Mark Hovatter, chief facilities executive

School overcrowding is down and buildings are safer and updated. But according to a recent report, there’s still $60 billion worth of work needed on LA Unified schools.

Since 1997 an unprecedented series of bonds approved specifically for school buildings to ease overcrowding has provided the district with $19.5 billion. While the district has completed 20,000 modernization projects, built 130 new schools and added onto 65 campuses, it still needs an additional $60 billion to renovate and modernize its existing campuses, Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter said in a report last week to the school board’s Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee.

“We had an unprecedented influx of funds for facilities,” Hovatter told the committee, pointing to propositions ranging from Prop BB in 1997 for $2.4 billion to Measure Q in 2008 for $7 billion, all of which must be used for school facilities and cannot be used for salaries or books. “We’ve made a lot of progress. But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

That progress includes nearly eliminating multi-track school schedules districtwide (the last school will end the multi-track schedule this year) and adding full-day kindergarten classes to every elementary school. Seven schools have had major seismic renovations, and 48 schools have had urgent repairs that include new roofing, fixing air conditioners, asbestos removal and other major structural repairs. Schools that were built for 1,800 students no longer house 3,500 students.

“We still have a lot of major issues. Even with our new schools, the average age of our schools is 50 years old,” Hovatter said. “We have 700 buildings that are more than 75 years old.”

Board member Monica Ratliff, chairwoman of the budget and facilities committee, said she was concerned that the money wasn’t spent evenly among districts. Hovatter said, “The prime directive is the safety of the school, and we didn’t look at district lines.”

Ratliff, who was looking at the big picture of solving a $600 million budget deficit expected in three years, said, “In terms of fairness I want to see how the money is distributed across our district. I always want to make sure it’s fair.”

Of the $7.8 billion of proposition money left, about $1.45 billion is set aside for charter school facilities, including $402 million for building new charter schools.

“The charters have to be built to our standards and will become our facilities, so they have to comply to our labor standards and certain qualifications,” Hovatter said.

The board had to cancel $600 million in bond construction projects in October to free up the funds needed to make existing buildings compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The district has been out of compliance with the act and is under a federal court order to upgrade its facilities.

Although the school board must still individually approve each project, the district for the first time has set up an overall plan for the 1,274 schools it runs in the district, according to Hovatter. The plan is a wish list, written as if money were no object for each school site. That list comes with a $60 billion price tag, he said.

So, the first Unassigned Day of the year fell on Sept. 14 when teachers and students had off. That was on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana.

The next day off is tomorrow, which is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Then, there’s the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before the usual Thursday and Friday holidays for Thanksgiving from Nov. 23 through 27. Yes, this year the school district has off a week for Thanksgiving, probably something to do with a celebration of finding and catching turkeys.

And, the final Unassigned Day falls suspiciously on the Monday after Easter, March 28 next year.

The district isn’t calling those days off for the names of the specific religious holidays, but they know if those days weren’t taken off, there would be a high rate of absenteeism anyway. It costs the schools additional money for substitute teachers and a great loss of money in per-student attendance when there is high absenteeism.

“Days are labeled ‘unassigned’ because of high absenteeism on certain dates,” said Daryl Strickland, a district spokesman. “The District overall has a 180-day school year, spanning August to June.”

And, as one teacher, who recalls not having those Unassigned Days off during a year-round schedule in the past said, “I came to school one day and a third of the teachers were gone and the halls were empty. Then, the prinicpal told me it was Yom Kippur. We might as well have had a day off.”

As the district tries to eliminate any trace of lead, plans are underway to remove school fountains that aren’t being used regularly. LA Unified exceeds the one-fountain-per-150 students by nearly 10 times, so schools are inundated with fountains. But, some are redundant and need to be taken out or replaced, board members were told.

The $19,831,708 approved to eliminate lead is setting a “serious standard for school districts across the nation,” said Evelyn Wendel, of the nonprofit We Tap, which she founded to save public drinking fountains.

