools.

Another competitor has been Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who seeks to increase the number of schools under the control of his education nonprofit.

The school board, in a meeting scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., will be acting on the recommendations of Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, and it has the authority to alter his picks.

Lobbying by various interest groups has been intense.

See more photos of an early-morning vigil outside school district headquarters > > >

Cortines would allot seven new small schools to charters and 18 to teacher-led groups, who frequently worked in collaboration with district administrators and United Teachers Los Angeles, the school system’s teachers union.

Charter groups want more campuses; teachers want a clean sweep.

Cortines would give the mayor one new elementary school and Carver Middle School in South Park. He would deny the mayor Jefferson High in Central-Alameda and Griffith Joyner Elementary in Watts.

Rhetorically at least, the mayor gave a boost to charters midday Tuesday.

"Our charter partners who participated in this process include some of the best operators in the country," the mayor said in a statement. "Other communities are begging these operators to open schools in their districts, yet the [L.A.] district may give them a paltry number of schools, which would be a terrible blow to reform and would give credence to those critics who say this is [a] system trying to protect the failed status quo."

Charter allies tried to claim the very ground in front of district headquarters by camping out starting at 10 p.m. Wednesday. Slots for speakers at board meetings are limited and typically handed out on a first-come, first-served basis. But it appeared likely that different camps would all get turns at the microphone to lobby the board publicly.

School board President Monica Garcia represents a particular nexus
of pressure points. She’s regarded as the mayor’s most loyal board
ally, which could incline her to favor giving more schools to the mayor
and perhaps to charters, which Villaraigosa has supported.

But every school that becomes a
charter potentially increases the district’s budget deficit — and
likely results in the loss of union jobs because most charters are
non-union. Garcia is not especially close to the teachers union, but
has tried to nourish a tight alliance with other unions by, for
example, supporting the expansion of healthcare benefits to part-time
cafeteria workers. Garcia has enjoyed strong support from these unions
in her runs for office.

Another touchstone for Garcia is chief of staff and close advisor
Luis Sanchez, who is married to Maria Brenes, the head of the
Eastside-based advocacy group InnerCity Struggle. That nonprofit has
decided to campaign in favor of the teacher-led plans for the new
Esteban Torres high complex.

The Torres complex will house five small high schools. Cortines
would give three to teacher-led teams and two to charters. The division
is satisfactory to neither charters nor the teacher teams.

Garcia thus would confront divided loyalties if the mayor pressed
hard on behalf of charters. Of course, the mayor has a budget debacle
to deal with in the city and may be focused on other matters, or may be
concerned mostly with the fate of his own education nonprofit.

The Torres complex actually sits in the district represented by school
board member Yolie Flores, who brought the school choice proposal to the board last summer and who is also under intense lobbying pressure.

— Howard Blume

Photo: Yvette King-Berg, a charter-school advocate, leads her group in a cheer during an early-morning rally outside school district headquarters. Charter allies camped out in front of district headquarters beginning at 10 p.m. Wednesday. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

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The chance to operate 18 new campuses would be divided among competing bidders in a politically balanced way under recommendations released Thursday by Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines.

His recommendations are the next step in a process through which bidders from inside and outside the school district are competing to run the  18 new campuses as well as 12 persistently low-performing schools. 

The main competitors include groups of teachers—often working with district administrators—versus independently operated charter schools, which are exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools.

In the end, each political constituency is positioned to get something, but there is also substantial disappointment–especially among charter school advocates.

The Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to make the final selections Tuesday and intense lobbying from all quarters has already begun.

Charter companies had bid mainly for new campuses. Most of the larger, better-known charter organizations got one school or part of one school, but charter advocates said Cortines should have gone further based on their record of running high-achieving schools.

Charters scored seven new small schools, some on campuses they would share with schools that are still affiliated with the school district. Proposals involving district teachers claimed 18 new small schools. A nonprofit controlled by the mayor also competed for a new elementary school and would get it, under the superintendent’s choices.

Among the existing schools, the biggest news concerned Jefferson High in Central-Alameda. Cortines opted for an internal reform proposal at a school where he  handpicked the current principal. The loser in that competition would be the mayor’s team.

