One of the most popular classes at 20th Street Elementary School has 43 dedicated students who come twice a week.

They’re all parents.

The parents of this 600-student school just south of downtown Los Angeles come here to learn English. They do projects for teachers. They discuss school issues. Their children even help them with their English homework. And it’s all taking place at one of the most active rooms on campus: the parent center.

LA Unified officials, board member Monica Garcia and about 50 parents gathered Tuesday to dedicate the new parent center with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and student performances. The ceremony also marked a healing of sorts among divided parents who had twice moved to use a “parent trigger,” a California law that allows parents to take over a failing school.

District officials and the school board have come to realize that encouraging more parent centers on school campuses leads to more community engagement, higher attendance and eventually better test scores and higher graduation rates.

Nearly half of the school sites — more than 500 — at the nation’s second-largest school district have at least one classroom dedicated specifically as a parent center. Many of them have computers, Internet, desks, materials, copy machines and other supports for parents to use during and after school and sometimes on weekends.

This year alone, 70 parent centers opened at district schools and 40 more will open before the end of December, said Rowena Lagrosa, senior executive director of parent, community and student services. The district has a request before the school board for 155 more centers.

The 20th Street parent center.

“These centers are a game changer, and it results directly in improved classroom attendance,” Lagrosa said. “Getting our parents involved with the school is integral to getting our children college-bound, and as we see here, it starts at the elementary level.”

The costs per school for a new parent center run from $65,000 to $100,000, according to Lagrosa, who added, “Some of our schools need a little more TLC.” The district provides a cart with 20 Chromebooks, like those already provided to schools for testing.

“This is a great space for parents to come together and work together now,” said Karla Vilchis, who is on the English Language Advisory and School Site councils. She recalled the contentious years when parents tried to take control of the school. “Everyone has the desire to get the best education for our children.”

The school’s principal, Mario Garcielita, welcomed the parent center and acknowledged the difficult period with different factions of parents. For the past year, parents met at nearby homes to figure out how to force improvements at the school. Now they can meet on campus to voice their issues and talk among themselves.

“This was a tough year this last year, and I respect that past and the issues that came up, but I’m so excited about the future,” Garcielita said. “Parents are now coming together and sharing their vision for the school. This is a great new beginning.”

In June, the parents, teachers and the district agreed to move 20th Street into the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which now operates 19 schools in South LA, Boyle Heights and Watts. With Partnership, the school remains under district control but is granted more educational autonomy. It also benefits from the nonprofit organization’s many community connections and resources. Partnership CEO Joan Sullivan attended Tuesday’s dedication and pointed out the importance of parent centers.

“Investing in adults, who are the primary teachers of our children, is a centerpiece of what Partnership believes,” Sullivan said. “Equal access to quality education is the biggest civil rights battle going on, and it’s more important than the suffragette movement or integration or abolition, and the movement will look to parents to lead the way.”

Although the parent center was in the planning stages before Partnership came on the scene, Sullivan said they have helped with equipment and supplies for the center.

“Sometimes parent centers are second thoughts and put off in the corner of the school somewhere,” Sullivan said. “But these are important spaces where parents come together and feel empowered. They learn together and strategize. It is a space where parents can raise their voices and realize they are true partners in the education of their children.”

This is the best way to start turning around the school, said Central District Administrator of Operations Eugene L. Hernandez. “This is the beginning of turning this into a top-notch school,” he said. “Parents need to be engaged.”

Annabella Sales, the community representative hired to work with the 20th Street parent center, said, “Most of the parents who come in are not familiar with technology and they do not have computers or Internet at home. They come here and they learn not only how to help their children with their homework, but the children help them too.”

Cutting the ribbon.

Parents also learn how to navigate getting financial help and looking ahead to college enrollment for their children. “It is a great team effort for everyone involved in education,” said Lorena Padilla-Melendez, director of community relations for the district’s Facilities Services Division. “It shows we are all part of the team.”

Mark Hovatter, chief facilities executive for the district, said, “I am a parent and I love the parent center projects because it costs a small amount of money and we do something that is so critical for the schools.”

Board member Garcia chatted in Spanish with parents and children after the second-graders recited the poem “I, Too, Sing America” and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” Then the school drill team performed.

“This parent center represents power and love and hope and shows something great for the future of these talented children,” Garcia said. “This is your classroom, parents, and if you have doubts and concerns, you can come here to discuss. Everything you need is available here. We will work together for your children.”

As parent Vilchis pointed out, parent involvement could be as simple as helping a teacher cut out shapes or sweep the classrooms.

“There’s a lot of cutting and sweeping to do,” Vilchis said. “There’s enough to do to feel proud and happy and making the world a better place for our children.”

Resolutions are listed on the LAUSD.net website.

Some frank talk among the LA School Board members recently led to questions about how many resolutions the board creates and how effective they are. But they’re also one of the best ways to get things done, members said.

Every school board meeting at LA Unified has a flurry of resolutions: It’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Let’s recognize “No One Eats Alone Day.” How about “Be Kind to Animals Week” or “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” or the “Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.”

Those are some of the 102 resolutions presented by the LA Unified school board in the past 15 months. Sure, most of them get approved unanimously without discussion. And yes, many have nothing to do with anything that goes on in the classroom.

But a candid discussion last week among the seven school board members and the superintendent revealed that some of them believe resolutions are the only way to get anything done at the district.

The discussion at the Committee of the Whole led to board members contemplating whether there are too many resolutions. Superintendent Michelle King agreed that perhaps there are too many and that the process could be streamlined.

“I’m not sure anything we do in these resolutions has any impact on what actually goes on in the classroom,” said board member Monica Ratliff. “If they celebrate everything we tell them to celebrate, they’d be celebrating all the time. Sure, they had to do breakfast in the classroom because we decided on that, but they had no choice. School reform has to happen in the classroom, but it’s not related to what we do here, I wish it would be.”

Sometimes the resolutions reflect a board member’s passions or pet causes. Monica Garcia introduces “Celebrating Latino Heritage Month” every year and has resolutions against bullying and honoring LGBT Pride. The board’s only African-American member, George McKenna, every year commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black Heritage Month in separate resolutions.

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Ref Rodriguez presented a resolution for Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month to introduce instructors working at the district who are living with the disease. Scott Schmerelson showcased teachers and students who are overcoming their issues when recognizing Dyslexia Awareness Month. But inevitably, those recognitions can add an extra half hour or hour of discussion to already long board meetings that can stretch to eight hours or more.

Since the new configuration of the school board was seated in July 2015, the number of resolutions introduced by each board member or the superintendent has topped 100. This does not include the board members who signed on to co-sponsor the resolutions, which many of them do.

Garcia and Ratliff have introduced the most resolutions, at 31 and 30 respectively, nearly 60 percent of all the resolutions presented during the past 15 months. The superintendent’s office (which included Ramon Cortines as well as King over that period) has introduced 14 resolutions, most of them cursory appointments to advisory boards run by the administration.

Board President Steve Zimmer has 10 resolutions in his name, most supporting or opposing legislation for which he has lobbied legislators in Sacramento or Washington on behalf of the district. Freshman board member Rodriguez and longtime member McKenna have five and six resolutions in their name, respectively, and newcomer Scott Schmerelson ties with veteran board member Richard Vladovic at introducing three over the past 15 months.

King pointed out that she would prefer the board members check in with her directly before drafting resolutions asking her office to do something. Zimmer said that the past three superintendents all begged the school board to curb the number of their resolutions.

“But it’s a Catch-22 because sometimes I think it’s the only way to be heard,” Ratliff said.

Discussions by the school board with the superintendent.

In between the obvious resolutions that call for “promoting healthy habits” or “Internet for all” or “supporting fair utility rates for schools,” there are some that address hotly debated topics in the district, such as working together with charter organizations, sharing facilities through Prop. 39 and changing the school calendar.

The need to change some of the procedures weighed heavily on some of the board members, as they mentioned the dozens of resolutions thrown their way. As Vladovic summed up, “Sometimes I leave a meeting more frustrated and drained than when we started.”

Monica Ratliff places a sticker on a list to identify dysfunctional school board characteristics.

Some school board decisions get ignored, all board meetings are too long and most decisions have nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom.

That’s some of the conversation that came out of an all-day session Tuesday with the LA Unified School Board and superintendent. The meeting, led by a private facilitator, was held to discuss the strategic plan and vision of the nation’s second-largest school district.

They didn’t make any binding commitments, but the discussion could lead to some major changes in the way the school board deals with the public, and how the superintendent deals with the board.

“Everybody knows low-performing schools should not exist, everybody knows this, so why does it still keep happening?” asked board member Monica Ratliff. She noted that the school board doesn’t have much to do with what goes on in the classroom and then answered her own question with: “There’s this giant bureaucracy and layers of bureaucracy and you can get help from one layer and then get stifled by another layer. And sometimes you have to go to a school board member and have that member advocate for them, but it should not have to be that way.”

Ratliff said that even the agreements made at board meetings seem to go nowhere. She said a few members nod in agreement, but sometimes nothing gets done unless she writes a resolution forcing them all to vote on it.

“I see some people (on the board) throw out the same ideas over and over and we all nod our heads and it doesn’t go anywhere,” Ratliff said.

Board member George McKenna agreed and said, “When we throw out an idea, who is supposed to pick up on it? The superintendent? I hope others can pick up on it and will come up with something.”

Superintendent Michelle King admitted that she has to prioritize what the board throws at her. “There are great ideas, but we can’t take the focus off of where we have to go,” King told the board. She noted that if there are five new things for her to do that are suggested by the board, and money is already allocated for other things they must do, she has to “clear the must-haves and stay centered and focused on what is aligned to our mission and where we are trying to go.”

King said she preferred that school board members come to her directly with issues. “I prefer direct contact and we can talk about issues, that works best for me,” she said. “I appreciate clear expectations and where it will go, and that is how I operate. The more the specific the better.” That way, board members can avoid so many resolutions.

Facilitator Jeff Nelsen

McKenna said to King, “I’m concerned what stimulates your office is a private meeting with a board member. You start doing something because a board member is asking.”

The issues brought up were not supposed to lead to direct solutions, said facilitator Jeff Nelsen, of Targeted Leadership Consulting. A coach to more than 2,000 principals and school leadership teams over the past decade, Nelsen said the exercise with the board is to identify dysfunctions, and he said, “some underlying issues naturally surfaced.”

For example, the board members and superintendent were to put dots next to items on a board that had a list of dysfunctional characteristics. Most of them put dots next to: “Disagreement among members on goals and processes,” while others pointed out “Unfocused agenda that wastes time on unimportant, peripheral issues.” A few noted: “Disagreements get personal in public” and “Members represent special interest groups or only certain areas of the district.”

Others suggested problems, including: “Board members play to other district staff, go around superintendent” and “Board plays favorites with press.”

