Carol Alexander, director of LA Unified’s A-G Intervention and Support

As part of College Awareness Month in October, LA Unified officials on Tuesday presented a new initiative designed to inspire and prepare the district’s students for college, starting at the pre-K and kindergarten level and continuing every year through 12th grade.

“The Division of Instruction wanted to begin a dialogue of specific activities by grade level, highlighting an activity by grade level that every child by grade level would have,” Carol Alexander, director of LA Unified’s A-G Intervention and Support, told the school board’s Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee.

The plan is one of several ways the district is looking to increase college awareness this month. Others include a new instructional video on the A through G graduation standards, which will be shown to students, and a personalized brochure that can be given to high school students on A-G in their native language. The district is also promoting upcoming college fairs, as well as partnering with Cash for College on upcoming workshops for parents and students on how to apply for financial aid.

The pre-K through 12th-grade plan isn’t required for schools but is a list of “suggested activities” that have been sent out to each school, Alexander said, and leaders at each site will decide how best to implement them. The activities include kindergarten students investigating and learning about different careers, researching a college or university in 5th grade, learning about the A-G course requirements and how to calculate their GPA in 8th grade and writing college essays in 10th grade.

Members of the school board on the committee reacted positively to the overall plan and added some suggestions of their own on how to get the district’s kids interested in and ready for college.

“I think every student should take a college-level class. Every high school student has a mandate to graduate,” said board member Richard Vladovic, who chairs the committee. “Back in 1963 — even if it has to be over television — I took from community college, Harbor College, an astronomy class over TV. And earned a grade. I took it. So we can do it, there are vehicles to do it.”

Alexander also played a six-minute video produced by the district about the A-G graduation requirements that will be shown to students. The standards, which were required for graduation for the first time last school year, call on students to take and pass a series of courses that would make them eligible for admission to California’s public universities if they earn all C grades or better, although D’s are allowed for graduation. The video featured a series of graphics and a voiceover highlighting the various classes students need to pass to qualify for graduation.

Board President Steve Zimmer offered what he called a “gentle critique” when he said the video could perhaps use a little more excitement.

“As I was watching the video, I was reminded a little bit and it felt a little bit like I was strapped into my airplane seat and I was watching the safety video of like — very important information, but I’m worried that people kind of tune it out,” Zimmer said.

Zimmer then recounted a time he flew on Virgin America and was surprised the company had produced a video that was so entertaining “you can’t help but watch it.”

College and Career Awareness month comes as the district enters the second year of its new A-G standards, and with the recent news that LA Unified broke its graduation record last school year. It also comes on the heels of the August announcement of the Los Angeles College Promise, in which every district graduate starting in 2017 will be offered a free year of tuition at any Los Angeles Community College District campus.

UCLA’s Tyrone Howard addresses board members on ways to avoid racism and stereotypes.

Racism and stereotypes continue to plague LA Unified, and it’s up to leaders to change that, according to a UCLA professor who is holding seminars at some schools.

Tyrone C. Howard, associate dean for equity and inclusion at UCLA’s graduate school of education and information studies, spoke to the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee on Tuesday about how he is helping principals and teachers understand how to identify underlying racism and avoid enforcing stereotypes on their students. He said that initiating this difficult dialogue is among the steps needed to help persistently low-performing students, particularly African-American and poor children.

“Bias is real and discrimination is rampant,” Howard told the committee, made up of four school board members, administrators and representatives of some of the major school unions. “People don’t want to talk about race because it is not the politically correct thing to do. If we don’t talk about race, then we ignore one aspect of who they are as young people.”

He added, “Even teachers of color have biases against students of color. Lots of students feel like they have two strikes against them when they walk into a classroom because they are black or brown and poor and the teacher feels they can’t succeed.”

Every administrator and school board member will receive a copy of Howard’s book “Why Race and Culture Matter in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America’s Classrooms,” and some schools will get personal training by Howard, said Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson.

“We have a bold mission, and Tyrone Howard is an esteemed educator,” Gipson said, noting that some of his philosophies about understanding racial complexity “will intimidate some educators.”

Howard held a two-hour session last week with teachers at Cleveland High School in Reseda to discuss stereotypes and where those ideas come from in people’s lives. “It is going through a process of recognizing implicit bias and how we are all affected by it in one shape or form,” Howard said.

He suggested that requiring ethnic studies classes and emphasizing early literacy are also important steps to helping black and Latino students.

Frances Gipson

“We are one of the most racially diverse cities in the world, and we have the momentum and will and need to start having those conversations,” Howard said.

Howard, who grew up in poverty in Compton, said he would not have succeeded unless teachers put aside racial biases and saw his potential.

Howard said the district is moving in the right direction. He pointed out that 42 percent of students are now making a C or better in the A-G classes, twice what it was a decade ago. But he also noted African-American and Latino students make up more than 60 percent of California’s population but less than 25 percent of the UC system. And under-represented minority groups have not experienced substantial increases in college-going rates.

“We have to tell the narratives and promote things that are moving in the right direction on an ongoing basis,” he said. “We have to be frank and honest that African-American students lag seriously behind others and that it continues to happen. We also have to dismantle the belief that poor kids cannot succeed.”

School board President Steve Zimmer praised Howard for his books and as well as for his seminars at Cleveland High. Zimmer recalled a mentor explaining how a school with 98 percent Latino and African-American enrollment and with 90 percent minority teachers can still be considered a “white supremacist school,” and that changed his mindset about “deep and intentional deficit mindset and how pervasive it is.”

Zimmer asked for suggestions of what they could do, saying, “We don’t legislate hearts and minds, but we do set the direction.”

From Tyrone Howard’s presentation.

Howard said, “The issues about race are the big pink elephant in the room.” He said that educators need to understand the trauma that some students face outside the classroom.

“There is an impact of poverty, bullying, displacement, and many do not have the psychological support services they need,” Howard said. “Leadership is key here.” He said some principals don’t know how to deal with the issue with certain teachers.

Howard also said that support workers such as secretaries, nurses and janitors must all be on board to understand racism. “If we could cultivate that approach into the entire school culture there’s a lot of promise in the communities, but there are a lot who have written them off and that has to stop.”

Howard added, “The political craziness that’s going on doesn’t help. But I want to believe that most folks want to see what’s right for our children.”

Board member Richard Vladovic, who chairs the committee, said, “This has been really invigorating and good food for thought. We will move on it.”

LAUSD board President Steve Zimmer made an unusual appearance during public comment at Tuesday evening’s board meeting to urge people to vote.

Make sure you complete your ballot. That’s the message that came from LA Unified school board members at a committee meeting Tuesday night.

During the meeting, the board’s Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee heard a presentation from Pedro Salcido, the district’s co-director of government relations and legislative affairs, on key initiatives related to the school district on the Nov. 8 ballot.

This year’s ballot is crowded with 17 statewide initiatives. Among the questions to be determined are whether to repeal the death penalty, ban plastic bags and legalize marijuana.

The ballot for Los Angeles voters will also contain four city measures, and residents of Los Angeles County will vote on two county measures.

There are three statewide education-related ballot initiatives: a school facilities bond, the extension of an income tax for high-income earners, and an initiative to bring back bilingual education. Salcido also discussed a city measure that would bring changes to the governance structure of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. LA Unified is the utility’s largest customer.

Board President Steve Zimmer made an unusual appearance during public comment at the committee meeting because he does not serve on the committee. He encouraged those connected to LA Unified to register to vote by the Oct. 24 deadline and to get to the polls in November.

“It’s very important that we, who know how much our students have on the line in this election in so many ways, that we encourage folks, not only to go to the ballot box, but to complete the ballot,” Zimmer said. 

Teachers union members will be fanning out across neighborhoods on Thursday in cities throughout California encouraging voters to support Propositions 55 and 58. Members of the LA teachers union, UTLA, will be knocking on doors near LA Unified school sites.

Here are the measures:

Prop. 51

• authorizes $9 billion in bonds for new facilities or modernization upgrades to school facilities. It would generate $8.6 billion in interest.
• $7 billion would be allocated for K-12 public school facilities, and $2 billion would go to state community college facilities.
• Of the $7 billion for K-12, $3 billion would be for new school facilities, $3 billion for modernization of school facilities, $500 million for career and technical education programs and $500 million for charter schools.
• Of the $7 billion, $1.8 billion is already allocated because there is not enough money to fund these existing projects under the school facilities bond Prop. 1D passed in 2006, leaving $5.8 billion up for grabs, Salcido said.

How would LA Unified be affected?

Salcido said LA Unified has very few new construction projects in the pipeline, but he said the district could benefit from about $325 million for facilities modernization projects.

“We would take the money and spend it wisely,” said Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter.

The ballot measure is sponsored by home builders, school construction companies and others. It is supported by both state parties, the LA County Democratic Party and the LA Area Chamber of Commerce. The school board is also in support of it. Gov. Jerry Brown opposes it. A group called California Taxpayers and Educators Opposed to Sprawl and Developer Abuse is leading the opposition.

Supporters of the measure have raised $9.7 million so far, according to CALmatters. The top donors are Building Industry Association, Community College Facility Coalition and the Association of Realtors. The opponents haven’t raised any money.

See CALmatters’ summary of Prop. 51.