The mayor’s nonprofit, Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, also lost to an internal plan at Griffith-Joyner Elementary in Watts, but would claim a notable prize: Carver Middle School in South Park.

The Youth Policy Institute will split San Fernando Middle School with an internal district team. The institute would keep its part of the school within the school system rather than making it a charter.

A handful of charter operators vied for an existing school and lost. Yet for most of the existing schools there was no competition; only an internal plan emerged. Cortines approved these but expressed strong reservations on some.

No San Fernando Valley school went to a charter, which dismayed charter operator Eugene Selivanov.

“A lot of us have been very skeptical of this process and I guess a lot of us were right,” said Selivanov, executive director of Ivy Academia. The “superintendent’s recommendations show that this was never a competitive process.”

Charter operator Mike Piscal called the split campuses a “half a loaf strategy.”

His ICEF Public Schools is supposed to share a middle school campus. He would run one small school and an internal district team would run two.

“From a practical standpoint, it runs the risk of muddling reform by putting three schools run by two separate operators on a campus built and intended to house one,” he said.

The new Torres High School complex will house five new small schools. Cortines wants to see two charter schools and three “pilot” schools. The pilots are internal, teacher-led plans for schools that are supposed to have much of the autonomy of charter schools

Former school board member David Tokofksy called the split campuses “educational Darwinism” that overlooks the importance of unity and collaboration to a successful school.

The teacher groups did well overall, but they could take issue with the recommendations as well. They had a claim to every campus because the teacher plans prevailed in every school-level advisory election among staff, parents and high school students.

Cortines, however, was not bound to comply with these results. He also examined analyses by professional evaluators and conducted his own review.

— Howard Blume

Some adults voted twice and some third-graders voted once, but this month’s balloting on school reform plans in Los Angeles still proved a success, in the view of the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles.

The verdict was in part the league endorsing its own efforts — it conducted the early February election at a cost of $50,000 by pulling together 400 volunteers.

The voting process is part of a school-reform plan under which groups inside and outside of the Los Angeles Unified School District are bidding for control of one or more of 30 campuses. Up for grabs are 12 low-performing schools and 18 new campuses that will be divided into 24 small schools.

Later Thursday, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines is expected to announce his recommendations for which groups should be running schools. He will most likely parcel out the spoils in a politically balanced way: Some schools will go to internal groups led by teachers, often working with district administrators; other schools will go to independently managed charter schools — most of which would hire non-district, non-union staff.

Cortines is supposed to base his choices on professional evaluations, his own experience and judgment, and the just-completed elections.

In those elections, teachers — with substantial support from United Teachers Los Angeles, the L.A. teachers union — organized a successful grass-roots campaign that took advantage of teachers’ connections with parents and high school students. Parents and high school students voted in separate tallies and overwhelmingly favored plans put forward by teachers.

Charter school operators cried foul, asserting that teachers had an unfair advantage and misrepresented their record and intentions. They also alleged numerous and egregious examples of improper electioneering and intimidation on the two days of voting.

The League report had little sympathy for these claims, although it acknowledged mistakes and some confusion related to a first-ever effort with a dizzying number of moving parts, including 36 separate ballots. And each of these 36 different ballots was further subdivided by different colors to represent a different group of voters: Parents (who split into four different categories), school employees, students and community members.

The League’s extensive election experience did not quite prepare it for what ensued on Feb. 2 and 6, the days on which nearly all balloting occurred.

The league had originally expected about 10,000 voters to cast ballots from a pool of 100,000. Instead, they collected 44,000 ballots from a pool that ballooned to 275,000.

Double voting occurred because many eligible voters (whose names were on a list according to their status as a school parent or employee, for example) also decided to cast ballots in the “sign-in” categories of “community” and “unverified parent.”

“The problems were most noticeable,” the league’s report said, “where internal and external applicants were engaged in competitive and assertive electioneering practices.”

In other words, bidders — charters and teacher groups alike — tried to stuff the ballot box wherever and whenever they could figure out how to do it under rules that were sometimes inconsistently applied. But such efforts affected only the community and unverified parents categories, which league officials quickly concluded were an essentially meaningless but engaging exercise in democracy.