“I think as a board we get in your way,” board member Ref Rodriguez told the superintendent. “You report to seven people rather than one board.”

King suggested that some decisions like business contracts could be handled during the various committee meetings rather than the marathon monthly board meetings that often start at 9 a.m. with closed sessions and then start again at 1 p.m. and often last until 9 p.m.

“It takes me a whole day to recover from those board meetings, I would like a more humane process,” said board President Steve Zimmer, who is in charge of the agenda for the board meetings.

Board members threw out some ideas, such as moving closed sessions to another day, getting board materials earlier than the Friday before the meeting and holding more board meetings.

The strategic plan is discussed at a meeting held at USC.

Rodriguez said some media reports “try to polarize us as a result of expressing our viewpoints and that is a shame.” He admitted, “My 4-year-old self may come out, but there’s so much value that we have different perspectives.”

King said she doesn’t mind the diversity of the board and said, “It is healthy to see the diversity of the board and their districts and how it all fits together as one. It is healthy to be aware of what it looks like in other parts of the district and it’s really not the same. We talk about poverty and there is poverty everywhere, but it does not look same everywhere.”

King suggested field trips or meetings in other parts of the district to see the diversity. Board member Richard Vladovic, who said he has worked in every district, said, “I don’t think that would be helpful for me.”

Vladovic suggested that the district consider decentralizing or even breaking up more to allow more local control.

“We as a district can’t change instruction, we can tinker with it, but the real change works at the school,” Vladovic said. “We need to stop thinking central, we need to divest ourselves of that.”

King agreed, adding, “I don’t believe one size fits all, and each school has a unique DNA. I need to see them get the results and not dictate that this is the way you need to do it. I agree that decentralizing is one of the best ways to serve the kids with the budget.”

Vladovic said he remains frustrated that the same schools continue to fail and said some solutions have become political. He said, “Union leadership doesn’t share our vision. State and federal laws don’t necessarily share our vision. We’re all together in this.”

Board member Scott Schmerelson said that when he asks staff a simple question, he often gets back a detailed five-page report that isn’t necessary. King defended the process and said, “Not every board member is satisfied with the same level of response.”

Another idea that came up is putting high-performing teachers in low-performing schools. Ratliff suggested that teachers would go if there were incentives, but McKenna said the existing teachers may resent the newcomers.

Zimmer suggested increased investments in 3-year-olds not yet into the school system. McKenna replied, “Why should we make investments on 3-year-olds when we are graduating students who cannot read?”

Zimmer said, “I am interested in a revolution of mindset and how it can be a dynamic and synergistic confluence that has to come from the messaging and framing from the district level.”

Zimmer and board member Monica Garcia both said they wanted to learn more from employees who have chosen to educate their children in the schools they work at, even though those schools may not be their neighborhood schools. Their choices show the schools are doing something right. “You want to have people proud of the school they send their children to, and we should look at that. I do not want to see any school tumble.”

Rodriguez quipped, “I have the intestinal fortitude to take on the lowest-performing schools, but I take a lot of Tums.”

School board members and facilitator Jeff Nelsen (far right) at USC’s Caruso Catholic Center for a special committee meeting.

LA Unified’s three-year strategic plan lacks a clear mission statement.

That was the consensus of an all-day school board session Tuesday. So the seven board members decided to fix it, landing on the goal of a 100 percent graduation rate. Yet the draft of the strategic plan remains light on exactly how to accomplish it.

Because even with every teacher and principal knowing that 100 percent graduation will be the ultimate goal for the district, the three-year plan presented by Superintendent Michelle King offers targets that expect only 81 percent graduation by 2018-2019, and only 52 percent of students getting a C or better in the A-G classes required for graduation. Board members agreed that while a 10-point increase in the graduation rate to 75 percent from the 2010-2011 school year was significant, it wasn’t enough.

Draft of strategic plan targets.

The strategic plan does not directly address what King has previously acknowledged as two of the most pressing issues facing the district: the decrease in enrollment and a serious financial deficit, which she addressed last spring when she held a series of meetings before the budget was approved to discuss major challenges.

During Tuesday’s discussion at the Committee of the Whole at USC’s Caruso Catholic Center, school board President Steve Zimmer said a number of times, “I would argue that people don’t have a sense of mission” in the district. He insisted, “This discussion today is so important. We’ve got to coalesce about something.”

In a brainstorming session Tuesday that was described in the agenda as discussing “vision elements and core values” rather than specifics of the strategic plan, the school board was led by Jeff Nelsen of Targeted Leadership Consulting who has coached more than 2,000 principals and school leaders over the past decade.

“I will argue today that we should revisit the goals,” Zimmer said. “None of us is OK with 75 percent graduation, and we are being dishonest if we think so.”

Zimmer’s preferred goals are to eradicate the school readiness gap and have every graduate be bilingual and bi-literate. “We can lead the state and the nation with this,” he said.

But Zimmer was willing to let go of his ambitious goals to allow for one singular goal that the board agreed on that could encompass other goals. “We can really make real that we don’t give up on a single kid,”  Zimmer said. “We can lead in that area too.”

Zimmer told his fellow board members, “I don’t think we have a mission sense right now, and I think it’s our role to create it. And it has to be big, and the strategic plan should fall behind it. The strategic plan should be about implementing a broad mission.”

School board members with Superintendent Michelle King and facilitator Jeff Nelsen.

While King’s draft plan sets a goal of 100 percent graduation, she conceded Tuesday it wasn’t the sole clear mandate. “Heretofore, it’s about graduation,” she told the seven board members. “It’s about getting students to graduation and all that entails.”

In the initial draft, dated Aug. 3, the mission statement reads: “Embracing our diversity to educate LA’s youth, ensure academic achievement and empower tomorrow’s leaders. We are LA Unified.”

And the strategic plan does not include the 100 graduation rate in its seven targeted accomplishments with benchmarks to be hit in the next three years.

The seven goals included a 24 percent increase in school pathways such as magnets, dual-language immersion and Linked Learning programs; a 30 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism; and 100 percent access to quality art instruction, a parent computer program and restorative justice practices. Two other goals — of high school students concurrently enrolling in community college and an increase in bilingual, bi-literate graduates — did not have numerical targets yet.

“We can have all the mission statements in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to action, it doesn’t matter,” board member Monica Ratliff said.

Ratliff said that once every teacher is on board with a unified mission, then everything they do, from preschool to third grade to fifth grade, to children with trauma and more, should all lead to a child graduating from high school. “That provides us with a very clear mission that everything feeds into,” she said.

But can the district ever get to 100 percent graduation, asked board member George McKenna? “I have a problem with 100 percent graduation, it’s like a trap,” McKenna said. He pointed out that students get to the next grade simply by their birthdays, not because they are academically equipped to go to the next grade level. “How do you reconcile that we’ll never get to 100 percent graduation?”

King said some pilot schools in the district have reached 100 percent graduation and they are looking at how to replicate those programs. But she also pointed out that the one-size-fits-all approach that the district used in the past doesn’t work for every district school.

King acknowledged, “If there is a common vision and direction that is set forth and folks know where you want to go, it’s better than having competing multiple agendas.” She said, “You can’t go anywhere by spinning around about this one and that one, all that energy dissipates.” She said she plans to outline clear messages that don’t contradict each other and then plans to get the word out to kids, parents, educators and all school stakeholders.

Michelle King at the white board with Jeff Nelsen, facilitator.

Board members Ref Rodriguez and Zimmer both pointed out that statistics prove that early education helps achieve college-ready graduates.

Board member Scott Schmerelson added, “I believe most people think they work for the district, they don’t work for the kids. They forget for whom they are working.”

Board member Richard Vladovic said, “The same schools are still failing and I believe we can do better. It’s about leadership and good teaching and we’re not putting our resources where the greatest need is. I believe we have to do it now, time is running out.”

Board member Monica Garcia said she champions the 100 percent graduation goal and they all need to work out what can be done most immediately.

Zimmer pointed out that King has the respect of the teachers. “You have more trust than any superintendent has had,” Zimmer said. “You inspire trust amongst our ranks, and it’s our job to establish this mission sense once again.”

King acknowledged that the “superintendent represents the image of the district” and that “once we have what we want to do, I will go out again when I can engage (parents and teachers) face-to-face” to explain how they will accomplish their mission.

“We want graduation, bar none, not just college eligible but also getting students to be productive citizens,” King said. “Getting them to get a diploma in hand and being eligible to get to college, if that’s their choice, and everything else that supports that happening” is now the district’s clear mission, she said.

Nelsen, who monitored the discussion, said afterward that the meeting went well, and that often large urban districts don’t have as cohesive a mission as LA Unified does. He said the meeting helped “get some closure around what is the focus” for the district. He added, “I was impressed on how open and honest the board members were with a room full of people.”

The room contained about a dozen onlookers, half staff members and half media. The school board members, King and Nelsen sat around a boardroom table with religious iconography hanging over them and bulletin boards listing characteristics of a successful superintendent and school board. Although the committee meeting wasn’t televised live as meetings at LA Unified headquarters usually are, an audio recording is expected to be available in the next few days, said Board Secretariat Jefferson Crain.

The off-site meetings held outside the regular Beaudry headquarters of the school district are considered “field trips” for the board, and although they are still open to the public, the off-site locations usually discourage the public from making comments. Vladovic said Tuesday that public comments made before the monthly closed sessions end up extending the board meetings much longer than anticipated.

King said she would revamp the strategic plan in two weeks and then discuss the changes at the Oct. 25 meeting of the Committee of the Whole set for 2 p.m., although it is not yet clear where it will be held.

LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King signed off on new health benefits for teachers assistants and playground aides even though the agreement stated that it will help push district reserves into the red by half a billion dollars within two years.

And the question in the document asking how the district would replenish those reserves was left blank.

The collective bargaining agreement with SEIU Local 99 signed Aug. 10 by King notes that “the district will have to identify additional balancing strategies to address the cost of the agreement,” and that “program adjustments are needed to accommodate the additional costs.”

According to the agreement, the superintendent acknowledges that the impact of the agreement will cut existing unrestricted reserves in half next year, then result in a $506 million deficit in 2018-2019. The unrestricted reserves meet the state minimum reserve requirement for this school year and next year, but then a “NO” box is checked for the 2018-19 school year.

The new health benefits, which will cost the district an additional $16 million a year, was approved unanimously last week without discussion by the school board and helps 4,197 employees who make an average of $28,000 a year pay for their health benefits. The total cost for the certificated and classified salaries is $117 million a year before the agreement.

Some of the costs of the health benefits will be absorbed by the state’s Local Control Funding Formula and soften the blow to about $5.7 million a year, according to the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the union and the district.

Beginning next school year, teachers assistants who work 800 hours or more a year will get their medical, dental and vision benefits paid for, valued at $506 per month per worker. They will be able to enroll in the Kaiser Permanente plan or a comparable plan.