Prop. 55

• extends the income tax rates under Prop. 30 for individuals who earn more than $250,000 a year and couples who earn more than $500,000 a year for 12 years.
• expected to raise between $4 billion and $9 billion a year from 2019 to 2030.
• the sales tax component of Prop. 30 will be eliminated.
• most of the money would go to K-12 education, some money would be set aside for state community colleges and low-income healthcare programs.

If it doesn’t pass, Salcido said there would be $5.5 billion in state funding of K-12 education programs that would have to be cut.

“What it’s done is it’s allowed districts to climb out of the hole that took place between 2008 and 2012,” Salcido said, referring to cuts made following the Great Recession.

“It’s really about generating the necessary amount of dollars to prevent an impact to K-12 programs in the out years if there’s an economic downturn or a slowdown when it comes to funding for K-12 programs.”

“The board of education strongly supports Prop. 55, and I hope people will find it on the ballot,” said Monica Ratliff, who chairs the committee.

How would LA Unified be affected?

Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly said the district uses Prop. 30 funds to fund arts programs and to hire guidance counselors, and any funds raised by Prop. 55 would continue to support those programs.

The initiative’s supporters have spent $49.7 million on their campaign, according to CALmatters. Top donors include California Association of Hospitals and Health Systems and the California Teachers Association. The opponents haven’t raised any money.

The school board has also endorsed Prop. 55.

See CALmatters’ summary of Prop. 55.

Prop. 58

• reverses portions of Prop. 227 passed by voters in 1998, which mandates English learners must be taught in English.
• the state legislative analyst found no costs are associated with the initiative.
• under the current law, if a district wants a class to be taught in a language other than English, at least 20 students in one grade level have to request a waiver.

How would LA Unified be affected?

Salcido said if Prop. 58 is passed, the district will be able to expand bilingual education programs.

State Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, is sponsoring the initiative. Keep English for the Children is a group organized to lead the opposition.

Supporters, including the California Teachers Association, have raised $1.1 million to promote a yes vote, according to CALmatters. The opponents haven’t raised any money.

The school board has unanimously endorsed Prop. 58.

See CALmatters’ summary of Prop. 58.

Read the Secretary of State’s voter reference guide here.

Measure RRR

While not an education-related measure, Salcido discussed Measure RRR, which will appear on the ballot for Los Angeles voters. It would amend the city charter to bring changes to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

LA Unified is the LADWP’s largest customer.

The measure proposes various reforms to the governance structure of the LADWP,  that board members must have certain qualifications and the utility must have a four-year strategic plan in place that will dictate rate increases.

The LA City Council has approved the measure.

Read more about the measure here.

Described as the variations in academic performance among children entering kindergarten and first grade who are from low-income and diverse backgrounds compared to their wealthier and white counterparts, Zimmer reiterated in a recent interview with LA School Report that he believes the district can eliminate this gap. California and LA Unified have invested heavily in early childhood education programs like transitional kindergarten and preschool. But ultimately, King and the school board, including Zimmer, coalesced around a singular goal of 100 percent graduation, which King said would trickle down to all grade levels.

Here is the rest of our interview with Zimmer on topics like the school readiness gap, the school calendar and his opinion of King. Read the first part of the interview, which was on credit recovery, here.

Q: Your board office here in East Hollywood seems pretty robust with after-school programs, classes for homeless youth and computer courses for parents through your partnership with Youth Policy Institute. Do other board members run similar operations in their field offices, or is yours unique?

A: I think different board members have different operations. We’re the only one right now. We pay. We invest in this. Most field offices are at school sites. We have an office at Twain and we have an office at Taft. We have a huge district, so it’s important. But they are literally a tiny office or desk. It’s just so when I’m out there I don’t have to ask families to come all the way downtown or to east Hollywood to meet me. Or when we have staff, they can work out of the field. They’re not an office like this. This is the neighborhood I served as a teacher and counselor. This is the neighborhood where I live.

Q: How long have you lived here?

A: I’ve lived here in this area for about nine years. But I worked this area for about 15 years. They actually had me come over for the first week, this was 2007, when they opened Bernstein (high school). This whole area used to be Marshall. It’s hard to imagine now with the building program, what the world was like 10 to 15 years ago. And what the world was like before we built 131 schools. And the whole debate right now over the calendar is a very interesting debate because there’s a whole generation of us who only taught at year-round schools, what were known as Concept 6. 

Q: What is Concept 6?

A: Year-round schools is a misnomer because it implies that there was an academic or instructional reason why we had a year-round calendar. The only reason we had a year-round calendar was we didn’t build adequate facilities for children living in the most economically and racially segregated neighborhoods in the state or in the nation. And so, when we say Concept 6 that was how we designed a calendar so that we could meet, at the bare minimum, the state’s standards, the state’s requirement for days of instruction, while offering less days of instruction.

Q: What were the advantages of a year-round calendar?

A: I think for adults, there were things about that schedule that had advantages. There were even things unintentionally instructionally that had advantages when we had funding. Let’s say you were an immigrant student who came to this country in middle school and you went to a Concept 6 year-round school. You basically could go to school all year round, so you really had a chance actually to not have any gaps in your English language acquisition and your academic acquisition. So there were a few advantages, unintentional. But when you really parsed it out, if you went to a year-round school from kindergarten through 12th grade, you actually missed the equivalent of a year and a half of days of instruction, and that was ultimately what won out in court and I think ultimately what helped folks convince the voters that we should pass these (school construction) bonds.

Q: You are constantly asking Superintendent Michelle King to be bold and to take chances. Do you feel like there needs to be more of that? 

A: I think Superintendent King is genuinely collaborative in her leadership approach, and I think in the long run that’s going to be a good thing for the students of Los Angeles. I think the normative back and forth between a board and the superintendent should have some of that pushing back and forth. And that’s how districts move. It’s a precise nexus between the proper checks and balances in a system, but also the creative tensions in a democratic structure that has separation of powers that actually move an organization. I’m sure that the superintendent and her team will push us a lot on budget issues over the next few months. We may push for some more bold measures in terms of goals or aspirations or things like that. That’s appropriate.

If I didn’t believe that Ms. King has those for our students, I wouldn’t have voted for her to be superintendent. I just think there’s an incredible amount of balancing that takes place. And actually, I couldn’t imagine right now a better relationship between a board and a superintendent. We model in some ways what (former superintendent) Ray Cortines taught us in terms of a true partnership. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without creative tension. That doesn’t mean there is a 100 percent disagreement, nor should there be. We are sleeves rolled up and working on this, both literally and figuratively. 

And I believe it’s within our grasp to eradicate the school readiness gap, and I don’t understand why we would do anything else. If we make this investment on the front end and ensure that we have an equity lens to early childhood education and we invest heavily, all the research indicates that will pay dividends throughout. And so, do I want there to be a more aggressive, faster, bolder initiative around that? Of course. Is the administration really to roll that out tomorrow? Probably not. I think Dr. McKenna feels the same way about zero dropouts, and Dr. Vladovic right now is extremely concerned about re-classification, Ms. Garcia as it relates to graduation and the different things that we need to be doing now to make 100 percent a potential reality. Each board member has urgency about things that are absolutely driven by transforming outcomes for kids.

Q: What is your focus?

A: Today? Today it is eradicating the school readiness gap. Some of this is completely informed by research, some of this is informed by a lot more time spent with 3- and 4-year-olds recently. I’m just convinced that if we could say that for every child living in poverty in Los Angeles County, we are going to make sure they have access to a high-quality early-education program, with high-quality literacy, numeration skills and social emotional learning linked to an early elementary school literacy program. I actually believe it’s within our grasp to eradicate the third-grade reading gap. We saw last spring when we are focused on something, and when we resource it appropriately, and I don’t just mean resource it with funding, there’s the intellectual and emotional heart and mind resources that happens also, otherwise known as focus and mission.

I really believe that our kids can do amazing and remarkable things and I really do have an asset mindset. This has to be personal for each of us, we can’t think of EL as over there, those kids, who don’t know English. For a lot of us, English learners are our grandparents and it has to be that personal. We are very intentional in our office about what we do and how we approach the work to be very conscious and very intentional about making this personal.

And so when I approach the work as a policymaker and people say, ‘Why are you so concerned about labor rights as it relates to the largest public-sector food services contract west of the Mississippi?’ The most important part of it, the folks working in the field picking the vegetables or working in the slaughterhouses that’s someone’s mom or dad, brother or sisters, not mine, but someone’s, and we should approach the work as if it were our own. What labor conditions would we expect for our own parents? We are literally trained to not personalize this. What level of instruction do we expect for our own children? Why would we expect anything less for anyone’s child?

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 school board President Steve Zimmer recently sat down with LA School Report at his field office tucked away in an east Hollywood strip mall, where there is a unique partnership with the Youth Policy Institute and the school district that hosts after-school programs, adult classes and classes for homeless youth.

During the hour-long interview, Zimmer spoke about his passion to eradicate the school readiness gap (the achievement gap between students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds as they enter the school system compared to their white and wealthier peers), the relationship between the school board and Superintendent Michelle King, who is entering her ninth month as the leader of the nation’s second-largest school district, and his experience working as a counselor at Marshall High School helping students cross the graduation stage.