A number of charter school leaders have asserted that the elections were too flawed to have any legitimate bearing on Cortines’ recommendations.

Just as predictably, the teachers union asserts the results to be crucially meaningful.

The league acknowledged that on this round there was no way for parents of students in charter schools or magnet programs to have their votes counted in a category with reliable results.

For all the electioneering, parent turnout was low.

“We are quite concerned about the small percentage of parents that participated in the process,” said league executive director Raquel Beltran.

As for future elections, “attempts to assess public opinion should involve adequate voter education, including an independent pro/con analysis of applications,” the league concluded. “This is the single most important tool to empower eligible voters to act in their own best interest.”

The report added: “A longer planning period would be essential.”

— Howard Blume

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ramon C. Cortines on Tuesday accentuated the positive amid dire financial realities in his first “state of the district” address before students, parents, school officials and dignitaries at Belmont High.

He chose the Belmont campus, west of downtown, because of the school’s steep rise in academic performance, but also spoke of the need to do better still, saying that only 52% of district students graduate in four years.

Cortines cited a looming $640-million budget deficit as a prime reason that warring district factions must work together.

“Too many times we focus on blaming each for not achieving our goals,” he said. “We point fingers at our students…administrators and our parents. And that has got to stop.”

Even in difficult financial times reforms will continue, he said, citing such efforts as the hard-fought competition between groups inside and outside the district to control 30 campuses. The bidding frequently has pitted teachers from traditional schools (which operate under union contracts) against independently operated — and mostly nonunion — charter schools.

“I no longer want to see mudslinging” between traditional schools and charters, he said. “A good school is a good school period. … We need to spend more time learning from each other. The best schools in the country are right here.”

He reiterated past remarks that he would brook no excuses for failure to improve, be it family poverty or the budget crisis.

“I will never accept low expectations for students or adults in our district.”

— Howard Blume

In a “state of the district” speech, L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines on Tuesday is expected to emphasize progress in making schools better amid a financial crisis that will make classroom conditions more difficult.

Cortines will outline four strategies for the Los Angeles Unified School District: using data on student performance to drive instruction; improving the training and quality of teachers; pushing financial decisions and dollars to individual schools, and creating a menu of schooling options along with accessible information about those schools for parents.

The Times learned details of Supt. Cortines’ speech from interviews with Cortines and other district officials, as well as from notes prepared for his remarks.

The second point — improving the teacher corps — is tied closely to work being spearheaded by state school board President Ted Mitchell. Mitchell chairs a task force that is looking into how teachers are evaluated, hired and fired. In his remarks, Cortines will say that an important part of this effort is putting an increased emphasis on teacher recruitment, training and support.

The superintendent said he hopes to push dollars to school sites through a practice called “per-pupil” budgeting. Under it, money is allotted per student based on that student’s needs. Wherever that student enrolls, the money follows. Then the school decides how to spend that money.

This practice differs vastly from the current system, which allots funding for schools from the central office. The “per-pupil” method was rolled out in a pilot program this year. Next year, Cortines wants to take it districtwide.

The concept is not without challenges. To succeed, local schools must know how to spend their money wisely. And some schools could end up with more money while others have less. Some other school systems began per-pupil funding during a period when new dollars were flowing in — so that no schools would end up with less money than they had before.

Cortines won’t have that luxury, as L.A. Unified tries to solve a $640-million budget shortfall for next year. The district projects a second straight year of increased class sizes and employee layoffs. Funding for music and art will be halved — one proposal, rejected so far, involved cutting all music and art spending.

Cortines is giving the speech at Belmont High School, west of downtown, to emphasize that school’s recent academic progress.

Belmont High’s score on the state’s Academic Performance Index surged 78 points last year, one of the largest improvements in California. The school also slashed its still-alarming dropout rate from 55.4% to 38.9%.

But Belmont also exemplifies how far the district has to go. Its index score of 618 remains low; if every one of a school’s students tested as “proficient,” its score would be 875.

At Belmont, about one in five students tested as proficient in English and fewer than 1 in 10 tested as proficient in math.

— Howard Blume

Photo: L.A. Times file

Los Angeles school officials are scheduled to decide Tuesday whether to put a parcel tax on the June ballot as an emergency response to an ongoing budget crisis.