SEIU Local 99 members protest during negotiations over the new health benefits.

Playground aides who work 1,000 hours or more a school year will get half of their medical, dental and vision paid for, a benefit of about $253 a month.

Family members, who are fully covered in teachers benefits, are not insured by this agreement for these employees. This also does not involve retirement benefits.

In the district’s original counter-proposal, the superintendent and school board referred to the findings of the Independent Financial Review Panel, which suggested cutting health benefits and decreasing staff by nearly 10,000. Administrative staff increased this year.

In the document signed by King, “specific impacts” of the agreement were listed as: “This agreement impacts the purchasing power of school sites, especially for limited, restricted funding sources. Positive impacts could be claimed in improved quality staff and organizational climate.”

It adds, “The district will have to identify additional budget balancing strategies to balance the one-year deficit” of $5.7 million.

In the section titled “concerns regarding affordability of agreement in subsequent years,” the agreement states: “The out-year impact of this agreement compounds existing budget imbalances brought about by increases in fixed costs as well as decreased revenues due to enrollment decline.”

Teacher assistant Andrea Weathersby, who was on the bargaining team for Service Employee International Union Local 99, told the school board last Tuesday that the agreement is going to be a big help for her. She is an LA Unified parent, as are many of the other workers getting the new benefits. “Unfortunately, there have been times when my children have had to skip the arts classes they love because I need to pay for their health care instead. How can you tell a child, ‘You can’t’?”

It may not go as far as the union wanted, but the agreement helps, SEIU Local 99 executive director Max Arias said at the board meeting, and added, “These are the mothers and fathers of district students, educators committed to keeping our children safe and learning, LAUSD graduates, future teachers and members of our Latino and African-American communities who have historically suffered from unequal access to quality health care.”

School board President Steve Zimmer heralded the deal, pointing out that these workers have direct interaction with the children on a day-to-day basis, and the decision is making up for past staff and budget cuts. “I am proud to support the action which ensures that our workers, and their families, will have access to expanded health care options,” Zimmer said in a statement. “We need to make sure that the women and men who take care of LAUSD’s children by day can care for their own families by night.”

Michelle King and Steve Zimmer.

Board member Monica Garcia said, “I am proud to stand with every employee – from our bus drivers to our cafeteria workers, from our maintenance professionals to classroom support staff. You help make Los Angeles great, and we look forward to our continued partnership.”

And school board member George McKenna added, “Providing health and welfare benefits to our employees is the right thing to do and will further strengthen the relationship with vital members of our school families.”

King, who is working on a budget plan that she said she hopes will off-set the additional expenses in the upcoming years, said, “We are pleased to be able to extend health and welfare benefits to support more of the hard-working employees of SEIU Local 99.”

SEIU Local 99 represents nearly 30,000 employees throughout Southern California in public and non-public organizations in early education, child care, K-12 and community college levels and includes maintenance workers, gardeners, bus drivers, special education assistants, custodians, playground workers and cafeteria workers. Nearly half of the union members are parents or guardians of school-aged children, the union said.

King added, “We believe it is in the best interest of the district to support the teacher assistants and playground aides who are committed to providing a safe and nurturing learning environment for our students.”

Two more people this week entered the March 7 race for LA Unified school board.

Gregory Martayan will join Nick Melvoin in challenging board President Steve Zimmer for his District 4 seat. And Joanne Baltierrez-Fernandez joins one other challenger in seeking an open seat in District 6.

Martayan and Baltierrez-Fernandez filed with the city Ethics Commission on Tuesday an intent to raise money for their respective races. Candidates officially file to run for the seats in November.

Zimmer has represented school board District 4, which includes the Westside and Hollywood, since 2009. In his latest re-election bid, he won with 52 percent of the vote.

Melvoin has taken a wide early lead in fundraising. The latest campaign finance records show Melvoin has raised $124,344 from Jan. 1 through June 30. Records show that Zimmer raised $7,304 in the same period.

Melvoin touted grassroots support for his campaign.

Zimmer said he has been focused on statewide ballot measures in the Nov. 8 election, including Prop. 55, an extension of income taxes on the wealthy for public education, and Prop. 58, which would repeal a law that prohibits non-English languages from being used in public schools. Zimmer said he is also working to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton as president.

Martayan did not immediately return a request for comment.

In the board District 6 race, where Monica Ratliff is not seeking re-election as she is running for Los Angeles City Council, Baltierrez-Fernandez joins Araz Parseghian in running for the seat. The district encompasses the east San Fernando Valley.

Neither candidate has reported any fundraising or spending to the Ethics Commission. Both just filed their intentions to run this month.

Baltierrez-Fernandez unsuccessfully ran for the 39th District state Assembly seat occupied by Patty Lopez. She came in fourth in the June primary.

Baltierrez-Fernandez, who served on the San Fernando City Council from 1994 to 1999, said Friday that as she was campaigning for the state Assembly seat, many LA Unified school district issues came up.

She is a mental health clinician and said she sees that there is a need for more mental health services in the public school system.

“Children can’t learn if they’re angry, depressed or worried,” she said.

The other seat up for election is in board District 2 occupied by Monica Garcia since 2006.

Four candidates have filed paperwork with the Ethics Commission to raise money to run for the seat, which covers East LA, Pico-Union, downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods.

Garcia has dominated early fundraising, the latest campaign finance records show. Seeking her third term on the seven-member board, Garcia collected $119,858 in donations between Jan. 1 and June 30. One challenger, Carl Petersen, raised $805 in the same period.

Other candidates for the seat are Berny L. Motto, Walter Bannister and Manuel “Manny” Aldana Jr., who all filed their paperwork within the past two weeks.

Michelle King announced a record 75 percent graduation rate at her first State of the District address as superintendent of LA Unified, “a district on the move,” she proclaimed Tuesday.

King noted that the 75 percent rate is based on “preliminary data” as she addressed 1,500 principals, assistant principals and district administrators at the annual kick-off to the school year, held at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

“We are a district on the move,” King said after her speech, when asked what she wants the general public to know about the second-largest school district in the country. “The movement and trajectory is from the earliest youth, pre-K and not just stopping at high school but through college. Right now our preliminary data shows that the class of 2016 is at 75 percent graduation. It Is supposed to be as high as we can get it. It is better than we’ve done in the past. Last year was 72 percent, and we’ve exceeded that.”

The graduation rate jumped nearly 3 percentage points over last year despite a new requirement that students pass a rigorous college-prep curriculum in order to earn a diploma. The slate of classes known as the “A-G curriculum” qualifies students to attend California’s public universities.

Michelle King at her first State of the District address.

She added, “This is exceeding expectations of those who said our students couldn’t do it. Today we say our students can and will thrive to meet the standards to be college-ready.”

The theme of King’s address was “A District on the Move,” and she introduced a promotional video of the same name showing the district’s successes. She also emphasized that “we’re in it together,” and she peppered her speech with more than a dozen names of principals and administrators in the audience that she congratulated for their successes.

Among those she called out included: California’s National Distinguished Principal Marcia S. Reed of 186th Street Elementary School in Gardena; teachers Anthony Yom and Sam Luu and Principal Jose Torres of Lincoln High School who helped every student pass the demanding Calculus Advanced Placement examinations; and Hesby Oaks Leadership Charter Principal Movses Tarakhchyan who required all of his staff to learn CPR and then saved a cafeteria worker when she collapsed this year.

“Together we are turning the tide in a district on the move,” King said. “We are at our best when we are unified and working together as a team.”

All of the school board members except Ref Rodriguez and Richard Vladovic attended the speech, held one week before the Aug. 16 start of school. School board President Steve Zimmer gave a rousing introduction, calling King “not only the best but most qualified leader in public education in the United States.”

Zimmer thanked his fellow board members, school police and principals for their response to the terrorist threat that closed down the schools on Dec. 15. “We hope that never happens again, but if it does, LA became the model on how we all come together and work together and be strong together in the face of danger.”

Marcia Reed, in white sweater, was one of the principals honored by Michelle King.

King noted safety as a top priority. “As I talk to parents, one topic that continuously emerges is school safety in this time when the headlines are dominated by tragedy and violence. Our students, families and employees want to feel safe, and I am committed to ensuring that they do.”

King also announced:

• Preliminary results of last year’s Smarter Balanced Assessments show that some math and English scores have improved by as much as 7 percent.

• Nearly 200 Title III coaches for English learners have been added.

• 1,000 classrooms in bungalows will be replaced this year with new, modern classrooms.

• Linked Learning will expand to 20,000 students.

• 16 new magnet schools will start this year, including firefighter academies at Wilson and Banning high schools and the very first robotics magnet at Mulholland Middle School.

• There have been 20,000 fewer days lost to suspensions over the last three years thanks to the district’s restorative justice program.

• Nearly 90 programs will offer Arabic, Armenian, Mandarin, Korean and French this year, and multilingualism will be required throughout LA Unified.

• The district is working on a plan to allow more students to earn community college credits while they are still in high school.

• A landmark academy for gifted students and gifted students with autism is coming to the district.

• The district has distributed more than 342,000 instructional technology devices and will expand online gradebook pilots to 54 schools this year, with full districtwide implementation planned for the 2017-2018 school year.

• Students will receive more support. A specialized counselor will be assigned this year to high-needs high schools, helping students stay on track to graduate, while college and career coaches support struggling middle schools. Additional resources will be dedicated to help English-language learners, who make up nearly one-third of LA Unified’s enrollment.

King’s speech brought the principals to their feet for a standing ovation at least three times. Many of the administrators arrived on buses provided by the district, and they divided up afterward into groups such as “new principals” and other groups for professional development training.

Some of the biggest applause and whoops from the crowd came when King discussed “decentralization” and allowing “greater decisions to be made by the school community.”

King touted her “listen and learn” tour, the successful relocation of two schools during the Porter Ranch gas leak and the “Promising Practices” forum with charter and traditional educators which she wants to make a biannual event.

She pointed out that the “district is facing a deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars and we need to prioritize investments in what gives greater results,” and added, “We are spending more money than we are taking in.” She pointed out that the people in the audience could help by making school more attractive, because the district could save $42 million by raising the attendance rate by 1 percent. She pointed out that around Garfield High are banners on Atlantic Boulevard of successful high school graduates, and that keeps students wanting to come back.

She gave props to Kim Bruno, the teacher who created a play about the LA riots at the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, Shelby Sims, who transformed Western Avenue Elementary School into a technology hub with an annual technology fair, and Garry Joseph at Millikan Middle School who won a Fulbright Award  to connect students with those in India to collaborate on a science fair.

She also honored longtime activist Scott Folsom who died last week, calling him “the conscience of the district” and saying he would be truly missed.