Here are Zimmer’s comments on the district’s online credit recovery program, administered by companies including Edgenuity, which has been scrutinized for its rigor amid the district’s recent announcement that its graduation has reached a record 75 percent even as the bar has been raised with the requirement that students pass the A through G, the course criteria established by UC faculty. (Lightly edited for clarity and length.)

• Read more on credit recovery: Are the courses ‘very rigorous’?, Credit recovery starts early this year, Zimmer expresses frustration over credit recovery, LAUSD summer school had better teaching 

Q: We’d like to talk to you about the district’s online credit recovery program. On Tuesday (Aug. 23), you made it clear that you have concerns about it.

A: It’s a great concern to me.

Q: What are your concerns? What do you want to see done this year? What did you learn from last year? 

A: So, there’s so many places to start on where I’m concerned. But I think the most important place to start about where I’m concerned is I’m simultaneously concerned about the right now and the long view. The long view is not about how many assignments were in Edgenuity. Not that I’m not concerned about that — actually I am.

But I am much more concerned that we believe having an individual education plan for every middle and high school student is a key lever for moving the needle on this, that we have to be looking very, very carefully at career and training pathways and I don’t think we are. And as a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure we’re not.

And so, both in the immediate short-term when you’re looking at academic counseling loads and ratios, the medium-term in terms of if we do try and bring those down, do we actually have the folks who are credentialed and who intentionally want to work with our students in this way and the long-view is we know we’re going to be in a teacher shortage. I know we’re going to be in counselor shortage. What are we doing in terms of our partnerships to build the right kind of pipelines to make sure the right people are in those counseling seats with the right set of  skills, with the right asset-based mindset about our students and the right balance of a caseload where they can actually do this?

Having an individual graduation plan, as important as it might be, needs to be more important than just having a piece of paper. I mean having a piece of paper actually for urban school districts, where the belief system was not what it was in affluent school districts, is a step and an important step. Because having an individualized graduation plan, by definition, means we expect you to graduate and we expect you to graduate fully completing the A through G’s. So this is not triage or salvage work. This is intentional and very purposeful and is of high rigor and high quality all the way through. When you have a plan, there’s an infinitely better chance that the plan will be executed, as opposed to not having any plan.

Q: How concerned were you when you heard UC was looking at this credit recovery program and might reject the courses? (Update: Since this interview, a UC spokeswoman said UC has reviewed the courses and there will be no changes to the admission status of incoming freshmen accepted to UC.) 

A: So short-term obviously, we’re concerned for our students because it’s certainly no fault of theirs. They completed the courses that they were asked to complete to graduate, fulfilling the A through G’s, so I have a short-term concern, of course, for them.

Am I concerned that they’re looking at this? No. I think they should look at it. I’m very skeptical of online recovery programs. I’m very skeptical of online instruction period. I say skeptical in the literal sense. I’m not a Luddite on it. I’m not reactively opposed to it. I think that we in the new terrain that is blended instruction, blended instruction within a year or two is not going to be some kind of branded movement that the Alliance charter schools try and so, therefore, it is wonderful.

Blended instruction is going to be part of instruction. Period. In many ways it already is. Do our teachers have the right training and support to use it the best way possible? I don’t think so. Not yet. And so, yeah, I’m interested and concerned and skeptical all at the same time. It’s not necessarily negative.

Q: Will the school board be taking another look at this?

A: As it related to Edgenuity and all those contracts, the first thing to say is that let’s be clear on what everybody expected and what happened and what the narrative should and shouldn’t be around this.

Access to an A through G college-preparatory curriculum is a foregone conclusion in affluent school districts, whether they be suburban, wherever they are. Nobody asks that question. Nobody says are our students capable of this level of rigor? It’s assumed that they are. And that is, not to give a lecture, but that is just very clear exposition of systemic racism. That’s what it is and it shouldn’t be called anything else.

And so when there’s all these questions about did our students really do this? I think we have to check ourselves. And go back to 10 years ago, 12 years ago when we first passed the A through G and how much of this is going to hurt students.

Go back two years ago to the editorial pages of the LA Times where literally they said we are setting up these students or those students for failure. We still use this language today. Catastrophic failure did not happen. Let’s say it turns out that this “all hands on deck” approach that really probably the true rate was more like 70 percent than 75 percent if you don’t accept these credit recovery courses.

Q: Do you know how many students used online credit recovery courses in order to graduate?

A: No. Today on Aug. 25, I stand by 100 percent what our numbers are, but I also understand that folks are looking at them and they should. But even if the numbers were 70 percent, it’s important to understand that’s not what people thought would happen, that’s not what people thought our kids were capable of, or our teachers were capable of, or our system was capable of.

Now when there was this big panic around when the fall numbers came out and the fall numbers looked very low, that was even somewhat at the district level, both the panic around that and the misunderstanding of that was mostly from folks who had never worked graduation. I worked graduation for 10 years. I was in charge of the kids who were between 20 and 60 credits down when the fall semester started. And that’s what I did and that was a chunk of my job.

Q: What was your role?

A: I was intervention coordinator at Marshall High School. I always had that as a half-time position. I didn’t want to leave the classroom. We also had over 4,300 students. Marshall was a very different school back then. Most students from the Los Feliz, Silver Lake community did not go to Marshall. It was a very different place and so I understand what it’s like to get kids across the stage. And I understand when we were talking about two to four classes away, we were not in a crisis. We had to be very, very intentional about how it was done, but it was only because there was so much attention and scrutiny to it, now I didn’t think that that was a bad thing because that allowed us to move resources to do this “all hands on deck,” but what people don’t understand is at every comprehensive high school every spring, it’s all hands on deck. That’s what you do.

And so what happened was not this kind of miracle on ice or miracle on the graduation stage that people kind of thought. That’s what happens every year at schools because life happens to kids. Even kids that are not so far off the rails.

After spending almost 20 years working almost exclusively with adolescents, that there’s very few things that are absolutely true. But what’s almost absolutely true, if you’re going to be in high school for four years, you’re going to have one really rough semester. It’s this invisible cloud of adolescent angst, or a break-up, or a family situation, or normal stressors, or non-normative stressors, or whatever it is, it hits almost every kid at some point during adolescence.

If you have the system in place, especially family systems in place, especially family systems in place where the adults do not lose their minds when this happens, then it’s a rough time and everything’s OK. What happens in families that are already in crisis is oftentimes the entire system collapses or the perception of the student is that everything is collapsing around them, and so without a comprehensive system of supports at the school site, that’s how we lose kids.

And sure, there are gang issues, there are teen pregnancies, whatever the issues are, those issues become predominant during a time that’s fairly normative in adolescence, and so when you look at it from that view and you look at how few resources our students had and how just there wasn’t the stability that would put the guardrails around that one rough adolescent period, it was not unusual for even a fairly strong student to have failed a couple of classes because life happened and there weren’t those guardrails. So not tremendously shocking for those of us who have done this that our numbers were where they were. Certainly urgent and certainly demanded everyone’s full attention.

Q: But it was not something you hadn’t seen before?

A: Not something I haven’t seen before. Again, there was some of this that was about the increased rigor under the A through G, absolutely.

All I’m saying is is that there were other factors involved, but kind of the baseline factor very few people outside of those of us who had worked this for so long understood. There were many factors, a whole cacophony of things, that made the numbers probably a little bit more severe than they had been previously, but just at a baseline level you know that you start your senior year, you’re going to have to offer some very focused resources and some very focused attention to get kids across that line.

So there was a very public exhibition on a district-wide level of what happens at schools every year and yes, it was punctuated and maybe a little bit more extreme, but not like a new thing.

Now what was new in some ways were these online credit recovery resources. I visited a bunch of classrooms where they were doing it. You don’t learn completely about a program from visiting it for one day or even two days. Was there a teacher in the classroom? Absolutely. Did the teacher seem like they knew what they were doing? Absolutely. Would I have been thankful if these resources were in place when I was trying to get certain kids across the graduation line? Absolutely. Did it seem like it was real and there was rigor to what I was seeing students doing? Yeah. Yes. but do I know for sure? We won’t know for sure until UC takes a look at it, until we continue to take a look at it.

Q: Did online credit recovery work too well because it has taken the luster off the grad rate? Did you expect to break the graduation record?

A: I think the trajectories have been very steady. If we had gone from 64 or even 67 percent to 75. This was a clear trajectory, more resources on hand, not only the online credit recovery. I encourage you to visit what’s called an II (Individualized Instruction) lab at adult schools that’s a more traditional version of credit recovery. We opened II labs through spring break and that was one of the things behind the scenes. Sometimes, and you’ll rarely see this on the dais, but there are some things I will not just take no for an answer. The idea that we have students striving toward graduation and we were going to shut down for a week during spring break, was just, that could not happen.

Q: Does that usually happen?

A: That’s what usually happens. Even if we only served 100 kids that week, there were seven or eight centers open during the spring break and kids came. There were all kinds of things that were happening to give the proper attention to the first time under A through G. To some of the other factors, it was not just credit recovery. It certainly didn’t work too well. What we have to see is what’s the role of this. What’s the right role.