The measure would tax each property owner $100 annually for four years, offsetting a portion of budget deficits that could still result in employee layoffs, increased class sizes and possibly a school year with five fewer instructional days.

Recent polling for the measure showed support strong enough to win, but caveats abound. For one thing, positive polling in some other school systems led them to try for a parcel tax, which voters subsequently failed to approve. A parcel tax requires a two-thirds majority to become law.

The school districts that have fallen short tend to look more like L.A. Unified than those that have succeeded. That is, small, prosperous enclaves have had better luck with parcel taxes than larger school systems with a broad distribution of family income from rich to poor.

L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said in an interview Monday that members of the elected school board have mixed feelings over whether to put a parcel tax before voters. But he insisted that the need is dire.

The tax would raise about $92.5 million a year, but the district has an estimated a deficit of $640 million for next year.

In other words, Cortines said, a successful parcel tax would make a bad situation somewhat less bad, which he acknowledged is a “tough sell” for voters.

— Howard Blume

Police found a woman shot to death and a gravely wounded man at their Westminster home after their car was found in Nevada being driven by a wounded man.

Authorities are not yet releasing the names of the victims or of the man being held in Nevada.

The events that led to the grisly discovery began Sunday with a man walking into a casino in Stateline, Nev., and “acting suspiciously,” said Officer Van Woodson of the Westminster Police Department.

Security guards started to question the man, and he fled, driving away quickly. He crashed the vehicle soon after, Woodson said. Las Vegas police took over the investigation and determined that the car was registered to a Westminster resident. Officers also noticed that the man had a gunshot wound to his leg.

Nevada authorities alerted Westminster police at 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Local police discovered the victims, who had been shot, at 2 p.m. in a two-story house in the 5300 block of Duncannon Avenue, the address where the car was registered.

The man was rushed to a hospital where he was listed in grave condition.

“This is one of the quieter neighborhoods,” Woodson said of the middle-class enclave bordering Seal Beach. “It’s not a neighborhood that the Police Department is dispatched to very often.”

On Sunday night, Westminster detectives were en route to Las Vegas to question the man in custody. 

— Howard Blume

The victims of a freeway crash and fire Saturday were a popular high school coach, his wife and their two small children.

Ryan Villalpando, an assistant football coach at Moreno Valley High, was killed with his wife, Veronica, and their two children when their car became wedged between two trucks and burst into flames.

The accident occurred shortly after noon on the southbound 15 Freeway, south of the Jurupa Street exit, in Ontario, said California Highway Patrol Officer Monica Posada.

The accident became a six-car pileup involving cars and trucks and also resulted in several minor injuries. A photo taken by a witness, and aired on KCAL-TV Channel 9, shows the Villalpandos’  car fully engulfed in flames and wedged between tractor-trailers front and back.

Authorities have not released the victims’ identities, but they have been reported by a local paper and by KCAL.

"He was my offensive line coach,” Moreno Valley High football coach Ted Wadkins told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. “I met him at Cal State San Bernardino, and he was the first guy I hired. He’s taught the last five years at Moreno Valley.”

Wadkins said Veronica Villalpando taught at an aerospace school at  Norton Air Force Base.

KCAL aired an interview with Ryan Villalpando’s father, Edward.

He described his son as “honest, had integrity, tough. He had a bark, but he had a heart, a huge heart. He’s going to be missed.”

He said his son was 32 and was going out to get a pizza with his family when the accident occurred.

An investigation into the cause of the accident is underway.

— Howard Blume

A Pacoima man died of gunshot wounds from a confrontation that began as a fistfight near a bar in North Hollywood.

Carlos Martinez, 18, was struggling with two men when one pulled out a gun and began firing.

“It was a fistfight that escalated,” said Officer Karen Rayner of the Los Angeles Police Department.

More than one bullet struck Martinez. A companion took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Rayner said.

Details about what happened were sketchy, but Rayner said Martinez had just left a bar about 1:15 a.m. Sunday in the 11700 block of Vanowen Street.

A sharp exchange between Martinez and the two men preceded the violence, witnesses told the police.

The suspects, believed to be 17  to 23 years old, left the scene.