“Most of our drinking water is the best in the world,” she told the board. A former movie producer and mother of two, she added, “The seriousness that this school board has in improving the water equals some of what is being done with academics.”

But caveats arose. Board member and former teacher Mónica Ratliff said she worries about taking fountains away even though some may be unused. “As a teacher I want it in my classroom,” she said. “If there was one in the classroom and now we have to go elsewhere that will be a problem in terms of classroom management.”

Board member and former principal Scott Schmerelson pointed out that he has seen the need for more fountains where physical education activities take place. “You don’t want to have to wait in a long line after P.E., you need more fountains,” he said.

And dipping his toe into the issue, school board member Ref Rodriguez suggested, “We need to organize and create a campaign to communicate something specific to drinking water for the students.”

Magnolia Science Academy 6 charter school

* UPDATED

LA Unified today finally released a report that confirming that two charter schools, Magnolia Science Academy 6 and Magnolia Science Academy 7, were operating with insufficient funds and for years and have been financially mismanaged.

The 78-page report, prepared by an outside firm for the district’s Office of the Inspector General, concludes that the Magnolia schools in Palms and Reseda are financially insolvent, spending more money than they’re bringing in.

Other accounting irregularities found on the OIG report included loans between schools, payment of immigration fees for unspecified persons, the possible use of school funds for a European field trip, and what seems like an unsustainable over-payment to a charter management organization providing services that are the purview of the charter group.

The review, which was completed in mid-June but withheld by the district, does not examine the Magnolia schools’ parent company, Magnolia Educational and Research Foundation, known as MERF, beyond June 2014 despite assertions by Superintendent John Deasy that the Inspector General would be looking into all eight of the district’s Magnolia schools.

The district’s Charter School Division based its denial of the two schools’ charter renewal petition on the findings of the report as presented to the school board over the summer. But the revocation of the charter was overturned in court and the schools were allowed to reopen this year. A court hearing is scheduled for January to determine whether they can continue to operate.

Officials from the Magnolia schools said they were heartened by the release of the report, saying that the detailed findings, now public, would help them mount a stronger legal case against the district in arguing to keep the schools open.

Kim Onisko, MERF’s accountant, sounded relieved after reviewing the executive summary. “Getting the numbers lets us trace back to where their figures came from to see if they’re right or wrong,” he told LA School Report.

“Basically the discussion is exactly the same as it was in June, it’s just we have more meat in this report so we can actually give a better response than we did to the prior report which didn’t tell us very much.”

What MERF officials contended then — and now — is that they operate as a company, not as individual entities, a difference that might show deficits at individual schools but not with the company.

“There is no inter-company borrowing because Magnolia operates as one entity, under one tax number. As such, you can not make a loan to yourself,” Onisko explained. “You can transfer money between departments, but there are no loans because you can’t contract with yourself.”

Onisko also denied the use of public money to fund a student field trip to Europe in 2011.

LA Unified officials declined to comment citing pending litigation.

Previous Posts: Magnolia schools remain open but relationship with Accord changes; Magnolia Charter troubles in LAUSD highlight larger concerns; Fiscal mismanagement’ cited in closing 2 Magnolia charters

* Clarifies that the report released yesterday was completed in June.

But there is one celebrity-led health trend that has state and LA officials alarmed, and that is the plunging number of children receiving vaccinations against diseases like whooping cough and measles, which has left 25 LA Unified schools, some of them charters, with a vaccination rate that is below the levels recommended by health officials.

State law requires kindergartners to be vaccinated against nine diseases, but allows for parents to opt out if it violates their personal beliefs. As a result, the number of California parents invoking the personal belief exemption has doubled in the last seven years, according to the Los Angeles Times. The trend is particularly high in Los Angeles County. (The list below shows the 10 LA Unified schools with the highest opt-out rates.)