I have a particular view of how data should be used, particularly standardized test data. I’m sometimes characterized as anti-data, but I’m very concerned about the way data is used. I have strong convictions of data as an instrument around calibration and redesign vs. data as a hammer. Data as a hammer is about political agendas, it’s not about getting to better for kids. The same is true about blended learning, online credit recovery. This is part of our toolbox right now, and to toss it out of that tool box when it can really help students would be both counterintuitive and would not be fair, truthfully.

Q: What is the ultimate goal?

A: We need to design instructional programs so that we’re not in the position of doing credit recovery and certainly not credit recovery because the instructional delivery wasn’t adequate or the supports weren’t adequate. There’s going to be a degree of credit recovery that’s going to happen, as I explained before, because from my experience because of adolescence and the things that happen, there’s always going to be some credit recovery that you need to do. But our entire system should be geared towards, if we really believe these kinds of things about RTI (response to intervention), if we really believe in the differentiation of instruction and we are training our teachers and supporting our teachers well about how you do differentiation that would be what our primary focus should be, not on recovery.

Q: What would you like it to look like?

A: What I would like it to look like, again, is better professional development, better supports for teachers on an ongoing basis, I would like it to have an informational dashboard so that we know where there are problems sooner and we can do intervention rather than recovery.

This is hard work. When you’re really talking about changing mindsets when you’re talking about changing hearts and minds both in general, but at school sites. When you’re talking about constant improvement in terms of instructional quality. We have not given a lot of attention to lowering the affective filter (a term used by Stephen Krashen, which refers to negative emotional and motivational factors — like anxiety, self-consciousness— that can interfere with processing information, like learning a second language) to getting to better instructional quality. It’s not about, do you have a skill that you weren’t trained for in your teacher preparation program. That’s a very deficit mindset approach.

The vast majority of teachers want to do right by our kids. Of course, we have teachers who shouldn’t be in front of kids. We made a lot of strides in the last five years, but that’s not the majority of our teachers. The vast majority of teachers are teachers because they want kids to break through and succeed. We need to lower the affective filter among our instructors on getting to better skill sets to meet all of these needs. Differentiation is one of the hardest things, if you talk to teachers, to do. It’s very hard for me as an ESL teacher. We came to differentiation early on because by definition we’re going to get kids at very different levels especially if you’re in a very diverse ESL class, like I did.

What I want us to commit to is very honest and open conversations with our teams on the front line about what they need. Look, we had a very fear-based system under John Deasy. There were reasons why that happened. In the long run, while there were some shifts and some shaking that needed to happen in the system, we injured the profession. We injured people’s confidence, people did not believe that we believed in them and when you don’t think the leadership in the district believes in you, you’ve got a huge problem.

Coming up: More Q & A with Zimmer, as he discusses the board’s relationship with Superintendent Michelle King and his drive to eradicate the school readiness gap.

Summer school students working in groups. (Courtesy: LAUSD)

Innovative summer school practices are credited with helping 758 students graduate through a credit recovery program, and grades were significantly higher as LA Unified went out of its way to increase the quality of the teachers giving the summer school instruction.

“We are emphatically keeping high standards for summer school like we do during the school year,” said Beyond the Bell administrator Betsy Castillo, giving the summer school report to the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee this week. In the past, any teacher with any credential could teach summer school, but for this year, Castillo said, “We were emphatic about the quality and caliber of instruction and that summer school should not have lower standards for anyone involved.”

• Read more on credit recovery: Are the courses ‘very rigorous’?, Credit recovery starts early this year, Zimmer expresses frustration over credit recovery

Principals were asked to hire appropriate teachers for the courses with “a deep knowledge which is as necessary for summer as it is for fall,” she added.

This summer 71 high schools offered 2,749 classes and 174 online classes for 119 different types of courses. Of the 31,729 students taking summer school, 758 were for credit recovery in order to graduate in August and be part of the estimated record 75 percent graduation rate for the district. But 15 percent taking the summer classes still got D’s or F’s, and the school board members on the committee expressed concern for them.

There were 45,454 grades issued and 1,650 teachers employed over the summer, according to Castillo.

Because most of the students were in for credit recovery, the courses with the highest enrollment were algebra and English classes. Castillo said most of the students are in summer school to re-take classes to get a better grade, but some of them are also adding to their credits by taking extra classes, or taking fun courses such as art or drama.

School board President Steve Zimmer noted that the grades were far better than during the rest of the year and suggested it was because the students only took two classes rather than six at a time.

Summer term courses with the highest enrollment.

“I just want to note the significantly higher grades and that when we do intervention we look at how we do this,” Zimmer said.

Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson pointed out that many of the students were taking classes for a second time and therefore were getting a better grade, but she said holding longer classes over a shorter time period may have helped.

Another plus for summer school was starting classes for the first time at 9 a.m. when students were more alert, engaged and ready to learn, but Castillo pointed out that tardiness among both teachers and students was about the same as when classes started earlier.

“Research does show the benefits of extra sleeping time in the morning, and I can tell you the student surveys showed that they were thrilled and very appreciative with the later start time,” Castillo said.

She said she visited more than 300 classrooms to observe classes and said, “In the past, I saw students asleep in class and was very disheartened and this year not one student was asleep and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. They were rested and there was sufficient time to eat breakfast.”

Betsy Castillo, Beyond the Bell administrator

Committee chair Richard Vladovic pointed out that the Seattle school district is testing out later start times and he has suggested that Superintendent Michelle King monitor their process.

“We may want to consider a late start for each day of school,” Vladovic said. “I would like to take a look at doing that if it makes a difference for kids getting there.”

Other new elements the district added to summer school this year were a case manager at each school and a teacher leader position to help teachers and students deal with two-and-a-half-hour classes presented in an accelerated time frame. The teachers were also given a four-hour online professional development course and common planning time to encourage working together.

Some teachers worked at schools they were new to and they developed more team efforts on campuses this past summer, Castillo said.

The schools also offered at least two non-core courses at every site, so it didn’t seem like summer school was all remedial and can be fun too, Castillo said. In the past summer school was called “credit recovery” and now they call it “summer term.”

Board member Scott Schmerelson was concerned about those who didn’t make it through. “What about the 573 souls who came to the class and still failed?” he asked. Castillo said those students generally dropped out and staff members are following up with helping them in the future.

“We feel overall it was a successful summer school and we are thinking about ways for improvement for next year,” Castillo said.

El Camino Real Charter High has back-to-school night this week.

An emergency meeting has been called for Friday morning by the El Camino Real Alliance Board to discuss an internal investigation and the paperwork left to satisfy an LA Unified inquiry. On the agenda is “public employee discipline/ dismissal/ release” in closed session.

Meanwhile, the El Camino Real Charter High School already sent new documentation to LA Unified to answer questions of their Notice of Violation which could lead to the district taking back the independent charter school. The school plans to give more documentation before the Sept. 23 deadline next week.

Before Friday’s meeting was announced, Marshall Mayotte, the school’s chief business officer, said Wednesday that the board has been trying to schedule a special meeting since LA Unified issued the Notice of Violation at last month’s LA Unified school board meeting. The El Camino board is made up of three teachers, a parent, a classified employee representative and two community representatives.

“We are not sure what they will discuss, but it could have to do with the Oracle report,” Mayotte said.

The school spent $20,000 to hire Oracle Investigations Group earlier in the summer when LA Unified charter division officials were asking about what they called “seemingly exorbitant personal and/or improper expenses.” It is possible that some results of the investigation will be revealed on Friday, and it’s possible the board could decide whether or not the results could be made public. But it’s also possible the report may fall into attorney/client privilege and never be released to the public.

Marshall Mayotte, El Camino Real Charter chief business officer.

These next few days are important to the future of the academically successful charter school. Thursday is back-to-school night, which will not be a forum for anyone to address the issues before the LA school board, according to ‎the school’s Director of Marketing Melanie Horton. Parents have been notified by a weekly newsletter and staff is informed regularly at staff meetings about the progress of the school’s response.

Friday’s emergency meeting will be followed next Wednesday by the El Camino regularly scheduled board meeting. El Camino isn’t expected to be scheduled for discussion at Tuesday’s LA Unified school board meeting, but issues or updates could be brought up while other charter school issues are addressed. Then, Sept. 23 is the school’s final deadline to answer all of the district’s questions.

“We feel confident that all of the questions will be answered to their satisfaction and that we will be able to put this behind us,” Horton said.

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer asked for a detailed list of the inaccuracies that the school saw in the violation notice presented by the district’s charter division. After three weeks, they presented 40 of them to Zimmer. Some of those included business expenses such an Academic Decathlon coach who traveled to Sacramento to receive a proclamation by the state Senate. Others include charges made on Mayotte’s card by other employees.

Some of the teachers were concerned about the school’s response to the district and wanted to be involved in writing the response, but Horton said, “This requires going over a lot of accounting records handled by the business office so teachers are not involved in the response.”

“It’s really a busy time for our teachers and they are making every effort to stay focused,” Horton said. “There was some fear about what it all means, and is the school going to close tomorrow, but we have had staff meetings and explained the process and let everyone know it is our top priority to put out a quality document and provide a satisfactory response that will end this process.”

El Camino officials, who claim there is no wrongdoing in their financial reports, provided a lot of details and evidence that they provided previously, but did so once again “just to prove our point,” Horton said.

