“The Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council supports Bassett Street School and rejects the co-sharing of the campus with a charter.”
- LBNC Motion
Families within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have many choices for the education of their children. The parents of 625 students in the Lake Balboa area of the San Fernando Valley have decided that Bassett Street Elementary School is the best option for their families. For some, this is because of the high-quality after-school programs that ensure that their children are well taken care of while they work. Others are attracted to the robotics team which…
“After years of being given two tissue boxes a year, dealing with rat infestations, and using dirty bathrooms, we do not trust that the district has the commitment or resources to make us safe at school.”
- Nicolle Fefferman
In the Voices From The Community series, representatives of constituencies throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) express their concerns about the district and detail how they would like to move forward. The first three articles (here, here, and here) detailed the effects of charter schools on neighborhood public schools. …
- Los Angeles Times
In normal circumstances, parents have a hard time negotiating the LAUSD’s vast bureaucracy when advocating for their children with special education needs. In a system designed to discourage the use of high-cost but effective services, parents in this situation often feel that they are adversaries to a district that is supposed to be their partner in helping students reach their highest potential. On top of the extraordinary stress involved in raising a…
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
- Leonard H. Courtney
Data is useful to identify possible problems, but it should never be relied on to tell the entire story. An example can be found in the LAUSD Special Education Department’s presentation on “Addressing LA Unified’s Significant Disproportionality Challenges for African American Students with Disabilities.”
According to the data provided, African American students represent 7.49% of the LAUSD’s general education students but are 10.04% of the district’s Students with Disabilities (SWD). For the specific eligibility of Emotional Disturbance (ED), African American children comprise 18.5% of the…
The Republican-controlled state has long pursued a policy of deregulation. For those who could not escape to Cancun, the results were deadly.
- Grover Norquist
Republicans control every single elected statewide office in Texas’ state government including the governor’s mansion. Since 2003, the party has also controlled both the state’s Senate and House. Both federal senators have been from the Republican party since 1993. …
- Mike Hutchinson
When Jackie Goldberg won the 2019 special election to replace convicted felon Ref Rodriguez on the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) School Board, it was supposed to return control to supporters of public education. This should have resulted in much-needed changes in the country’s second-largest school district. Instead, the status-quo was basically unchanged when the charter-industry recaptured control in last November’s election. Public schools were still losing much-needed space to their…
- LAUSD parent Jazmin Garcia
In its latest guidelines on how to return students to school, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that teachers should be vaccinated as quickly as possible. LAUSD’s Superintendent Austin Beutner has called vaccines “a critical piece to this reopening puzzle.” UTLA’s President, Cecily Myart-Cruz says that “the path to a safer reopening must include…vaccines for…
- Joe Biden
Like our newest president, Barack Obama came into office promising to bridge the partisan divide. His outstretched hand was slapped back by an opposing party that was obsessed with making him a one-term president. Still, Obama ignored his overwhelming majority in the Senate and crafted a stimulus bill that jettisoned the money for infrastructure projects that he preferred and replaced them with tax cuts…
“Our education system requires significant structural reform, and that includes addressing decades of chronic underfunding of education needs for students with learning disabilities.”
- Shervin Aazami
My first public interaction with my Congressman was at one of his town halls about seven years ago. Fresh off my fight to get my two daughters the services that they needed from the LAUSD, I asked Brad Sherman how more teeth could be put into the law that requires school districts to provide free and appropriate public education (FAPE) to children with disabilities. He responded that no one from the disability community had…
“Will you…join Kelly in calling on Governor Newsom to give us a real plan to reopen schools, while keeping our communities safe?”
- Kelly Gonez
As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly overtook Los Angeles last March, the School Board gave Superintendent Austin Beutner broad emergency powers. This allowed Beutner to react to events in real-time without the need to stop and get the board’s approval. During an unprecedented crisis where decisions had to be made on the fly, this was a decision that was in the best interest of the students.
With the anniversary of the physical closure of LAUSD schools…
Parent, special education advocate and former LAUSD School Board candidate. Still fighting for the children. www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com