The percentage of kindergarten classes in California in which at least 8 percent of students are not fully vaccinated has also doubled, a disturbing trend because for a community to be immune to diseases like measles and whooping cough, a concept known as “herd immunity,” experts say at least 92 percent of kids need to be immune, the Times reported.

The Hollywood Reporter noted that some schools in LA have a vaccination rate on par with South Sudan, and that the falling immunization rates have led to an outbreak of whooping cough around the state.

Inspired by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who led public crusades against vaccinations by saying they threatened public health and could cause medical conditions like autism, many parents in LA have followed the advice and opted out of vaccinating their kids.

The spread of anti-vaccination beliefs has happened despite Kennedy’s citing of data that went against “broad scientific consensus” and McCarthy’s citing a totally debunked scientific study, then backing off her anti-vaccination position, the Hollywood Reporter noted.

The California Department of Public Health, Immunization Branch has a great interactive map here.

Los Angeles School for Enriched Studies

Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews took an in-depth look at Los Angeles County this month when he applied his Challenge Index rankings and came up with a list of the top 75 private and public schools.

The results may surprise some, as Mathews noted that only six schools on the list are private, and the top school, LA Unified’s Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, is a public magnet school in which half the students are from low income families. Eight other schools from LA Unified were ranked in the top 25.

Mathews has been applying his Challenge Index to national rankings in the Washington Post and Newsweek for decades. The LA County rankings were published in the September issue of Los Angeles Magazine.

Mathews’ Challenge Index takes a non-traditional approach to ranking high schools, and while his methods are not without critics, they do provoke some interesting thoughts, as well as hope for the opportunities a public education can offer. In his explanation of the rankings, Mathews wrote that SAT, ACT, and state test scores don’t offer a one-to-one correlation with the schools that prepare the most students for college, so he ranks schools by participation in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses and tests.

Viewing schools with this different lens, Mathews said parents should not worry if they can’t afford a private school with high SAT scores.

“Stanford, Yale, and similar institutions pick only a few students from each school,” he wrote. “It’s hard to stand out in a class full of near-perfect SAT scores. Private schools may seem to do better at placing students in the Ivy League, but look carefully. Often they have more Ivy-graduate parents, whose children are given special consideration by their alma maters.”

The LA Unified schools ranked in the top 25 are: James A. Foshay Learning Center (No. 11), Harbor Teacher Preparation Acadamy (12), North Hollywood High (14), Eagle Rock High (15), King Drew Medical Magnet High School (16), Van Nuys Senior High (22), 32nd Street/USC Performing Arts Magnet (24) and Downtown Magnets High School (25).

See the full list here.

City Attorney Mike Feuer

Getting safely to and from school can be tricky in a rough neighborhood. To make it easier, City Attorney Mike Feuer launched a pilot program earlier this month at four LA Unified elementary schools, aimed at keeping kids safe.

The Neighborhood School Safety Program targets schools in areas with high “quality of life” crimes, including graffiti, vandalism, prostitution and illegal dumping.

The pilot schools are Vista Middle School in Panorama City; Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy in Chesterfield Square; Le Conte Middle School in Hollywood; and John H. Liechty Middle School in MacArthur Park.

The City Attorney’s office has partnered with LA Unified and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Providing safe passage on the journey to school is one key component of the program that will start later this fall, Sharee Sanders Gordon, Deputy City Attorney told LA School Report. Volunteer parents armed with walkie-talkies and bright colored vests will be stationed throughout neighborhood streets leading to the schools.

“It seems simple — just walking to school — but it’s not. It can be a very scary, and sometimes dangerous thing,” she said.

A multi-agency School Toxics Task Force has been set up to identify potential polluters within one mile of a school. Local police will conduct semi-regular gun sweeps and the City Attorney’s office will coordinate compliance checks on probationers, parolees and registered sex offenders who reside near school campuses to assure that none are in violation of any law.

Ultimately, the program can be expanded to other areas of the district where children are living in similar circumstances, Sanders Gordon said.