The LA Unified staff noted that no one at the school has been disciplined or replaced for violations, and Horton said the El Camino Real Alliance Board “made it clear that they won’t take any action until they study the results of the Oracle report and have all the information and allow due process to all of our employees.”

Mayotte said the school didn’t have a chance to respond fast enough before the Notice of Violation was made public.

This is the first of three steps the district would have to take before the school reverts from a charter to a district school. The school converted to an independent charter in 2011 and receives $32 million a year in government funding.

Patrick O’Brien, a parent of two children who just started at El Camino, sent a detailed letter to Zimmer protesting the unfairness of the scrutiny that the school faces. An attorney who has conducted investigations himself, O’Brien wrote: “I don’t at all disagree with the reasonableness of your use of a school-owned vehicle to head out for dinner and a nightcap when you’ve put in a long day of school business, and I don’t really think the law is intending to prohibit that. But the apparent approach of the Notice of Violation report applied to your use of a school vehicle seems to reach the same unproductive result.”

(Courtesy: City Charter Schools)

Citing financial woes due to low enrollment and problems with its private facility, the governing board of City High School voted Monday to close the charter school immediately, leaving 116 students scrambling to find new schools.

The school, located in Pico-Robertson on Los Angeles’ Westside, had been offered a location at Dorsey High School through Proposition 39 but turned it down because it was too far away from its middle school, according to Valerie Braimah, executive director of City Charter Schools. Choosing a more expensive option of leasing a private location on the Westside at 9017 W. Pico Blvd., the school struggled with enrollment and experienced electrical and air-conditioning problems at its building, which hurt enrollment more, Braimah said Wednesday evening.

With the only option being to cut staff to the point that academic viability of the school would be hurt, Braimah said the board opted to cease operations at the high school immediately. The school expected 150 students on the first day, but only 125 showed up and more dropped out in the first few weeks, leaving the school in financial trouble, Braimah said.

“This was an extremely heart-wrenching decision. This was not a problem with our educational program, this was an operational problem,” Braimah said.

The high school is part of a network of schools called City Charter Schools that includes City Language Immersion Charter, a dual-immersion elementary school in Baldwin Village, and The City School, a middle school. The middle school has been operating for five years, and the network’s leaders wanted to create a high school to serve its outgoing middle school students, but the school struggled to keep its enrollment up.

Braimah said the school was originally offered space from LA Unified at Emerson Community Charter School in Westwood through Prop. 39, a law that requires school districts to offer space to charters at district schools if it has unused classrooms or facilities. This can lead to charters sharing a building with another school, referred to as a co-location.

Emerson is 2.2 miles away from The City School, but the district changed plans and ultimately offered space at Los Angeles High School, which is 7.5 miles away in the Mid-Wilshire district. After a year at LA High, the school asked LA Unified for another location and was offered space at Dorsey High School, which is 6.4 miles away near Baldwin Village.

“Unfortunately, last year we ended up with a Prop. 39 site at Los Angeles High that was an adequate site facilities wise, but was geographically far for a lot of our families, and so a lot of our 8th-grade class did not matriculate to the high school and we started with a class of 60,” Braimah said.

City High only has 9th and 10th graders because it began last year with a freshman class and planned on adding a new class each year. After being offered Dorsey, the school chose to rent a private facility near its middle school, but the problems with the building added to financial woes and also led to several students dropping out, Braimah said.

“Long term, without a permanent facility in our sights and with the lack of predictability on Prop. 39, this problem really would have persisted. We are still young in our program, and we felt it was better for our kids to have another option that is college preparatory,” she said.

Braimah said the district has been helpful in getting students placed in schools and has extended the magnet enrollment deadline for its students. She also said the school has a partnership with Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy, which has offered to take as many students as are interested and has also offered them free busing to their campus near LAX from a central location.

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside, said late Wednesday, “The only thing that we are concerned about in this moment is the students and families impacted by this closure three weeks into the school year.”

When asked about the Prop. 39 issues and if City High had been offered an adequate facility, he declined to comment.

“When something like this happens, we should all remember that these are all of our kids and everyone has a role and a responsibility to make sure every family has the services that they need to make sure that there is not academic injury that would compound the stress that happens when the school closes,” Zimmer said. “So that is what is most important right now. There will be time to talk about what we need to do in terms of our early warning systems to know about when enrollment is at a point where viability is a question so that we know about it before it becomes a disruption.”

The school employs 10 teachers and three administrators, and City Charter Schools is working to find them new jobs, Braimah said. She also said the goal is to have every student placed in a new school by Friday.

“We have a crisis with our youngsters,” board member Richard Vladovic told the district’s chief academic officer.

LA Unified’s chief academic officer came before board members Tuesday with an upbeat-titled report called “Breaking Our Own Records,” but instead of resting on the improvement in overall test scores, the four school board members in attendance grilled her for nearly two hours throwing out terms like “frustrating,” “depressing” and “disappointing” and saying the district is in “crisis” when educating certain segments of the student population.

“I had to say this because it depressed me as an educator and after eight years I was told it was going to get better, and I’ve been assured it will get better,” said board member Richard Vladovic, chairman of the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee that met Tuesday. “I’m most concerned about those children not getting what they deserve, and that is quality education.”

Math scores highlighting groups that need attention.

Board member George McKenna said, “I’m as frustrated as I can possibly be. The data is miserable. Test scores are still almost embarrassingly low. It is continually depressing and disappointing.”

The committee was discussing the list of lowest performing schools and other test score numbers that the district was touting as “breaking our records!”

Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson pointed out that the district’s record 75 percent graduation rate is up from 72 percent last year, and she showed other upward trends in the Smarter Balanced Assessments. She also noted that 265 schools are now participating in the Early Language and Literacy Plan, up from 85 in the 2015-16 school year.

“Some of the scores are record-breaking, but we have not hit the finish line yet,” Gipson said. “Our goal for graduation is 100 percent.”

Gipson tried to paint a positive spin repeating district catchphrases including “A District on the Move” and “All Hands on Deck” used by Superintendent Michelle King. But the four of seven board members on the committee were having none of it. Other members of the committee included representatives of three unions and USC and UCLA.

She pointed again to the increase in students meeting or exceeding English Language Arts standards, to 39 percent, up from 33 percent last year. Math scores rose to 29 percent from 25 percent in 2014-2015.

But then came the board members’ harsh reaction to zero improvement for English learners’ math scores: only 5 percent met standards, and only 4 percent met English standards, up one point. There was no improvement for students with disabilities: 6 percent met math standards two years in a row, and 8 percent met English standards.

Frances Gipson

Gipson said some successes were made through personalization of graduation goals and a dozen different types of interventions. “We are assessing what worked best for students and are accelerating that while eliminating things that did not work best.”

Another new number showed that 42 percent of students received a C grade or better in each of the 15 required A through G courses. Even though students can graduate by getting a D in those classes, Gipson said they want to strive for a C grade or better. California’s public universities require a C or better in those classes.

State math score rankings for the largest school districts in California.

School board President Steve Zimmer said, “I want to ask staff what specific crisis we are addressing? What do we need to see in due time? We need to reflect the urgency to see some positive results in continuing areas of inequity and our failure for public education.”

Zimmer said the board needs to hear “some type of strategy plan and urgency and honest feedback of what we need to do.”

Gipson had staff members from Beyond the Bell, Counseling Services and the Charter Schools Division ready to explain other recent successes in various departments but cut some of the presentations short as the board members asked her questions for nearly two hours.

“This group does represent a sense of urgency,” Gipson responded. “We have taken some bold steps.”

Gipson said she plans to report back with how some of those bold plans are working at school sites.

“We have a crisis with our youngsters and our youngsters need the very best, and if we are paying someone 15 percent more why aren’t they concentrated in schools that need it the most?” asked Vladovic. “There needs to be a concentrated plan. We are in the process of being confronted with a budget crisis that we have never confronted before, and people don’t know that.”

George McKenna and Scott Schmerelson.

Vladovic was particularly concerned with Long Term English Speakers who have scored persistently at 23 percent and never higher. “I feel like we have written them off,” he said.

Board member Scott Schmerelson echoed that, saying, “I’m not concerned about the cracks in the system, but the craters.” He also referred to students continuing from fifth to sixth grades or eighth grade to high school without the appropriate skill sets.

McKenna pointed out that some schools celebrate successes while African-Americans and poor children are still failing. “Is it that these poor children have gangs, or don’t have a momma or a daddy, or there’s no literacy at home? I got all that! So, what are the extreme measures that we should do?”

McKenna pointed to math scores, for example, that showed 18 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of Latinos exceeding standards while Asians hit 70 percent, Filipinos hit 56 percent and whites were at 57 percent. Economically disadvantaged students scored 23 percent compared to 50 percent for non-economically disadvantaged.

McKenna, the only African-American on the school board, added, “Girls do better than boys and African-American males are at the bottom of the ladder. Am I surprising anyone? Absolutely not! What else can we do? Do we tell them to sing and dance and play baseball?”

McKenna said the district must focus on middle schools because only then “graduation becomes an aspiration rather than an illusion.”

