Voices From The Community

“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. …

COVID-19 And Education

“LAUSD spokeswoman Barbara Jones declined to answer questions about how the nation’s second-largest school district is addressing the needs of its special education students.”

- 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…

EDUCATING OUR MOST VULNERABLE STUDENTS

“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…

Deregulation

The Republican-controlled state has long pursued a policy of deregulation. For those who could not escape to Cancun, the results were deadly.

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

- 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. …

#RedForEd

“It is our democratically elected school board’s responsibility to lead our school district through this crisis. Not the superintendent, district staff nor the teachers union.”

- 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…

EDUCATION IN CRISIS

“It makes me very angry. It’s wrong, it’s unethical. As our community has gone through this pandemic, it’s been our community that’s been the hardest hit, so it makes me angry that some folks can jump the line.”

- 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…

A New Beginning

“To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. Unity.”

- 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…

2022 Elections

“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…