The Garfield High JROTC color guard and cadets brought out the flags at the opening of the ceremony, the Verdugo Hills High School choir sang, Danielle Rawles from Westchester Enriched Science Magnet High recited the Pledge of Allegiance and Eileen Garrido from Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts sang the National Anthem, receiving a standing ovation.

“It is critical that we continue the momentum of all these efforts through the year,” King said. “We have to keep it moving.

“All students can succeed.”

Three people in the last 10 days have filed with the city Ethics Commission an intent to raise money to challenge Monica Garcia for school board in District 2, and one person has entered the race for the vacant seat in District 6, which is held by Monica Ratliff, who is running for City Council.

Manuel Aldana Jr., Walter R. Bannister and Berny Motto have joined Carl Petersen in challenging Garcia.

Araz Parseghian will run in District 6 and is the only candidate to declare an intent to do so.

Campaign finance reports show Garcia dominating in early fundraising. She raised about $120,000 in the first six months of this year. Petersen, who ran unsuccessfully in 2015 for the District 3 seat, raised $805 in the same period.

District 2 covers East LA, Pico-Union, downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods and is heavily Latino. Garcia, who was board president for an unprecedented six consecutive years, was first elected in that district in 2006.

District 6 covers the east San Fernando Valley. Ratliff was elected in 2013. She filed an intent to run for a City Council seat in March.

Parseghian filed an intent to run for the seat on Aug. 2.

The primary election will take place on March 7. Also running are Board President Steve Zimmer in District 4, who is seeking re-election against challenger Nick Melvoin. Melvoin has raised about $124,000, compared to Zimmer’s $7,300, according to city filings.

School board candidates officially file for the race in November, but they can begin to raise money and declare their intent to do so with the Ethics Commission.

If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes in the March 7 primary, the top two vote-getters go on to compete in the May 16 general election.

Mónica García

Seven months out from the primary, L.A. Unified school board member Monica Garcia has already raised nearly 150 times more money than her opponent, including donations from former L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and both charter school and L.A. district employees.

Garcia, seeking her third term on the seven-member board, collected $119,858 in donations between Jan. 1 and June 30, according to the latest campaign finance documents filed with the city Ethics Commission. She has spent about $18,000.

Challenger Carl Petersen has raised $805 and spent $412. Neither candidate responded to requests for comment.

Garcia’s 2013 re-election bid and the two other contested school board races that year received national attention for the large amount of money — $6.16 million — poured into the campaigns by independent expenditure committees, which are not subject to fundraising limits.

About $1.2 million of the independent expenditure money went into Garcia’s race to support her. Independent expenditure committees meanwhile spent $113,000 trying unsuccessfully to defeat her.

She received support in 2013 from a coalition formed by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that donated money to all three school board races and received backing from outside donors like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She raised $504,224 on her own that year and spent $507,032, according to city finance documents. Her closest competitor in the five-way race, Robert Skeels, raised and spent $19,000.

This year, in addition to donations from Deasy and charter and L.A. Unified school educators and officials, Garcia’s contributors so far include philanthropists, film executives, the Los Angeles School Police Management Association PAC, several employee unions, Eli and Edythe Broad, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Garcia, who was board president for an unprecedented six consecutive years, from 2007 to 2013,  has been an advocate of charter schools and sweeping reforms to low-performing schools. She has called for “Diplomas for All” with a goal of 100 percent graduation rate in the district.

“It has been an incredible honor to serve you for the last 10 years; together we have been able to increase graduation and reduce the dropout rate,” Garcia wrote in a letter to supporters earlier this year announcing her re-election bid.  “I am looking forward to continuing our work transforming this district so that all children can learn to read, write, think, believe and be college ready and career prepared. But I need your help to win.”

In the past, Garcia has not been endorsed by the L.A. teachers union, UTLA.

Petersen has said he and his family will move into District 2 specifically to run against her.  District 2 covers East L.A., Pico-Union, downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods and is heavily Latino.

Carl Petersen

On his campaign website, titled Change the LAUSD, Petersen said the board needs a “parent’s perspective.”

“This campaign will not be funded by the California Charter School Association,” he writes. “I will answer to the parents and students of the district, not corporate donors.”

Petersen ran unsuccessfully in 2015 for the school board District 3 seat against incumbent Tamar Galatzan and came in fifth place in the primary. (Scott Schmerelson won that seat.) District 3 includes the west San Fernando Valley. Petersen raised $2,160 and spent $2,641 in that failed bid, records show.

The primary election will take place on March 7. Also running are Board President Steve Zimmer in District 4, who is seeking re-election against challenger Nick Melvoin. Melvoin has raised about $124,000, compared to Zimmer’s $7,300, according to city filings.

Zimmer said he has been focused on statewide ballot measures in the Nov. 8 election, such as Prop. 55, an extension of income taxes on the wealthy for public education, and Prop. 58, which would repeal a law that prohibits non-English languages from being used in public schools. Zimmer said he is also working to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton as president.

No one has officially declared for an open seat in District 6 where school board member Monica Ratliff is running instead for a seat on the City Council.

So far, no one else has entered the District 2 race against Garcia. She was first elected in 2006 in a special election where she replaced her boss, Jose Huizar, who had won a seat on the City Council.

School board candidates officially file for the race in November, but they can begin to raise money and declare their intent to do so with the Ethics Commission.

If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes in the March 7 primary, the top two vote-getters go on to compete in the May 16 general election.

As those inside the district voice a repeated refrain that declining enrollment will likely plunge LA Unified into bankruptcy, new data show it still attracted nearly the same number of kindergarten students last year as it had nine years earlier when it had 133,000 more students overall.

The data come as a surprise amid declining enrollment as the county’s birth rate has dwindled and parents have opted to send their kids elsewhere as charter schools proliferate and many suburban school districts continue to outperform LA Unified.

In 2006-07, the district had 49,896 kindergarteners enrolled as of the October “norm day” an enrollment count used to allocate resources and funding from the state. Nine years later, 49,289 students were enrolled in kindergarten at the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, the data show.

School board member Monica Garcia highlighted these numbers at the last special meeting the board held aimed at tackling its long-term financial situation. She expressed hope that the district can hang on to those students through graduation.

“Let’s keep them,” Garcia said of the kindergarteners.

But the data show, so far, the district isn’t.

The class of 2006-07 kindergarten students, has turned into 36,876 ninth-grade students in 2015-16, a 26 percent decrease. The students will graduate in 2018-19.

And the data show the decline is happening as early as first grade. The number of district kindergarteners who have gone on to first grade has decreased over the past five years, plummeting 17 percent just last year.

In a memo to the Board of Education, Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter, whose office compiled the data, wrote that the increases in kindergarten enrollment “may not be a true indication of future enrollment growth.” He said transitional kindergarten has led to an increase in kindergarten enrollment.

Transitional kindergarten students are included in the kindergarten data, although district officials did not say how many of those students were in transitional kindergarten. So it is unclear how much transitional kindergarten has affected the numbers.

Transitional kindergarten was established by the state Legislature in 2010. It essentially created a two-year kindergarten program.  Teachers must have a credential, the curriculum is a “modified” version of the kindergarten curriculum and students are generally in school for a full day. Since implementation in 2012, the state rolled back the eligibility date one month each year from Dec. 2 to Sept. 2. Now students can be enrolled in transitional kindergarten if their 5th birthday falls between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2. If a student turns 5 on or before Sept. 1, the student enrolls in kindergarten.

“It increases the total pool of children that are counted to be in kindergarten,” said Rena Perez, director of the district’s Master Planning and Demographics.

Transitional kindergarten was piloted in the district in the 2010-11 school year, with 36 classrooms. The following year, the transitional kindergarten program grew to 109 classrooms, and it has continued to expand.

Carola Matera, an assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands’ School of Education who specializes in early childhood education, said she believes transitional kindergarten has a big impact on enrollment numbers.

She said parents who might have opted to send their child to private school are attracted back to the public school district by transitional kindergarten. She said because transitional kindergarten teachers must be credentialed and receive professional development and support, the program is more attractive for parents than some private school options.

“All of this builds a level of confidence to go back to the public school system to take advantage of it,” Matera said.

She also said transitional kindergarten was highly marketed in Los Angeles, especially to Latino parents, and in the media when it was implemented.

“The other aspect of this is that for parents who would have gone to private schooling, they saw this as an opportunity to start early,” Matera said.

No one can say for certain whether the district’s kindergarten enrollment would be declining without transitional kindergarten, but the data shed light on the trends.

The number of kindergarten students decreased 6 percent from 2006-07 to its lowest point in 2010-11 with 46,934 students. Then, after transitional kindergarten began, the number of kindergarten students steadily increased every year since to 49,289 in 2015-16.

In contrast, the number of kindergarten students enrolled in charter schools steadily increased over the 10-year period, as the number of charter schools in the district grew. From 2006-07 to 2015-16, the number of children enrolled in kindergarten increased 179 percent from 2,556 to 7,131 students.

Kindergarten is not mandatory in California, so some parents don’t enroll their child in school until first grade. Before transitional kindergarten was implemented, the district saw a jump in the number of students that enrolled in first grade compared to kindergarten.

Dean Tagawa, who heads the district’s Early Childhood Education program, said one reason for the boost in kindergarten enrollment could be that more parents are opting to enroll their children now that the district has a two-year kindergarten program. Parents who might have kept their children out of kindergarten for a year because they felt their child wasn’t ready are now enrolling their kids in transitional kindergarten, he said.

“We know there’s a group of parents that really like the idea of having a ‘TK’ option, in the past they might not have utilized kindergarten,” Tagawa said.

Matera said it’s too early to determine what impact transitional kindergarten had on whether parents opt to keep their child in the school district for first grade.

The number of first-graders in the district has fallen 22 percent since 2006-07, according to the data. From 2006-07 to 2009-10 there was a small increase in the number of students who attended first grade from kindergarten. But in 2010-11, the opposite trend occurred. The number of first-grade students as compared to the previous year’s kindergarten students dropped each year. Part of the reason for that drop could be because of the expansion of transitional kindergarten — students are staying in kindergarten for two years and so some of the kindergarten students in the data are not eligible for first grade.

The Independent Financial Review panel assembled last year that released a report in November addressed declining enrollment and made several recommendations about ways to increase enrollment.

The panel of outside experts found several reasons for the district’s declining enrollment, which has dropped 100,000 students over the past six years. The group estimated that about half of the enrollment loss is due to increased enrollments in charter schools. The remaining loss could be attributed to declining birth rate, students dropping out of school and students moving to other school districts, the panel said in its report.

Data from LA County show the birth rate has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. In 1990, there were 204,124 births throughout the county. In 2011, there were 130,312 births, according to a briefing from the Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Assessment & Epidemiology.

The health department also found that the number of children under age 10 living in the county has fallen nearly 17 percent since 2000.