Gipson pointed to working with the community colleges, using block schedules, holding twilight classes, getting grants and creating a director of innovation to review what is working in education. She also said a new dashboard computer program allows teachers to quickly figure out what each student needs to improve on the most.

Gipson said her team “ended some curriculum chaos” by pulling together many different teams and figuring out how to support each other. The district tripled their work in English language development. Gipson said the district saw a large drop in reclassification percentages because of changes in state accountability, and, because the year is from October to October, she said she expects some better numbers in a few weeks.

Zimmer said, “I think we are on the right path, but I want to caution that if we want to eradicate the school readiness gap we have to see the literacy foundation results” and see how early learning initiatives are directly linked to early elementary and math initiatives.

“We need to align the resources with the neediest students,” Gipson said.

One of the committee members, Mojgan Moazzez, principal of Logan Street Elementary School and representing AALA, the principal’s union, praised Gipson and said, “I have personally seen how she works with schools and has allocated resources where it is needed.”

The school board members wanted to see a more precise plan of action to help the lowest-performing students.

“And if we believe in the plan, why not have the plan anchor our approach?” Zimmer asked.

Vladovic added, “We need to see a plan rather than wishes of what we want to do. We need to shore up those youngsters and need a timeline and expected outcomes and what will happen if they are not achieved. We have to make a change.”

“We are doing it now,” Gipson said.

Vladovic continued, “We want to see some real particulars in what you’re doing. I truly believe all kids can learn. It’s our fault, … not theirs. I’m hoping you’ll do it. Let’s not just wait.”

After the meeting, Gipson was asked if the board seemed particularly harsh.

She answered, “We all want better. We have done better. We have a way to go.”

Waiting to speak about a Green Dot charter school.

Charter families have lined up at dawn in biting cold winds holding babies. They’ve sweated it out for hours standing around ice chests or taking turns under canopies. They’ve waited hours—sometimes nearly a full a day—to get into an LA Unified school board meeting. Then, they wait hours more just to be heard.

School Board President Steve Zimmer is out to change that, especially since next week’s school board meeting on Sept. 20 is expected to have many items involving charter schools.

“First and foremost, I want folks to know that we are committed to changing that so they will not be waiting all day and not know when their items will come up before the board,” Zimmer said at the last board meeting. “We are actively trying to get better on this.”

It’s an idea that will help all speakers on any topic who come to address the LA Unified meetings, but it will specifically help charter school families. Many of the agenda items that draw the most speakers involve charter renewals or questions about charter schools that the school board oversees. Parents, teachers and students come to sign up to speak to the school board.

The once-a-month marathon-length school board meetings typically go from 9 a.m. for closed session personnel items until well past 9 p.m. Zimmer promised the public and his fellow school board members that when he was elected as president for the second year he would try to fix the long waits by the public.

“When charter items are being heard, having folks wait all day is not something we want to continue,” Zimmer said.

During the open section of their Closed Session meeting on Aug. 23, other school board members weighed in on rectifying the situation about 54 minutes into the meeting. Board member Monica Ratliff considered making a motion or resolution to come up with a solution.

“I feel like we talked about it, but I do not feel like it’s moving forward and I’m concerned that it’s not happening,” Ratliff said.

Zimmer assured Ratliff and the other board members that the request would be followed. Board member Monica Garcia suggested that the district’s Charter School Office also help notify the schools on the agenda.

“There should also be some trust that when you say something is going to happen, that it actually happens at that time,” Garcia said.

Jason Mandell of the California Charter Schools Association said he welcomes the new procedures planned by the school board because the long waits have resulted in complaints and frustration for the charter school families. He said he has been notified of a “time certain” for charter school issues for the next meeting. And although his group would prefer an entirely separate meeting for charter issues, this is a step in the right direction, he said.

“Anything is better than it was before, and overall we are happy because it is easier for families, teachers and school leaders to speak to the school board without having to wait eight to 10 hours,” Mandell said.

Board secretariat Jefferson Crain said emails will be sent to 1,600 people who receive school board news that will indicate specific times for agenda items, most likely after 6 p.m. to make it easier for working parents and teachers.

“Despite past efforts and speaking directly to some people, they still chose to come at 6 in the morning,” Crain said. “We do not want to have a separate meeting for specific types of issues.”

Superintendent Michelle King said her office would conduct a survey to get some input into how to best solve the long lines and waiting issues.

Zimmer said, “We want to make the best way for people to be heard. I want the maximum amount of people to speak and don’t want folks here late into the evening.”

He added, “Clearly the way we did it last year is not something we want to continue.”

The next regular board meeting is set for Sept. 20 with closed session items discussed at 9 a.m. The open session is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. at the School Board Auditorium at 333 S. Beaudry Ave. Charter school items will have a “time certain” starting at 6 p.m., and the order of business will be posted on Sept. 14.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti speaks to members of the media outside the home of a high school dropout on LA Unified’s Student Recovery Day.

LA Unified officials and a team of volunteers hit the streets Friday, knocking on the doors of high school dropouts in an effort to get them re-enrolled in school as part of the district’s Student Recovery Day.

Among the door knockers was Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who along with LA Unified Board President Steve Zimmer, board member Scott Schmerelson and Superintendent Michelle King visited the home of a former student living near the campus of USC. After about 20 minutes, as a mass of reporters waited outside, Garcetti and the rest emerged victorious. The young man inside, Jeffery, had agreed to come back to school.

Jeffery had apparently dropped out to work and help his family, but Garcetti and Zimmer announced they had convinced him to attend night classes at an adult school so that he could continue with his day job. Not only that, but his cousin may also return to school and his grandma might start attending adult school.

“This is a city of second chances. We believe in people, and we want to come face to face,” Garcetti said. “That’s why we have a 75 percent graduation rate, the highest that we have had in LAUSD in modern history. That’s why we are coming and finding folks, and we understand they have struggles like working for their families to support them, but they shouldn’t have to choose between a job and a degree. We are going to make sure he has both.”

Student Recovery Day has been happening for eight years at the district and has resulted in nearly 5,000 students coming back to school. District employees from the central office, school board members and their staff, school personnel and volunteers from organizations like City Year fan out into neighborhoods and contact former students and their families while making them aware of the various services the district can offer.

This year, the recovery efforts were focused on dropouts from seven high schools, one in each board district. They were West Adams, Washington Prep, Canoga Park, Bernstein, Marquez, Sun Valley and Dymally high schools. The district reported a total of 230 volunteers visited homes Friday; it will announce next week how many students were visited and recovered.

Less than an hour before Garcetti exited Jeffery’s home, a press conference had concluded at West Adams Preparatory High School that featured five students who had either dropped out of school and returned or had faced extreme challenges just to get into school. One was Glenda Abrego, who grew up in El Salvador but decided to make the trek to America by herself. She was arrested at the Mexican border by immigration officials and spent several months in a detention center in Texas before coming to Los Angeles and enrolling at West Adams.

Abrego credited the counselors and teachers at West Adams with helping her find housing, financial support, legal aid and helping her learn English.

“As an immigrant I have a language problem that made me struggle a lot. In addition to that I didn’t have a place to live and no one to take care of me,” she said. “Now I have a place to live and friends here at West Adams. … Now I am here in front of you and I am incredibly grateful to those who have supported me.”

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer outside a home on Student Recovery Day.

About an hour after the mass of reporters swarmed Garcetti and the other district leaders outside Jeffery’s house, Zimmer stood on a quiet sidewalk next to a few district employees, looking over the fence of an apartment building on the 3000 block of West 12th Street. The address he was looking for didn’t seem to exist on the block, and he and his team had already gone to a different wrong address on 12th Avenue. A staffer made a call, and they realized they were at the wrong address again and should be at West 12th Place, one block over.

“This is part of Recovery Day, yes, standing on sidewalks,” Zimmer said when asked if this kind of thing happened often.

After driving the one block, Zimmer and his team entered the correct apartment. About 20 minutes later they exited and reported another success. In an hour a team from the district was going to come back and take the young man inside to a nearby continuation school. Zimmer said he was a quiet kid who maybe suffered from some depression and had lost interest in school.

“He’s a super nice kid and he’s not going to do anything to draw attention to himself. He’s just not able to connect at school and that’s not some like marquee thing. We had kids today (at the press conference) who went through a lot of dramatic stuff,” Zimmer said. “This is a lot more typical of kids who are struggling academically, struggling emotionally, family struggling economically, and school kind of like just — there’s not a motivation there because they don’t see the connection yet to the future.”

Zimmer added, “He’s going to go today. He gets it, he’s not resistant. It’s just how do you keep him motivated? That’s going to be the big challenge here. This is not unusual. This is not ‘the press conference story.’ This is the work our counselors do every day. I’m confident he is going to go back today. The issue is going to be how do we keep on him?”

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.”

Performing arts teacher Sue Freitag of El Camino Real Charter High School.

A $1,139 dinner at a steakhouse. A $95 bottle of fine Syrah wine. A $73 bill for flowers.

Those charges and others made by staff of a successful charter school were cited this week at an LA Unified School Board meeting and led the district to take the first steps to revoking the school’s charter.

El Camino Real Charter High School, which educates 3,600 students in the west San Fernando Valley, was given a Notice of Violations Tuesday that they must answer by Sept. 23, or the district could hold a public hearing to decide whether to revoke the school’s charter and return it to traditional district school status.