“This could really change their lives,” she said.

Concerned by a slew of problems with the district’s new student management computer system, board member Tamar Galatzan said today she is asking the district’s Inspector General to conduct an audit of the defective rollout.

“I demand to know what happened and how this got so messed up,” she told LA School Report. “Because until it happened, the board had no inkling that the system wasn’t ready to go live.”

Galtazan, who made her request in writing to Ken Bramlett this afternoon, added, “After the payroll fiasco of a number of years ago, the board tried to put safeguards in place so we wouldn’t go live with a system that didn’t work. Clearly, that didn’t happen here, and we need to know who’s responsible for it.”

She says the board received little information about the progress and development of the comprehensive system over the last year.

“I can’t remember the last time we got an update on the program . . . and we don’t supervise anyone who works for the superintendent, which is who was running it,” Galatzan said.

Among other things, she asks Bramlett to include in his audit:

• Reasons the new system was put into place without a backup.
• A financial summary of the program.
• A review of the management and implementation by LA Unified employees and contractors as well as how third-party contractors were sourced.
• A breakdown of the problems reported at school sites.
• Recommendations to avoid the same kinds of problems in future technology projects.

In response to continued complaints about the glitchy system that continues to derail efforts to enroll kids in the right classes, LA Unified officials now say, less than 1 percent of students have been affected by the series of technical snafus.

“Students at the vast majority of LAUSD schools are in class and learning how to read, write, think and speak for success,” the district said in a statement today.

By the district’s own math, that leaves about 6,500 students who have yet to be assigned classes, teachers, counselors, and a host of other services.

The system, called MiSiS — My Integrated Student Information System — is designed to track every aspect of a student’s academic lifecycle by consolidating a variety of existing computer programs. The one-stop-shop is supposed to monitor everything from grades to health records to daily attendance.

However, while the district tries to solve a series backend problems, teachers have been instructed to track attendance the old fashioned way — with pen and paper — through August 22, which is 10 days into the new academic year.

“At times, the system has been slower than expected. We’ve asked teachers to take attendance offline — for now,” reads the statement.

Lydia Ramos, director of communications for the district, said, “Attendance will be input either by teachers, front office or support staff. Instructions will go out at the appropriate time.”

Beyond the immediate repercussions of disenfranchisement by having students miss the first week of school, their exclusion could have a significant impact on the district’s bottom line, which relies on student attendance for federal and state dollars. Every day that a child is not in school, or is not recorded as being in school, means less money for the district.

Again, Ramos, says the district is on top of it. “We will not risk losing money in the short term.”

Previous Posts: Teachers union says computer glitch cost students first day; Teachers in panic over LAUSD’s new computer tracking system

* Includes details of Galatzan’s request to the Inspector General.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/galatzan-calling-for-probe-into-computer-system-snafus/feed/ 10 https://www.laschoolreport.com/teachers-union-says-computer-glitch-cost-students-first-day/ https://www.laschoolreport.com/teachers-union-says-computer-glitch-cost-students-first-day/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:34:57 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=27463 Officials from LA Unified’s teachers union said today hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students missed the first day of school today due to flaws in the district’s new student data management system, which is designed to enroll and assign students.

Colleen Schwab, a UTLA vice president, held up a picture of an empty classroom taken earlier today as she detailed a litany of problems at several LAUSD campuses.

The system, called MiSiS — My Integrated Student Information System — is designed to track every aspect of a student’s academic career by integrating a variety of existing computer programs. When working properly, teachers and administrators can track attendance, grades, health and counseling records from a single location.

“At Taft High School in Woodland Hills at 9 o’clock this morning, there were close to 400 students, still sitting, waiting for classes, and a long line out the door,” Schwab said. She added that hundreds more across the district abandoned their plans to enroll today, leaving school sites frustrated by the long waits.