The study pointed to a number of factors for the declining birth rate, including a decline of people migrating into LA County and an increase in the number of people migrating out of LA County, likely caused by the recession; a rise in unemployment; changes in contraception methods used by women; women getting married at an older age, and an increase in the proportion of women who don’t have children.

Birth rates have decreased for mothers from all racial backgrounds, the study found.

The Independent Financial Review panel gave the district and school board a number of recommendations on how to improve enrollment. It recommended that the district focus on which students are leaving the district and why. It said that any improvements the district made in reversing the trend of declining enrollment “must start with analysis of which students are being lost, at which grade levels, at which schools and why.”

Amid the expansion of independent charter schools in Los Angeles, the district has taken steps to attract more students and their parents to LA Unified, including expanding magnet programs, opening pilot schools with smaller enrollment and expanding dual-language program offerings. The district hosted a forum this past weekend on sharing best practices between pilots, magnets and charter schools.

The Independent Financial Review panel recommended that district officials do extensive follow-up with students and parents who have opted to leave the district. LA Unified has said it will conduct surveys of those leaving the district.

Garcia, who is the school board’s longest-serving member, said she believes there are many reasons why students are leaving and those reasons vary across the diverse district.

She said she thinks the absence of student achievement across the district has contributed to the decline in enrollment, as well as families that opt to send their children to schools with smaller class sizes, the declining birth rate and the exodus of families from Los Angeles amid the housing crisis.

“I think it’s great that we’re interested in learning what is happening with the families,” she said.

From LAUSD

Despite projected budget deficits reaching nearly half a billion dollars and steep enrollment declines, LA Unified’s certified administrative staff has increased 22 percent in the last five years, according to a superintendent’s report.

The number of teachers has dropped 9 percent in the same period. And teachers and certified staff are aging toward retirement, heading toward a possible teacher shortage.

The report was presented to the LA Unified school board Tuesday at a special budget meeting at USC to discuss ways of lowering a looming budget deficit.

The administrative staffing level increase surprised some of the board members.

“How is it possible that administrators went up so much when we have a decline in enrollment?” asked board member Ref Rodriguez, shaking his head.

From LAUSD

According to the report presented by Superintendent Michelle King and her staff, certified administrators increased from 2,146 in 2011-2012 to 2,628 positions in 2015-2016, a 22 percent increase.

Over the same period, K-12th grade teachers decreased from 27,208 to 24,863, a 9 percent drop.

Concerned that the chart could be “misconstrued,” King explained that many of the administrators are hired for programs located at individual school sites and involve staffing for restorative justice and foster programs that the school board chose to focus on in the past. Also, with the Local Control Funding Formula, schools asked for more local programs requiring administrators, not teachers. Of the administrators, 1,723 are school based while 905 are not.

“We invested in administered accounts, such as more restorative justice and foster programs where the ratios are one person to 100 foster youth,” King said. “You can see how that starts to expand when you’re talking about training for restorative justice coordinators and such. It is important to remember what we invested in and why this is the outcome to where we put our dollars.”

Meanwhile, King noted that in the feedback from a New Principals Survey she received, it showed principals expressing frustration with a lack of clerical staff, a lack of time to complete tasks and limited opportunities for instructional training. “Principals say there are not enough hours in the day to get everything they need done and improve teaching and learning due to a lack of sufficient personnel,” King said.

Some of the school board members emphasized that such statistics only add to the common thought that the district is top-heavy with administrative staff. “I know that’s not true because I know there are 2,000 people who are out of that building in Beaudry (the school headquarters),” said board member Monica Garcia. “We are still digging ourselves out of the days we gave 36,000 pink slips at one time.”

Board member Scott Schmerelson pointed out that he has heard complaints from principals with 900 children that they have no help in the front office.

Pedro Noguera facilitates the special board meeting.

“We need more administrators at schools sites, and I’ve been told all the reasons why we can’t do this and when I look at this I see the gain of all the administrators since I’ve been on the board and I’m really concerned about this,” said Monica Ratliff. “Maybe we need to move them to some of the school sites because that is where people are suffering.”

King said there’s a freeze on creating central office positions and on filling vacancies as well as a shift of resources to the schools. Central office budgets have also been reduced for next year.

King said the theme she sees running through a lot of the dialogue she hears is that there is a need for more training for the entire workforce. She said there is a lack of continuity and lower productivity for staff because they have to train new people coming in, and so retaining people would save resources.

King also pointed out that classified staff and teachers were aging closer to the 64-year-old average retirement age. Most of the classified staff (employees who are not teachers or administrators) are in the 45-to-54 age bracket. Most of the teachers are in the 41-to-45 age group.

“Everyone is marching toward that line, and that’s another piece we need to be attentive to,” King said. “There is a teacher shortage coming, and unfortunately, this is a perfect storm.”

A majority of the school’s budget, nearly 80 percent, goes to salaries and benefits, according to Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly. That aligns with the standards of a major corporation of a similar size, she said.

School board President Steve Zimmer said, “While these are high percentages we often hear that a majority of the money goes to adults not kids, and that’s not true. It takes people to operate, so that we survive, and that’s normal. It’s an important context that we are a service delivery organization and we are not out of line with other organizations our size.”

Reilly pointed out that since 2008, there has been a 19 percent decline in staffing levels for both classified and certified staff, from a high of 79,000 employees. She pointed out that at the same time the district built 131 new schools.

The average base teacher salary now stands at $75,434; it was $63,188 in 2007-2008. Pension costs that now take up 5 percent of the general fund will take up 9 percent in 2020-2021.

Zimmer pointed out that the district targeted early retirement for some employees, but it didn’t offset the projected $127 million loss of revenue expected in 2016-2017. Only $36 million has been saved through staff reductions so far.

Smaller schools also cost more to maintain because of supplemental staff, and King said, “We must make a decision if we should continue to operate small schools. We are paying the same costs to run a smaller school, is that where we want the investment?”

King said she followed the Independent Financial Review Panel’s report in reducing the teacher pool to 170 teachers. The report stated last November that the teacher pool was down to about 100 teachers, and it recommended that it be eliminated, saving the district $10 million a year.

The teacher pool is a group of teachers who are not assigned to a specific school or were displaced from their school and are still on full salary until they are added to a school.

King also said she is increasing employee attendance, though she didn’t cite numbers. The review panel said only 75 percent of LA Unified staff had “strong attendance,” a figure that should be at 96 percent, it said. Improving that would save $15 million in substitute staffing costs.

Pedro Noguera, a Distinguished Professor of Education in UCLA’s graduate school who has been advising the district and helped moderate Tuesday’s discussion, said the board should have a different way of thinking about how to approach the problems in the district.

“Don’t think ‘our job is to save the district,’ but ‘our job is to transform the district,’ because it is not possible to retain it as is,” Noguera said. He suggested the district look at several potential partners such as other universities and the city. “Think about what takes us out of the gloom. Not what to cut next, but how to recreate the system.”

He added that some districts are dismantling a deteriorating school system, but LA Unified still can be helped. “You are at a crossroads,” said Noguera, whose team is compiling notes and concerns brought up by the board during the full-day meeting. “You have to put it all together and take a comprehensive look and the make a salient plan moving forward.”

The next special board meeting is scheduled for May 31.

20th Street Elementary School

The LA Unified school board broke into a surprise closed session for several hours Tuesday afternoon in the middle of their public meeting in order to head off a potential “parent trigger” lawsuit over 20th Street Elementary School.

All morning, the school board was in closed session to discuss employee actions, contract renewals and pending litigation. Then, in the middle of the 1 p.m. public meeting, school board secretariat Jefferson Crain said they were going into closed session again to discuss the potential litigation involving the elementary school.

Board member Monica Garcia, who has worked with the 20th Street parents to try to solve the issues, said Wednesday that the closed-door session wasn’t merely to stop the threatened lawsuit.

“We are making every effort to listen to all of the concerns, the dreams and aspirations of all the players and give energy into making that a better school,” Garcia told LA School Report.

Gabe Rose of Parent Revolution — a nonprofit group that helps parents organize and take over a failing campus through the state’s Parent Empowerment Act — said the attorney representing the parents “made it very clear that there’s pending litigation and that’s why in the closed sessions they went in to see what the settlement would look like. The parents expressed clearly there’s no plausible deal without a significant shift in who’s managing the school.”

But the district didn’t offer enough, Rose said. “The parents need autonomy and without the necessary changes, they will go the legal route and be successful. The district never did any of the things they promised, so of course there’s a lot of hesitation on the part of the parents.”

One of the parents, Omar Calvillo, who helped file the trigger against the district, said the parents are trying to work on a deal with Partnership for Los Angeles Schools that could offer a hybrid of a charter and traditional school as an option, which they have done in 17 schools in the South Central LA area.

“We like the Partnership, but the deal the district offered still had them completely in charge of our school,” Calvillo said. “The attorneys are negotiating, and that’s probably what is going on in the closed session.”

No one seems to want to go to court. “We don’t want a lawsuit, it’s not good for the district or school or community,” Calvillo said. “We care for LAUSD, there are some great teachers. We want to work with the district.”

After a March meeting with Superintendent Michelle King and other district officials at the school, Calvillo said some things have improved. “They fixed the fence and the yard and have some professional development for the teachers, but we haven’t seen much in the classroom. We need something more concrete.”

Even the most recent school report card showed only slight improvements, and the 5th-graders passing the California Standards Test was at 37 percent while the district average is 47 percent. On the new CORE accountability system, the school scored a 46 out of 100. The district average was 60.

“We are very nervous about what the district promises because we have been promised things before and they never happened,” Calvillo said. “We just want the best quality education for our kids.”

In a recent letter to the parents, David Holmquist, the district’s general counsel, acknowledged that the parents collected more than 50 percent of the family signatures required for a parent trigger takeover.

“Based on our review, the district will not contest a claim that 50 percent signature threshold was met,” the letter stated.

Garcia said that no decision has been made at the district level, but she thinks that the Partnership program could work for the school. She said there are exciting schools in the area.

“There’s a very successful parent energy at this school site, and we want to meet the needs of parents without them having to go elsewhere,” Garcia said. “I understand that people are not satisfied with the pace of change, I understand that, and it is the responsibility of the district to to change that.”

Almost without comment Tuesday, the LA Unified school board voted unanimously to seek help from outside the district to replicate high-achieving schools.

The resolution was introduced by Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez and asks the district staff to “seek outside support for the funding” to replicate successful school programs in areas of high need in the district.

The resolution, Offering Families More—Promoting, Celebrating and Replicating Success Across LAUSD, asks the superintendent to report back to the board within 60 days on the progress of identifying the successful programs and potential funding sources.

“I am glad to see the board supporting our multiple levels of seeing what works,” Garcia told LA School Report. “I was pleased and encouraged by behavior that is focused on moving to high-quality education.”

The resolution points to specific kinds of schools, and their successes, that could head off the decline in enrollment — and losing students to charter schools — by beefing up magnet, pilot and dual language schools.