On Friday morning, all of the correspondence between the district and the school that was provided to the school board members was made public as per a request by board member Monica Ratliff.

While some of the school board members seemed outraged about the charges against the charter school in more than an hour of debate Tuesday, many teachers who spoke in support of the school said they felt that the district was being too harsh on the school. Some of them supported the expenses on lavish dinners, even though the district rules wouldn’t allow such practices for their own traditional schools.

“There are some things that need to be negotiated, and that may mean taking you out to dinner,” said teacher Sue Freitag. “I think the district is being unreasonable. Once again, it’s a huge bureaucracy trying to tell us all what to do. Charters are supposed to be independent.”

Marshall Mayotte, El Camino Real chief business officer

Freitag taught at the school for 14 years when it was a district school and after it became an independent charter school. She is also a member of the teachers union, UTLA, and notes that she is making 7 percent more than she did as a traditional school teacher. She said she has been part of the school family for 32 years, going back to being a student there.

“This school has had a pristine reputation in academics and the arts and it hurts me personally to see our reputation under scrutiny,” Freitag testified to the school board on Tuesday. “I question the charter school division as to why these issues were not brought up prior to the school year?” Freitag, who also is in charge of the theater program at the school, said, “I’m here for students, they deserve a safe school environment free of political interference.”

The teachers at El Camino Real will be meeting after school on Friday with UTLA members to discuss the issues with the school. The teachers have a separately negotiated UTLA contract that is different than the one for the overall district.

At Tuesday’s meeting, school board member Richard Vladovic said he sifted through the thousand of expenses of El Camino and asked, “Is it common to ask school funds to pay for a corkage fee? Can you use money meant for the students to pay the price of a bottle of wine? Can they purchase alcohol with school money? … If an LA principal did that, what would probably happen?”

Schools have done that, but they are told it’s against district policy, school officials said. Superintendent Michelle King shook her head and said, “There would be an investigation, and appropriate action would follow. No, we wouldn’t say it’s OK.”

Vladovic added that the school was asked months ago about the charges of “significant meals at restaurants and who attended the meetings and what they were for, and they did not respond.”

Jose Cole-Gutierrez, director of the district’s Charter Schools Division that brought the vote for the Notice of Violations to the school board, said his office noted the “seemingly exorbitant personal and improper expenses” including first-class travel and other expenses into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He said the school has “the opportunity to remedy concerns noted” including charges on credit cards charged to the school that includes unauthorized travel expense. Although charter schools run independently, they must still follow some overall district rules and procedures, and their charters are renewed by the school board every five years but can be revoked at any time.

“We noted credit card activity that is still problematic,” Cole-Gutierrez said. “It does not prohibit the use of personal expenses. It discourages it, but does not prohibit it.” He said the district’s charter division asked for clarifications for the past two years.

School board President Steve Zimmer noted that the Notices to Cure from the charter division are common requests, and that the school board doesn’t plan to revoke the school’s charter immediately. Other school board members expressed serious concerns.

“This does not reflect on a great school, I have major concerns,” Vladovic concluded. “Do we treat schools that are still LAUSD property, as opposed to charter schools on independent sites, differently? No, so they are all treated the same.”

Board member Scott Schmerelson, who represents the district where El Camino is located, pointed out that each of the teachers speaking for the school was passionate and said “the charter school is excellent and used to have a stellar reputation.” Schmerelson noted a media interview with a school representative who said there was a lot of money in the school’s treasury and the expenses weren’t of concern.

“You can’t use public money like that,” Schmerelson said. “What bothers me the most is the arrogance, the arrogance, on the news, as if we’re the bad guys. We like the school, I don’t want to revoke the charter, I think it’s a great school. But you have to play fair and have to be fair with public money.”

Schmerelson said he received many emails from faculty members who said they were happy with the school, but unhappy with the administrators who created these problems. “The great majority of the emails I received were for the school, but against the deeds that were done,” Schmerelson said.

El Camino attorney Janelle Ruley

In the charter school’s own by-laws, it notes that purchases for staff meals must be pre-approved and “each department has a budget of $50/employee/year for meals.”

Janelle Ruley, a charter rights attorney of Young, Minney & Corr representing the school’s governing board, said the school district’s recent action “feels like a bait-and-switch sucker punch.” She said the school board’s actions are unproductive and said the school answered all the questions in a timely manner and changed some school policies.

“Like Charlie Brown kicking a football, charter schools are set up to make compliance mistakes and they’re heavily penalized when they actually do,” Ruley said. She added that the school board action “will expose the district to liability.” Ruley said the school plans to answer all the questions within the deadline, but that didn’t stop the teachers and families from being angry.

Teacher Gail Turner-Graham

Teacher Gail Turner-Graham pointed out that “El Camino takes care of its teachers” with an average salary scale of $90,000 per teacher last year. She said the school increased classes, clubs and extracurricular activities by more than 15 percent and two college counselors are dedicated specifically for college planning and helping students with credit recovery. She said the school has a waiting list of 1,000 students and has “established a lean operating system,” and support staff increased by more than 40 percent.

Softball coach and teacher Lori Chandler said she had taught at the school since 1985 and when they first talked about going charter. “At the time the faculty lacked confidence and a majority was not in favor, but five years ago was very different and the faculty fully supported it,” said Chandler who also graduated from the high school. “That was the very best thing that happened to El Camino Real. Being a charter school means decisions are made at the school level.”

Chandler pointed out the school won 97 awards in the past five years in athletics. She suggested that the district wanted to take back the school because it was thriving so well and had several million dollars in their coffers for retiree benefits. “Perhaps that’s the problem, we are thriving too much,” said Chandler, who devoted 33 years to the school.

Lori Chandler, teacher and alum at El Camino Real.

District officials said they first notified the school of concerns last year, on Sept. 29, 2015 and issued a “Notice to Cure” to explain the irregularities by Oct. 30, 2015.

But the faculty and students didn’t know of the issues at the school until the first week of school this year, according to a science teacher at the school for the past 14 years, Dean Sodek. He said the faculty and parents were surprised and it was like “having a kitchen sink lobbed at us” by the district.

Sodek said the district paid a total of $1.2 million in oversight fees over the past five years to the district. He said the district charter office should offer more assistance to the school. He and other staff members said the district’s actions have shaken up the school.

“Please try to understand our frustration,” said the school’s ‎director of marketing, Melanie Horton. She said the district’s actions were “distracting and scaring our students and staff.”

Dermot Givens, an El Camino parent.

Parent Dermot Givens, an attorney whose son Damian got into the school through open enrollment, pointed out that his is one of the 8 percent of African-American families at the school. “It is not an all-white upper-class population,” Givens said, adding that his son is fluent in French, learning Mandarin Chinese and a member of the basketball team.

Marshall Mayotte, the school’s chief business officer, said the district’s report was a result of “sloppy work and false statements.” He pointed out that his name was mentioned 11 times for charges made on an employee business card and he was not at the restaurants that were named.

After the district voted to approve the latest notice to the school, Mayotte said, “We were caught off guard.” He said he didn’t have time to answer the summary of facts before the district made them public. The Los Angeles Daily News conducted an in-depth investigation of the school finances in May that also detailed expenses.

Tensions during the school board meeting grew so tense that board member Monica Garcia ordered: “OK, everybody breathe! Everybody breathe! There is a lot of tension and anxiety out there. What I hear is there is a lot people who support their school and want to see a solution and concern about some behavior came to light at some point. …  What I’m interested in hearing is a conversation of how to fix the issues.”

Scott Silverstein, a newly elected member of the El Camino school board and the parent of a recent graduate of the school, said, “We are more than happy to make the necessary changes.”

The schools are eligible for School Improvement Grants (SIG) money that can result in $2 million a year for five years if the school administrators decide to implement one of seven school models that will help improve their scores.

The issue was brought up at the first LA Unified School Board meeting of the school year on Tuesday. Board members also discussed whether they need to intervene with the five traditional schools that are run by Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (and are not charter schools), as well as the six other charter schools that they oversee in the district.

The surprise is that a few of them named on the list are notable and previously celebrated schools as far as past achievements, yet some of them have been identified as low performing since 2010.

The traditional district schools are:

• 107th Street Elementary
• Annalee Avenue Elementary
• Augustus F. Hawkins High School-A Critical Design and Gaming School
• Barton Hill Elementary
• Cabrillo Avenue Elementary
• Daniel Webster Middle
• Dr. Owen Lloyd Knox Elementary
• Edwin Markham Middle
• Florence Griffth Joyner Elementary
• George Washington Carver Middle
• George Washington Preparatory High
• Samuel Gompers Middle School
• Tom Bradley Global Awareness Magnet Elementary
• Westchester Enriched Sciences High School Magnets- Health/Sports/Medicin

The charter schools are:

• Alain Leroy Locke College Preparatory Academy High (Green Dot)
• Animo Phillis Wheatley Charter Middle (Green Dot)
• Los Angeles Leadership Academy High
• Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle (ICEF)
• North Valley Military Institute College Preparatory
• Wallis Annenberg High (Accelerated School Foundation)

The list from the California Department of Education only slightly differs with the low-achieving list from the CORE district ratings which also included Century Park and Hillcrest Drive elementary schools and David Starr Jordan and Dr. Maya Angelou Community high schools.