But the district had a different take on today’s events. “The new MISIS system is working at the overwhelming majority of LAUSD schools,” read a brief statement issued late this afternoon.

“Launching a new system—as large and complex as this one—requires fine-tuning and we are responding to schools as they request support. We are the largest system in America to transition an entire student record system,” it said.

UTLA, which is negotiating a new labor contract with the district, has objected to MiSiS for several months, in part, because of the extra workload it has created for counselors, nurses, and administrative staff. Today, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl assured members the union will be seeking additional compensation on their behalf.

“We are going to be pursuing overtime for our counselors who have put in hundreds of extra hours to clean up for [Superintendent John Deasy’s] mess,” he said.

Whatever the magnitude of problems, board member Steve Zimmer acknowledged the hard work of school and district personnel getting the new system up and running.

“I was around people who have slept total of 10 to 12 hours because they’ve been working so hard to make sure that what needed to get done got done,” he told LA School Report. “It is literally heroic what staffers have done to get kids enrolled and in classes.” 

Previous Posts: Teachers in panic over LAUSD’s new computer tracking system

So what’s really new this year in LA Unified?

1. More digital devices are coming. They’re not going to be all iPads. Thanks to a review of the program, students in 27 high schools will be getting laptops. The school board agreed to spend about $40 million to buy 19,300 laptop devices for students and staff.

2. More teachers are here. Following an influx of new money from the state, the district has filled 60 positions to reduce middle school class size in math and English language arts by two students and 70 positions to reduce senior high class size in math and English language arts by two students.

3. More staffers are here. The district has filled 60 positions for health and human services personnel for foster youth, 90 to 100 positions at the district’s highest needs schools for special education teachers, secondary counselors and health and human services personnel, 20 positions in the Restorative Justice Program, 15 positions for school nurses and another 100 positions for other targeted student populations.

4. School facilities will be tidier, with fewer broken toilets, and school offices will run more efficiently. The district’s facilities department reports they’ve hired 25 full time building and grounds workers. Twenty seven new full time clerical staff positions have been filled.

5. More access to books. After years of shutting down school libraries because the district couldn’t afford to hire library aides, the district has hired 192 full time staffers and employees to fill 512 three-hour positions.

6. The district has more schools. In the coming year LA Unified is adding 9 autonomy schools – 4 pilots,  4 Local Initiative Schools and 1 Expanded School Base Management Model – and 17 new charter schools.

7. The district is phasing in a new arts program and planning to boost private donations to supplement the decimated arts budget due to years of cuts. Rory Pullens, head of arts instruction and curriculum for the district, says he plans to pursue a similar strategy to the one used at Duke Ellington School for the Arts, which he left to join LAUSD. Pullens says he plans to create a non-profit dedicated exclusively to raising funds for the school.

8. Within the next few days, District 1 will have a new board member, filling an eight-month vacancy following the death of Marguerite LaMotte. The new member will be either George McKenna, 74, a former administrator, or Alex Johnson, 34, a lawyer and policy aide. The election is today and swearing-in will follow certification of the vote.

9. UTLA, the teachers union, has a new team of leaders, led by President Alex Caputo-Pearl. Right now, they’re talking to the district about a new contract after seven years without one. Talking. Negotiating is too strong a word.

10. Instructional strategies are changing with teachers trying to accommodate a shift to Common Core State Standards. The new emphasis is on contextual thinking although any thinking is encouraged. First graders will be expected to study the poem “Mix a Pancake”:

Stir a pancake,

Pop it in the pan;

Fry the pancake,

Toss the pancake—

Catch it if you can.

OK, so it’s not Robert Frost, but click here for more samples of what students at every grade level will be expected to learn.

According to KPCC’s findings, only 70 out of more than 500 elementary schools in the district will provide all four forms of arts education required by California law.

This is the first comprehensive survey of arts access in LA Unified in recent years. We at LA School Report think this is a really neat tool, and that you should take a look.

For a look at the map, click here, and to read the full story, here.