• Read more: Are magnets the answer to LAUSD’s enrollment problem?

The resolution was proposed by the two board members most vocally supportive of charter schools (Rodriguez co-founded one), and they can see collaboration with philanthropic groups that others view as threatening to the district.

Rodriguez said he envisions collaboration with all sorts of philanthropical organizations, including colleges and even NASA. “I believe there is a lot of philanthropy for this and there is still a way to engage philanthropy to this district rather than just give to charters,” Rodriguez said.

By identifying the best programs, he said, “We can work with foundations and support these programs.”

Great Public Schools Now, which receives funding from philanthropic groups Rodriguez cited, issued a statement about the passing of the resolution and said, “We are encouraged by the LAUSD resolution seeking to replicate high-performing district schools. One of the best ways to bring additional educational opportunities to Los Angeles students is to expand the schools — charter, district or magnet — that are already succeeding. We look forward to working in partnership with LAUSD on this effort.”

GPSN is an independent, non-profit organization working to accelerate the growth of high-quality public schools and significantly reduce the number of students attending chronically low-performing schools in Los Angeles.

Ref Rodriguez co-authored the resolution.

“We are trying to walk a tightrope and are concerned with the polarized conversation outside of the board or in the media,” Rodriguez said. The discussion didn’t happen, at least this time, at the school board level, since the resolution was passed under the consent calendar.

Garcia added, “If we don’t work with GPSN, then they will only support charters. We have different levels of philanthropic parent engagement and a lot of partners, we just want to see that accelerate. With groups like GPSN there’s an opportunity to help children and staff and leaders, and I’d like to have multiple ways of moving what works.”

The resolution pointed to successes in the district, such as Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School which ranked in the top 50 high schools in the state while 90 percent of its student population qualify for free and reduced-price meals; King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science which saw 72 percent of its students meet or exceed standards in English Language Arts on last year’s Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, with 82 percent qualifying for free and reduced meals; and Downtown Business High School that has a graduation rate of 94 percent, with 84 percent qualifying for free and reduced meals.

The resolution is a way the board is showcasing high-performing schools, and Garcia noted in a news release, “The movement toward 100 percent graduation in Los Angeles is a model for the nation on collaboration and partnership with students, families, educators, employees, schools and community partners. As trustees for our children’s education, we are responsible for strengthening the bridges into our district and beyond our district for our college- and career-ready graduates and accelerating success for all. Today, we reaffirm our commitment to every child in Los Angeles in our search for partnership and investment for the schools our students deserve.”

For the past year, the board passed several resolutions all heading in the same direction, some creating long philosophical debates. The resolutions such as “Believing in Our Schools Again,” “Equity on A-G: Reaffirming Our Commitment to A-G Life Preparation for All,” “Zero Dropouts in LAUSD” and “Excellent Public Education for Every Student,” all passed after long discussions.

“Due to this district’s limited resources, we cannot do this work alone,” Rodriguez said in the district news release. “We call on our external partners, community organizations and businesses to invest in the replication of our successful district programs.”

He referred to school models that have found success in science, math, technology, arts and engineering academies and magnets.

Garcia added, “We can’t do this alone, we have to repurpose money and replicate best practices. This is going to lead to good conversations.”

After students and activists protested Friday afternoon outside LA Unified’s Beaudry headquarters, school board members Steve Zimmer, George McKenna and Monica Garcia issued statements about the 1033 program that allowed school police to get excess military weapons from the federal government.

Only one response, from Garcia, seemed to come close to the apology the group had demanded. She wrote: “I regret that LAUSD’s participation in the 1033 program may have caused a lapse in the trust LAUSD was building with many community partners including the Dignity in Schools Campaign. I apologize for any misunderstanding caused by this participation and the perception among some that LAUSD seeks to perpetuate policies of division instead of creating communities that are safe, supportive and successful.”

Eric Mann, executive director of the protest group, said Garcia’s statement “is a start, but it’s not enough.” He added, “We want the school police to be cut by half, it will save the district money. And the statements from Zimmer and McKenna were just insulting.” At the demonstration, Mann thanked Garcia and said, “I believe her letter is a true first step of good faith and is in sharp contrast to the misleading and hostile letter that Steve Zimmer and George McKenna wrote.”

On Friday in anticipation of the protest, school board president Zimmer and McKenna issued a statement reading: “The district has publicly stated numerous times that the Los Angeles School Police Department is no longer in possession of any weapons or equipment acquired through the Military Excess Property Program, commonly referred to as the 1033 program. We respect the many different views surrounding this important issue. We also understand that there has been confusion about this issue and so it is important to reiterate: LA Unified has ended participation in this program.”

The school police have returned the automatic weapons, three grenade launchers and small tank they acquired through the program.

McKenna was chairing the Committee of the Whole meeting last month when the group disrupted it for half an hour. In the statement, McKenna said, “The district will always respect the rights of organizations to peaceably assemble and protest, and we look forward to continuing our important work with all community groups on the many issues of civil rights, immigrant rights and education equity that affect the lives of our children and families every day.”

Mann said, “It’s safer for the schools to not have a school police that has military weapons.” He added that their protests are not yet over.

Randy Dwayne May Jr. talks about meeting graduation requirements after being in three juvenile camps.

LA Unified is expanding a Camps to College program that helps students coming out of juvenile detention camps get back into school and graduate.

Since the program launched two years ago in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Mental Health Department and the Los Angeles Probation Office, it has served 1,189 students. Most of them have come from the South District (299); the fewest have come from the Northwest District (73).

The Camps to College program is currently located at the Boyle Heights Technology Youth Center. In August it will open at the Harris Newmark Continuation School just west of downtown LA, and the district hopes to replicate it in more locations.

“We are not opening a new school, but creating a model that is changing the face of youth transitioning from juvenile camp so they can reintegrate to school and get all the services they need to stabilize,” said Jesus Corral, senior director of the Los Angeles County Probation Department who is working closely with LA Unified on the transitional program. “This is a model we have been working on for quite some time. We are transitioning youth into another school or alternative school based on their needs in a very individualized basis.”

More than half of the students in juvenile youth detention camps are from LA Unified schools. “It is more important now than ever to work together and divert youth from the juvenile justice system and open doors for youth coming out of the juvenile justice system,” said Corral, who on Tuesday addressed board member Monica Garcia’s Successful School Climate Progressive Discipline & Safety Committee.

From LAUSD

“We can replicate this in all the other local districts to help these students be successful,” said Erika F. Torres, director of Pupil Services and Drop-Out Prevention and Recovery in LA Unified’s Student Health Services.

When the program expands to Harris Newmark in August, it will include probation department support, mental health experts and Public Service & Attendance counselors as well as other school support.

Jesus Corral, LA County Probation Department

“I see this like a triage,” Torres said. “We will assess their needs and put in place the supports they need for successful graduation. It’s a pathway for youth to welcome them back.”

One of the recent students helped by the Camps to College program who spoke Tuesday was Randy Dwayne May Jr., a senior at the William J. Johnston Community Day in San Pedro. He talked about being sent to multiple camps for multiple parole violations and a burglary charge.

“I remember a time when I saw five different judges and had five different probation officers, it was crazy,” Randy said. “It was the bad influences in my neighborhood that got me making bad choices. People who were supposed to be my friends just weren’t looking out for me.”

He credits his LA Unified counselor, Michael Hinckley, with keeping a check on him, and he just completed the last of four classes he needed to graduate.

“Now I can graduate at the end of the year, and they talked to me about staying on the right track,” Randy said. “Being in the program keeps my mind off things from my neighborhood, and I feel supported and safe.”

He said this stretch of time since his probation ended in November “is the longest I’ve been out of camp for a while.” He wants to join the military and then train to be a probation officer.

His counselor said, “I give Randy full credit for what he accomplished. He went to camps three times and still strived to get a high school diploma even after he turned 18 so he can do something great in life.”

Right now, the program has three full-time counselors, six placement counselors in probation camps and six ongoing counselors. When the program expands in August, it will do so with the existing staff.

“We want to eliminate all the barriers that may keep the students from succeeding, and so we work with the entire family,” Torres said. The program also involves training with the parents and provides youth transportation to the school if necessary.

Helene Cameron, principal of Central High School/Tri C and who has had students in the program, said it helps the students beyond graduation. “This provides new opportunities and ideas for the next part of their lives.”

Torres recounted one student who called her up and asked for help after being in five different camps. She helped him figure out what credits he needed, and he asked, “Can I walk across the stage with a cap and gown?” After completing the coursework, he recently came into the office to get his diploma, she said, because he will be in Central High’s graduation ceremony.

“We like seeing the county mental health services, probation and all these different agencies come together to see fewer kids in camp and more at graduation,” said board member Garcia, who helped push for the program. “We like leading and learning. Well done!”

LAUSD school board members, from left, Monica Ratliff, Ref Rodriguez and Richard Vladovic.

Members of the LA Unified school board are taking the lead in identifying, encouraging and replicating successful schools with two resolutions that will be discussed at Tuesday’s board meeting.

One, sponsored by Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez, called Offering Families More – Promoting, Celebrating and Replicating Success Across LAUSD, asks that the district identify best strategies to replicate high-performing schools.

The other, sponsored by Monica Ratliff, Richard Vladovic and Rodriguez, titled Supporting Quality Educational Options for Students and Families Through the Development of Magnet Schools, asks for the district to break the backlog of applications for new magnet school programs and start approving more.

Both resolutions will ask Superintendent Michelle King to act within a short period of time to figure out how to duplicate the best schools in the district.

“These resolutions happened completely parallel to each other and yet they have some great connections because we are talking about how to replicate best practices,” Rodriguez said. “We do not have an incubator of ideas or innovation, and replicating best practices is one of the common things both of these resolutions propose.”

Garcia said in an emailed statement: “I am excited that the board is interested in being more intentional and strategic on resourcing and creating success. I hope there is a board majority that wants to be public about their support for a superintendent Plan of Action to increase achievement, creates excellence and supports equity and high-quality schools in every community.”

Garcia said her resolution involves all the different learning models, including dual language, linked learning, pilots and small-themed schools. She said, “My resolution is about creating diverse options for families to choose the district, stay in the district and celebrate 100 percent graduation with this district.”

King stated when she took over in January that identifying and encouraging successful schools was one of her top goals. The district is seeking to boost enrollment and graduation rates as well as stave off a predicted $450 million budget deficit in three years.

The Development of Magnet Schools resolution, which Ratliff asked to fast-track for a vote Tuesday, points out there are 22 applications for magnet schools in the 2017-2018 school year and 47 other schools interested in opening such programs, but the Office of Student Integration Services is “unable to support additional interested schools in their efforts to open a magnet program.”

There are now 210 magnet schools in the district serving 67,000 students, and most of those have higher testing performance levels than traditional and charter schools.

