April 2020 – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Headlines: LAUSD Earns High Marks For “Grab And Go”, Rough Financial Times Coming and More on Elections.

In addition to providing educational opportunities for students during the shutdown, LAUSD has also been distributing meals though its “Grab and Go” program at schools throughout the district. The program is earning mostly high marks, and was profiled in the LA Times last week as an example of a COVID response program that’s working. There’s also a video version of the story.

If you are in need, visit this link to see where the closest Grab and Go can be found.

Also, a hat tip for the fun #GrabnDough hashtag that features recipes to make better meals out of Grab and Go food bags.

And as we start to look forward to schools re-opening, hopefully in the fall, the question circles around what schools will look like on Back to School Day. NPR has some thoughts based on what is happening at re-opened schools throughout the world.

One Week of Headlines: School’s Out FOREVER (until next year), No F’s in the Last Quarter, UTLA Pushes Back on Relocations and More…

Well, it’s official. Yesterday morning, LAUSD announced that its buildings will be closed until the next school year giving time for more long-term planning to educate students in a safe environment while we wait for a coronavirus vaccine. Summer school will be offered online. No final word on STAR or other camps based on the school campus, but based on the language used by Beutner, I would guess they aren’t happening. LAist/KPCC, KTLA, EdSource.

The LAUSD announcement came the same day Spring Break ended and students returned to their virtual learning experience. It’s a hard way to start off Spring quarter, and in response there have been many wonderful “missing you” videos from all around the District. An exemplar is from Venice High School, where the same teachers who stole the city’s heart by dancing in the rain during the 2019 strike did their best to put a happy face on this weird experience in this video.

And while classes continue online, the move to approve charter co-locations continues in the real world. UTLA is asking LAUSD to put a halt on all charter co-location applications until the general public can be more involved in the process. Such a move is in-line with recommendations from national advocates for equity and inclusion in public processes.

From the “best practices” department comes a virtual spirit week put together by the parent advocate at Richland Avenue Elementary School (where my kids go.) If you’re looking for something fun to add to your curriculum or your kids’ sheltering at home, check it out.

Find SARS2/Covid19 resources for families here.

Backers of “Schools and Communities First” Submit Record Breaking Number of Signatures for Inclusion on Fall Ballot.

Backers of the Schools and Communities First Ballot Initiative didn’t let a little thing like a global pandemic stop them from submitting 1.7 million signatures to the California Secretary of State to earn a spot on the November ballot. The measure needs 50%+1 vote to pass. California’s fiscal analyst estimates it would raise an estimated $8-$12.5 billion a year for education and public safety by changing the state constitution and raising property taxes on California’s largest businesses.

“Now more than ever, we need to support those heroes on the front lines who have been caring for the most vulnerable, educating our children, and keeping Californians safe,” said Alex Stack, communications director for the Schools & Communities First campaign, in a press statement.

To qualify for the fall ballot, Schools and Communities First would need nearly one million verified signatures (read: signatures of voters registered in California). Because of poor handwriting, error recording the signatures or people just putting bad information on the signature sheets, the state recommends gathering 20% more signatures than the minimum requirement.

TogetherApart: Co-location And Collaboration Constrained By Pandemic

In the wake of pandemic, priorities are rearranged.

Prior to schools’ closing in March, 2020, several LAUSD school sites were facing the prospect of sharing their campus with a charter school next year. These forced “colocations” are directed by the District when a “public charter school” requests public space for its operations under legal mandate from a voter initiative passed in 2000.

Proposition 39 addressed schools facilities issues by lowering the passage threshold for local school bond measures from 67% to 55%. With over $10m of vested interest from ubiquitous charter privateers Ann & John Doerr, John Walton and Reed Hastings, the initiative established a facilities payload for the charter industry. Along for the ride was the ideological position that charter schools had the right to request of the public District “reasonably equivalent conditions” for operations. The specifics for calculating and granting these conditions were litigated through a series of lawsuits (2007, 2010 and 2012) inordinately taxing on the public purse in contrast with that of the billionaire-funded charter school lobby.

The Price Of Pandemic Opportunities – Laptops, Public Policy And Science Awareness

All this isolating and cowering in the shadow of a revolution of computerized learning shouldn’t remove us from the exhilaration of making a difference. Our actions as individuals and as families may well be making a significant difference; data is too poor to know for sure yet. So while a “bend” in the curve is hard to attest, still the trend of cases is not truly exponential. The cases reported daily by LA County’s Department of Public Health are far from the predicted exponential plotted on a log scale below as the straight, dashed line in yellow (an exponential trend plots on a log scale as a straight line).

There are other aspects of slight positivity. The pandemic may be creating budding physicians and virologists and epidemiologists in the students among us.

April 1 is Census Day! Take a Break from Homeschooling to Fill Your Form Out Online.

This post and podcast originally appeared at Streetsblog Los Angeles.

April 1 is Census Day! Every ten years, the United States government sends out a questionnaire to ask people living in America where they live and other questions about their lives. The final count of where people live helps determine how the federal government allocates resources. So the more people that fill out the census, the more money will flow into their community.

Today, SGV Connect broadcasts this half-episode with Active SGV’s Adriana Pinedo who is leading the advocacy group’s efforts to get as many people counted in the San Gabriel Valley as possible.