   

Police have asked anyone with information to contact Det. Steve Castro at (818) 623-4045 or 1-877-LAPD-24-7.

— Howard Blume

Minor earthquakes struck to the north and south of Southern California on Sunday. The most recent was a magnitude 4.1 shaker, centered five miles northeast of Coso Junction, about 141 miles north of Los Angeles, at 4:07 p.m.

No reports of injuries or damage had come in to dispatchers for the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department. A dispatcher, in his office about 50 miles to the north of the epicenter, said he didn’t feel anything.

But San Diego County residents did feel a 4.5 magnitude temblor that struck Baja California about 1:35 p.m. That quake was centered about 20 miles south of Tecate, Mexico. Three subsequent aftershocks were measured within the next hour.

The Associated Press reported that police and fire officials in El Cajon, Escondido and Kearny Mesa received no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

— Howard Blume and Corina Knoll

Teachers won a nearly clean sweep over charter schools and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in elections for school-reform plans that were held last week. The Los Angeles Unified School District released the election results Tuesday, packaging them with separate professional evaluations of each reform plan that sometimes resulted in a different verdict.

Neither the election results nor the evaluations are the final word on who will run 12 persistently low-performing schools and 18 new campuses under a school-reform strategy adopted in August. L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines will issue his own recommendations, and the school board is scheduled to make a final decision Feb. 23.

The main competitors for the campuses have been groups of teachers — frequently allied with district administrators — and charter schools. Charters are independently run public schools that are free from some restrictions that govern traditional schools, including district labor contracts. Teachers, in effect, were fighting to maintain more than 1,000 union jobs as well as for a chance at real local control over school sites. With support from United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, teachers launched vigorous grassroots campaigns for their homegrown reform proposals.

Charter operators decried misleading claims by some teachers and alleged voter intimidation as well as inconsistent or unfair voting practices. The League of Women Voters of Los Angeles conducted the election.

Voters cast ballots by category. It was no surprise, perhaps, that school staffs voted almost unanimously for internal district proposals.

So did high school students and public school parents.

In the run-up to the election, one of the most contested schools was the new campus east of downtown named for former Congressman Esteban Torres. It will house five small high schools to relieve overcrowding at Roosevelt and Garfield high schools. On the ballot were five teacher-led plans and five charter-school proposals. 

Garfield and Roosevelt students favored the teacher plans by an average margin of about 536 to 31. Among parents, the average margin was 86 to 13. Public school parents with children who will reach high school age next year favored teachers by a margin of 2 to 1. Among public school parents of younger children, the margin was 3 to 1.

There were also categories for “community” and “unverified parents,” but these tallies could be manipulated by interest groups so the league regarded them as essentially meaningless.

The professional evaluators, for their part, could reach no consensus regarding the Torres campus. They gave a thumbs-up to every plan.

At Jefferson High in Central-Alameda, Villaraigosa was trying to add to the 12 schools already run by his education nonprofit. But the mayor made little public relations headway, losing to the internal Jefferson proposal among students by 239 to 4, among current parents by 116 to 9 and among parents with students in schools that feed into Jefferson by 36 to 15.

“It’s fun the way we learn,” said senior Chris Harris, 17, on the day he voted for the internal Jefferson plan. “If we go charter, we’re not going to be able to play sports. We’re going to have to wear uniforms. And we’re going to be getting out 4:18 every day.”

The mayor’s plan did not, in fact, call for a charter school — he’s willing to abide by district labor contracts. Nor did he contemplate ending sports, but uniforms have indeed been part of the mayor’s schools.

Margarita Duran, who has a daughter in 9th grade at Jefferson, declared herself “very satisfied” with the school: “I believe the structure that we have is great and the school is working the way it is.”

The mayor did win the plurality among feeder parents at Carver Middle School, but only 70 voted.

His highest vote total among parents was 61 at Griffith-Joyner Elementary, but the internal proposal claimed 417. The district is looking into allegations that the principal violated a district neutrality directive by having students write letters home urging parents to “save” the school.

The evaluators gave the mayor’s team good marks, but also blessed at least one other plan for three existing schools and one new campus that the mayor sought.

— Howard Blume and Jason Song