Read more on magnet schools: Are they the answer to LAUSD’s enrollment program? 

LA School Report was told there is some fine-tuning going on with some parts of the resolutions, including financial implications, but both will give the superintendent some direction to explore what it would take to get them done. The magnet schools resolution asks that King’s staff come up with addressing the backlog in a report to the board by June 30.

The Offering Families More resolution emphasizes successful community schools and asks for the district to consider more resources to continue similar programs. This resolution gives King and her staff 60 days to investigate “strategies to replicate high-performing district schools in areas of high need and to seek outside support for the funding of such replication.”

That resolution may look like it could pave the way to make the school board more amenable to plans from Great Public Schools Now and other groups looking to increase the number of high-quality schools in LA.

“It is time that the district consider how to partner with philanthropic organizations,” Rodriguez said. “I hope that this would be a vehicle to do great collaborations.”

Rodriguez said he contacted Ratliff’s office late Friday to join her resolution involving magnet schools. “It was totally by coincidence, but ultimately both will be great for the district,” he said.

The school board meets at the 333 S. Beaudry Ave. headquarters at 1 p.m. Tuesday. It will be broadcast live.

Castelar Street Elementary School backers protest against co-locating with a charter school. (Credit: Martin Wong)

Angelica Lopez Moyes is amazed that her 1st-grade son can speak Mandarin. But she is concerned that his dual-language immersion program at Castelar Street Elementary School could  be jeopardized if a charter is co-located on the campus.

Castelar, founded in 1882 and the second-oldest school in Los Angeles, has 570 students and is at about 75 percent capacity. Under Proposition 39, passed in 2000, the remaining space can be given to a charter.

Some of the rooms at the Chinatown school identified for charter use include two science labs and a room used for special education students. The parents at Castelar have gathered more than 2,400 signatures in a petition and lobbied to keep those classrooms from being shared.

“I have nothing against charter schools, and I don’t have a problem with sharing space that we don’t need, but there is a problem in this district with the process of designating an under-utilized classroom and allowing a charter school to take it over for their use,” Moyes said. “We have poor students who do not have access to computers, and taking over our labs will hurt the school and affect our future programs.”

The district deems classrooms that aren’t assigned to a specific full-time teacher as under-utilized space and therefore eligible for Prop. 39 charter use. The dual-language program wants to expand, and has the demand for it, but needs qualified teachers who can also speak Mandarin.

Angelica Lopez Moyes with the #SaveCastelar campaign.

Martin Wong, who started an online petition, said, “If children from the charter school want to attend Castelar, they should come. We have awesome kids, excellent teachers, and that amazing Mandarin dual-language program which actually needs the extra space to grow.”

Wong and his wife Wendy don’t consider themselves activists, but they grew up in the neighborhood near downtown LA where they ate dim sum with their families and went to see cool punk bands. Their daughter Eloise has thrived at the school, and they said they were shocked by the “insane idea to have a charter school occupy the unused classrooms at our daughter’s campus. Most of the space is utilized by Chinatown children for music, art, science and P.E. Two schools on one campus would be a logistical nightmare, as well as an unhealthy environment in which the school and students on either side would be in constant measurement and competition against each other.”

Prop. 39 requires school districts to make “reasonably equivalent” facilities available to charter schools upon request. In past years, the California Charter Schools Association has had to sue LA Unified to comply with the state law. That has led the district to determine that essentially if the classroom is not assigned to a full-time teacher, it is considered under-utilized. CCSA continues to closely monitor LA Unified’s use of Prop. 39 to make sure it is fair and equitable toward charter schools.

• Read more about Prop. 39 from CCSA and United Teachers Los Angeles.

Castelar is one of three LA Unified schools offering a Mandarin-immersion dual-language program. It has a 50-student waiting list but not enough qualified teachers for the classes, which are also taught in Chinese. Other classrooms are used for art, dance and P.E. programs.

The parents took their concerns to the district offices, to school board committees and to board member Monica Garcia’s office along with UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl, who met with the parents and offered support.

Po-Wen Shaw speaking to the school board.

“Our members believe that holding charter schools accountable is a top priority, and UTLA is working with the district to make sure that the Prop. 39 regulations are being followed and that charters are paying their fair share,” Anna Bakalis, UTLA communications director, said in a statement.

Moyes and the parents said they are also concerned that charter schools may take classrooms away from the school but then not meet their enrollment requirements. “What happens to our school then?” Moyes said. “And the charter schools are supposed to pay that money back to the district, but the district has never collected on it.”

Ellen Morgan, of LA Unified communications, said in an emailed statement: “When a charter school fails to meet its average daily attendance projections, a school district may seek reimbursement from the charter school for the shortfall. There is a complicated regulatory formula for making this determination and the reimbursement rate is set by the California Department of Education and changes annually. For the past several years all of the district’s Prop. 39 communications have included specific language informing charter schools that they could be subject to over-allocation if they fail to meet their enrollment projections.”

Although LA Unified has not sought to be reimbursed by the charters, Morgan said, “The district has not waived any rights to seek reimbursement for the last two school years (2013-14, 2014-15). It is also important to remember that each charter school co-location situation is unique and needs to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.”

One of the schools that wanted to co-locate at Castelar was Metro Charter, with about 205 students. A spokesperson from the school said that its leadership decided not to go to Castelar and will look for another site in a year.

At a school-wide demonstration of a dragon dance this week, Castelar principal Sum Shum told the parents that Metro would not come to the campus.

Wai-Ling Chin tells the school board of her concerns for Castelar.

“When principal Shum was given permission to announce that Metro Charter would not be occupying our classrooms, everyone could really feel the room brighten, lighten and practically elevate,” Wong said. But the parents remain concerned.

“We love Castelar and don’t want to be invaded by outsiders or create a sense of separation like a second class,” parent Wai-Ling Chin told a meeting last month of LA Unified’s Budget, Facilities, and Audit Committee.

“The fight is not over, there could be another charter school that comes in,” Moyes said. She said the school is planning a demonstration on May 1 to protest any future plans for co-locations of charters on their campus. She also said she plans to bring the issue to the school board at their regularly scheduled meeting April 12. “There is a larger picture, they need to look at their methodology.”

Po-Wen Shaw, the parent of a first-grader, added, “I am not out to denounce charters, but we have a very unique school and close community. We have almost an equal mix of Latino, white, Asian and African-American children, and they all speak flawless Chinese. I’ve heard them!”

Megan Reilly, Michelle King and Monica Ratliff at Tuesday’s special board meeting.

*UPDATE

With LA Unified heading toward financial crisis within three years, Superintendent Michelle King on Tuesday kicked off a series of special board meetings to detail her plans for fiscal solvency. Topping that list is keeping kids in the district. Notably absent was cutting staff.

King’s initiatives would initially cost the district — roughly $20 million. But the programs, if successful, would bring in about $40 million, her staff estimated. The district’s deficit is expected to be about $100 million by the 2017-2018 school year and hit $450 million in three years.

“It sounds like a lot to spend, but if we get double our investment back, or we may even get higher than that, it sounds good,” board member Scott Schmerelson said.

Key to King’s plans is boosting enrollment, which has declined by 100,000 in just the last six years. Her suggestions include: increasing attendance by one percent; creating a unified enrollment process to make it easier for families to enroll in local district magnet schools; adding magnet, dual language and International Baccalaureate programs; making more use of marketing campaigns to highlight district successes; scheduling more professional development for teachers, and increasing parent involvement.

Some of those projects are already in the works, while others King presented to the board Tuesday and asked for their guidance — and eventually their vote to fund them when the budget is approved in June.

“We need to prioritize when we know our resources,” King said. “We can’t do 20, not even do 10, but we can determine six of these are good and let’s do two.”

King’s plans were drafted in response to a blue ribbon Independent Financial Review Panel, commissioned by former Superintendent Ramon Cortines to outline problems and possible solutions for the district, and the first part of Tuesday’s meeting was devoted to where the budget is headed and why revenue is expected to decline. The panel had recommended that staff be cut to adjust to declining enrollments, but King is rejecting that, opting instead to decrease staff through attrition, retirement and leaving vacancies open, as well as a concerted effort to renew grants that have run out.

“We have to align ourselves to what the student population is, and we’re able to shrink the overhead by right-sizing,” King said.

Besides, she noted, the panel’s recommended staff cuts would have saved the district only $36 million, while the revenue loss due to declining enrollment is projected at $127 million in 2016-2017.

However, according to the review panel’s report, a loss of 100,000 students means district staff would need to be reduced by about 10,000 people, for a savings of about $500 million per year. The report pointed out that the district has instead grown its staff — to 64,348 full-time equivalent positions — increasing its costs for both salary and benefits.

Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly said that increasing student enrollment alone will not solve the deficit projections. Board president Steve Zimmer noted, “We have had these discussions for six or seven years now. Declining enrollment, well, we can’t do anything to affect that.”

Board member Monica Ratliff said, “I’m a little bit concerned that the outcome of this report is dark. If there’s a loss of 100,000 students, we lose 10,000 staff, administrators and teachers and more.”

Reilly noted that at its height, the second-largest school district in the nation had just under 1 million students, including in adult education, but since 2002 it has lost 200,000 students. About half of the loss is attributed to lower birth rates, the rest to the growth of charter schools. About 100,000 LA students are enrolled in 211 independent charter schools, the largest concentration of charters in the country. There were 204,124 births in Los Angeles in 1990, but by 2011 they had declined to 130,312, Reilly said.

“We don’t have much control of the local birth rates, but we do with attendance and keeping the students going to school,” Reilly said.

Keeping kids in school was a main focus of King’s report. The financial review panel had stated that attendance is “the single most important driver of district revenues; more than 90 percent of district revenues are based upon actual attendance of students.”

Since 2002, the average daily attendance rate has increased by 3 percent, and a 1 percent increase in attendance would gain $40 million a year in state funding, Reilly said. LA Unified lags about 1.2 percent behind the state average and aims to bring the attendance rate up to 72 percent of students not missing more than a week of school a year.

King also discussed implementing a unified enrollment process that will make it easier for families to choose charter, magnet and pilot schools by putting them all on the same schedule. “We know magnets are popular, there are long waiting lists,” King said. “We want to understand the enrollment declines and why one would want to leave the district, and how we can address those concerns.”

A survey of students who are transferring to non-district schools found that 36 percent said they were leaving to go to schools with dual language programs and 30 percent went to schools that have an International Baccalaureate program. So King suggested offering more of those kinds of options.

She also proposed more marketing of positive messages about district schools, such as current campaigns that include a mobile billboard in Ratliff’s district for Arleta High School and that encourage students to wear T-shirts in the community so the schools are more visible.

The district also has campaigns that address chronic absences of students who miss 15 or more days of school, promote dental and eye care in the schools, and promote Restorative Justice programs to prevent bullying and encourage safe environments.

Board member George McKenna talked about some of the ways he turned around Washington Preparatory High School by offering incentives for teachers and extra pay to make phone calls to students and to work with them on weekends or after school.

Student school board member Leon Popa pointed out how parental involvement is important in increasing attendance rates. He said, “Working on improving parent integration into the school community could build more of a connection to the school.”

Ratliff said the state should be more involved in deciding where to allow charter schools so they’re not concentrated in one area. “I have no problem with charter schools, but the saturation is something we could bring up,” she said, noting that she had spoken with some charter school operators. “They thought that competition is good and just makes you stronger if we’re right next door.”

Ratliff added, “We must embrace them as real partners and have a more open relationship. The charter schools don’t want to see the district die. I don’t think they want to see our employees devastated. They just want to run schools. How can we work with them and give more autonomy to our principals? We make it so difficult with paperwork and checked boxes, and we must take a look at that in the long run.”

Zimmer added, “We need to connect with kids and their families so that they believe LAUSD is the best choice for their public education dream.”

Tuesday’s meeting, the first of at least four special meetings, was held at the LA ’84 Olympic headquarters and library in the West Adams district. The superintendent and school board members were seated around a table in a casual setting. Representatives of the search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, including president Hank Gmitro, took notes on large sheets of paper for the board members to review. Gmitro told LA School Report that this was part of the final portion of their contract with the district when they led the search for the new superintendent.

Board member Richard Vladovic pointed out that having the special meetings off-sight will probably lower the amount of public comment that the board will get prior to the meetings, keeping them shorter.

“If we have it downtown, we will have longer meetings and we will regret it,” Vladovic said.

The next meeting involving the budget is planned for May 3 at 1 p.m., with the location yet to be announced. The board is scheduled to vote on the overall budget on June 21.

*The unified enrollment process will not include charter schools.

Days lost to suspensions have dropped 92 percent.

LA Unified posted a 92 percent decrease in the number of days lost to suspensions as a result of its Restorative Justice program and the district’s new approach to discipline.

In the 2007-2008 school year, a total of 74,765 days were lost to suspensions, but that number plummeted to 6,221 in the 2014-2015 school year, according to a report issued last week to the Successful School Climate committee of the LA Unified school board. Expulsions were down by nearly half, from 141 in 2011-2012 to only 77 in 2014-2015, according to the district data.

“This is incredible news, and it shows that our approach to Restorative Justice and a new look at discipline is working, even though there were many people who were very skeptical about it,” board member Monica Garcia told LA School Report. Garcia, who chairs the committee and sponsored the program, added, “We want to get this to all the schools as soon as we can.”

The district voted in 2013 to bring Restorative Justice into all schools by 2020. The data now show that the plan is working, according to Associate Superintendent of School Operations Earl Perkins.

Earl Perkins introduces the 45 Restorative Justice teachers.

“We are aggressively training school site staff to implement this in more sites,” said Perkins, who asked the 45 full-time Restorative Justice teachers to stand at the board meeting. They started off working at 150 schools (paid for by Local Control Funding Formula money) and now have trained staff at 423 schools (nearly one-third of all district schools). “These are still baby steps, nothing can be fixed overnight,” he said.

Other district teachers and staff remain skeptical, because ultimately the new approach makes it harder to remove problematic students from the classroom. Keeping students in class, however, saves the district money that would be lost if they don’t attend.

“When this thing first unrolled there was a lot of skepticism, especially on our end,” LA Unified police chief Steve Zipperman said to the teachers. “These numbers we are seeing here would not be possible without your involvement. The data show it’s working.”

Suspensions and referrals over the past four years.

Restorative Justice has been catching on across the country, particularly in urban areas, and takes an approach to discipline that moves away from punishment. It involves restoring a sense of harmony and well-being for those affected by a hurtful act and provides families, schools and communities a way to solve problems as opposed to the student being tagged as the problem that adults must fix.

“We have stopped sending kids home,” Garcia said. “We understood when we started this that we helped create a better solution, there was more learning and guess what? Our budgets were better.”

Four students from University High School talked about their experience with Restorative Justice along with Principal Eric Davidson, who said suspensions dropped from 22 to zero in just a year. “A lot of it has to do with just listening,” Davidson said.

Student Brian Brass said he didn’t believe the program would work, and when someone stole personal items from gym lockers while his team was running track, Brass said he was angry. “I thought it would not work and thought it was like everyone coming together and holding hands and all, but going through the program made me understand that the person has problems and what they’re going through,” Brass said. “It was amazing how this program worked.”

DeJuan Shelton and Brian Brass from University High.

He said that before going through the program, “I wanted to be judge, jury and executioner,” but he said he realized the culprit’s situation and “that he comes from hard times.”

Fellow teammate DeJuan Shelton said he thought things would turn out poorly but was able to sit down and listen. “To hear [the person who stole from them] being honest really opened my eyes to why people do what they do,” Shelton said.

The students said that some of their teachers are still not on board with the Restorative Justice practices, and others seem resistant.

But Deborah Brandy, discipline foundation policy and restorative justice coordinator for the district, said, “We are doing better, absolutely. Are the students staying in class? Absolutely!”

Garcia added, “Hearing these students tell their stories is the best part of the job. You can see and hear what’s working directly from their mouths, and that’s great.”

This week, an article in Cabinet Report noted restorative justice techniques may also boost school climate by strengthening relationships between students and teachers, according to a recent study.

The report, “Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools,” from WestEd, found that in 70 percent of cases, teachers’ respect for students improved, and in 75 percent, students’ respect for teachers increased.

Overall, approximately 70 percent of participants saw a reduction in suspensions and an improvement in the overall climate at their schools, and almost 60 percent reported increased academic achievement. Many said it was too early in the implementation process to be able to report results.

WestEd’s report is based on 169 surveys and 18 interviews across 18 states, including California. Many of the respondents, who practice restorative justice techniques at their schools, were teachers, counselors, assistant principals, social workers and school psychologists – the majority of who had less than 10 years’ experience in leading restorative exercises.

Monica Ratliff plans to run for City Council.

UPDATED *

It’s official. Monica Garcia announced Tuesday to her supporters that she will be running to retain her seat on LA Unified’s school board.

Meanwhile, fellow board member Monica Ratliff surprised many education and City Hall watchers last week when she quietly took out papers with the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission to allow her to run for the City Council seat that is being vacated by Felipe Fuentes. She has named a treasurer, David L. Gould, based in Long Beach, to start collecting money for that campaign. She has also set up a new email to deal specifically with that race.

Ratliff doesn’t want to publicly discuss leaving the board until the end of the school year, in mid-June, because she doesn’t want it to disrupt work she is still doing with the district. She notified each of her fellow board members of her decision before it broke in the media last week, and she asked them not to discuss it.

Monica Garcia has declared she’s running again.

Garcia, on the other hand, declared in an email Tuesday afternoon, “I’m in!”

Garcia writes, “It has been an incredible honor to serve you for the last 10 years; together we have been able to increase graduation and reduce the dropout rate. I am looking forward to continuing our work transforming this district so that all children can learn to read, write, think, believe and be college ready and career prepared. But I need your help to win.” She asks for $10, $25 or up to $100 to help launch her campaign for re-election.

So far, Garcia’s only declared competition, who also filed with the Ethics Commission, is Carl Petersen, a gadfly at the school board meetings who said he is purposefully moving into Garcia’s district to run against her.

Petersen said that he and his wife, Nicole, will move into the heavily Latino district that includes Boyle Heights and South Los Angeles so he can run against Garcia. Petersen said he has two children who graduated from LA Unified schools and triplets who are still in district schools. He spoke often to the board about issues he had at schools in Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley. Petersen ran last year against incumbent Tamar Galatzan, who was ousted by Scott Schmerelson. Petersen came in fifth in that election with 10 percent of the vote.

“There will be people who will be suspicious of the fact that I will move into District 2 to enter this race,” Petersen writes in his newsletter. “I understand your concern and assure you that I am doing so because our children need a parent on the board to fight for them. I am taking the fight to District 2 because Monica Garcia has lost touch with the needs of the children and represents the worst attributes of our dysfunctional school board.” Garcia offered no comment about Petersen’s intention to move into her district to run against her.

Next year, three of the seven board seats are up for re-election: District 2 of downtown and East Los Angeles (Garcia’s seat), District 6 of the northeast San Fernando Valley (Ratliff’s) and District 4 of the Westside and Hollywood, currently held by board president Steve Zimmer, who is expected to run again for his seat.

So far, Nick Melvoin is the only person who has declared for the District 4 seat, but there’s still time. Candidates for school board don’t have to declare they will run until June. These three seats on the board run through June 30, 2017. The remaining board members are elected through Dec. 13, 2020.

It’s likely the school board elections will fall along lines of strong charter supporters, such as Melvoin and Garcia, and be hugely expensive.

The last election resulted in a mixed bag between the pro-reform and pro-union camps. Ref Rodriguez, who helped start a charter school, won, as did Schmerelson, who has vocalized a strong distaste for a proliferation of charter schools. Richard Vladovic and George McKenna were re-elected to their districts.

School board members who choose to serve full time earn a little over $45,637 a year, about the equivalent to a first-year’s teacher salary in the district. Ratliff, Garcia, Zimmer and Rodriguez take part-time salaries as school board members, accepting $26,346 a year.

On the other hand, City Council members earn nearly $190,000 a year, far more than Ratliff could earn as an elementary teacher, her former job. LA has one of the highest salaries for elected council members in the country.

The school board terms are for four years, and there are three term limits. The City Council seats are also four years but limited to two terms.

Ratliff faces 12 opponents for the City Council seat, but that’s no daunting task for her. She faced 13 candidates in the last school board election, and she was vastly outspent by her primary challenger, Antonio Sanchez, who raised about $2.1 million. Ratliff raised just under $88,000.

Ratliff is known for her interest in stabilizing the school board’s budget, and she was often teased by former Superintendent Ramon Cortines for her persistent questioning. Fellow board members, even when they contend with her, have yielded to her deep-dive questioning and analysis of complex budgets, which has led to uncovering problems with the MiSiS computer system and various ways of saving the district money.

In recent weeks, Ratliff visited city and civic groups and met with neighborhood councils that advise City Council members. Garry Fordyce of the North Hills West Neighborhood Council said he was impressed with Ratliff when he met her at one of those community meetings and followed her to other events that she led, including the recent town hall with new Superintendent Michelle King.

“I am shocked that Monica Ratliff is not staying with the school board,” Fordyce said. “I’m a numbers person and she is too, and she did some good there. The City Council is a nasty situation. Her leaving will be a big loss for the schools.”

So far, no one has thrown his or her hat in for Ratliff’s  seat, and no one is speculating yet who will run. Stay tuned.

*Corrects that the school board is now limited to three terms.