The list of 291 schools throughout the state of low-performing schools identify 20 in LA Unified, one in Los Angeles County Office of Education (Soledad Enrichment Charter High) and one in Long Beach (Jordan High). In Los Angeles County, there are 12 other school districts with schools named in the lowest 5 percent of state schools.

The state’s lowest 5 percent of schools was based on 2015 math and English assessment scores, graduation rates based on four years of data, the English learner indicator of the past two years, suspension rates over two years and college and career indicators.

Among the charter schools, the 3-year-old North Valley Military Institute is the only one of its kind in LA Unified and is championed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Wallis Annenberg High’s Accelerated School’s elementary school was named by TIME magazine as the “Elementary School of the Year” for its impressive approach to education, and has boasted years of 90-plus percent graduation rates.

Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle is getting a new building, and ICEF CEO Parker Hudnut said they have hired new experts in math that are joining the staff.

Among the traditional schools, the Augustus High School Critical Design and Gaming School has been noted for its innovation in computer science, while the successes at George Washington Preparatory High were chronicled in a movie starring Denzel Washington who played then-Principal George McKenna, who is now a school board member.

George McKenna

McKenna said he is unhappy with the low performance of a school where he gained his academic legacy, but said, “Our role is not to play ‘gotcha’ and I know some people have that perception. But if you have that perception you may think we’re in some way an intruder on someone else’s autonomy or freedom and they should be left alone. We need your help, we are the district and we have responsibility. If it’s our property, it’s our responsibility, it’s our kids. We have an obligation to insist and inform otherwise we are enabling or are complicit in negative outcomes and deficits.”

McKenna and other board members approved allowing the 14 traditional schools to apply for the SIG money, but they expressed concerns about how to help the charter schools that they were not voting on Tuesday with SIG applications. Those charter schools must apply on their own, and McKenna also wondered about the five Partnership schools that the district co-runs as part of the nonprofit started in 2008 by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Of the 18 Partnership schools they now run in LAUSD, five of them are on the district’s list of 14. Four of those five have been on the list since 2010, and have received extra money to help improve their test scores. Partnership’s CEO Joan Sullivan was unavailable to comment.

The money used to help the schools could be something that must sustain their progress, said board member Monica Ratliff. She said, “The schools begin to rely on the funding for the purchased positions, and then they lose those positions and it causes a lot of heartache on those campuses. If they bring up achievement levels maybe they do need those positions, and then suddenly those resources are not there anymore, and you’re out of luck.”

According to a national report when the schools were helped first in 2010, generally 69 percent of the schools helped for three years saw an increase in math, but 30 percent saw declines and 2 percent had no change.

School board President Steve Zimmer said he wanted to know for sure where money was spent to pinpoint interventions to see how they worked. He said he supported the Partnership schools and wanted to help.

“As far as charter schools, we feel these things shouldn’t happen,” Zimmer said about the list including independent charters. “We are granting the level of autonomy from the ed code that charter schools get and then results should follow them and not get deeper.”

Zimmer noted that the school board took a “leap of faith” in approving Green Dot charter renewals and said their two schools on this state list indicate “this should green-light more collaboration and I hope that it won’t be punitive, and would be a lot of engagement.”

George Bartleson, chief of School Choice at LA Unified, said the district has helped with partnered schools in the past, and there was a time when someone from the central office was assigned to schools to help.

David Tokofsky, a former LA Unified school board member who works for the principals union, pointed out that the school board and superintendent should have more scrutiny of the charter schools that will be getting the extra $2 million a year, especially if they continue to remain on the state’s improvement list.

LA Unified originally had 31 persistently low-achieving schools on the list. Eight schools are still receiving money from past SIG funding, according to a report by Frances Gipson, the chief academic officer. The district has to submit their applications for the schools to the state by Sept. 8.

Gipson said schools are already “discussing the selection of the intervention model that will best benefit their school culture.”

Zimmer asked for a breakdown of how many students are graduating with D grades and in what subjects.

“How many graduate with several D’s? How many of those D’s are in algebra?” asked Zimmer, who said he tries to remain data-driven in his decisions. “I see this and it causes me a lot of stress.”

He also wanted to know if the district is notifying local colleges and universities to let them know that the second-largest school district in the country is hiring academic counselors again.

“We know about the teacher shortage coming up, but I’m worried that we need to be working on hiring academic counselors,” Zimmer said. He pointed out that the district administrators should let the local colleges know of the district’s needs. “If they know we’re hiring, they will graduate them. This is a pretty market-driven system.”

Those academic counselors will also help students with their credit recovery program and push them toward graduation, he noted.

Although some of the academic scores came close to the district’s targeted goals, some were sorely lacking.

Cynthia Lim, the executive director of the Office of Data and Accountability.

For example, every high school student is supposed to have an Individualized Graduation Plan (IGP), but only 59 percent do, said Cynthia Lim, the executive director of the Office of Data and Accountability for LA Unified.

“We had a few glitches in the system,” Lim explained.

At one point Tuesday, Zimmer turned to the new student school board member, Karen Calderon, and asked if she had an Individualized Graduation Plan. No, she didn’t, but she said she has a good relationship with the counselors at her high school.

Also, about 38 percent of the district students taking the college-level Advanced Placement Exams received a 3 or higher, making them eligible to get college credit, Lim said. The target that the district is striving for next year is 40 percent.

“We have some improvement needed there too,” Lim reported.

The school district also wanted at least 48 percent of graduating seniors to pass the A-G class requirements with a C grade or better. They hit 42 percent.

“We have some work to do there,” Lim said. She also pointed out that the school board voted that students could get their high school diploma if they received a D-grade in the A-G classes, but “the goal is still to be college prepared and we want to cap it at a C. We are trying to improve that D to a C.”

Fellow board member Ref Rodriguez echoed some of Zimmer’s concerns and said, “We need to know how we got some of those scores up.” He added, “As far as the Individualized Graduation Plans, we need to do something about that.”

Zimmer pointed out that the district had laid off academic counselors in the past that were supposed to be helping students achieve success in graduating and steer them toward college. He said he fears that not enough academic counselors are graduating from local universities, and the district will suffer.

“We cut so much during the recession in non-roster classroom positions,” Zimmer said. “I know well that USC is only now restarting their counselor education program and we are two to three years out to getting those counselors.”

Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson said the district is working with Title 1 money to help schools that need extra resources. She said the district is also encouraging students to consider a counseling career.

In an interview, Gipson said, “What we’re doing puts a whole new perspective on what credit recovery is.”

She said the district is creating more pathways to accelerate student graduation and encouraging dual enrollment with community colleges. They are also working closely with USC, UCLA, Cal State and schools to share resources and produce the best graduates.

As far as the D grades, Gipson said, “a D-grade is not the goal. The goal is 100 percent graduation and high grades for all students. We will be increasing the rigor and calibrating the work we do in the system.”

Gipson said they want to encourage college-bound students from the early level of schooling. “You can imagine we’re pretty excited about what we’re doing and what can happen in every single grade level.”

She added, “The entire LAUSD family knows it starts in preschool. And we’re mapping those opportunities not just for the seniors who are getting ready to go to community college, but doing some design planning that takes them from preschool and graduation to high school and beyond.”

State Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson, left, LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King and LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer at Eagle Rock Elementary School to discuss new standardized test results.

LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer and other leaders called a press conference this morning at Eagle Rock Elementary School to tout the results of the newly released standardized test scores.

Scores in the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) went up both statewide and districtwide in the second year the Common Core-aligned tests were given. King was quick to point out that LA Unified’s gains were among the best of any large district.

“These represent some of the highest gains that were achieved among urban districts in California,” King said.

LA Unified’s score jumped six percentage points in the English test — from 33 percent to 39 percent — and three or four percentage points in the math test, from 25 to 28 or 29 percent. (There is a discrepancy between what the CDE website shows and LA Unified said the score was. Officially, LA Unified said the total was 28.696 percent.)

King also pointed out that nearly every important subgroup like English learners and students from economically challenged households also saw gains.

Statewide, students jumped five percentage points to 49 percent meeting or exceeding the English standard, while jumping four percentage points to 37 percent who met or exceeded the math standard.

Zimmer, who is running for reelection, said he does not put all his faith in test scores but was happy to brag about the results. The board president has received financial support and the endorsement of the LA teachers union, UTLA, which has a policy of downplaying the importance of standardized tests, in particular when they are used to judge the performance of teachers.

“Those of you who know me know that I don’t believe that test scores tell us everything. I don’t even believe that test scores always tell us the most important things. But they are an indicator of progress, and the scores that we are releasing today show that in almost every significant area this district continues to make progress,” Zimmer said.

Zimmer, King and Torlakson stayed away from some of less positive news from the test results, including that the achievement gaps between some minority groups and white students, and between students from economically challenged backgrounds and their wealthier peers, remained close to the same as last year. While minorities and subgroups showed improvements, so did white students and those not from wealthier backgrounds, so the gaps remained at close to the same levels.

“Yes, absolutely, we have a lot of work to do. Yes, unfortunately, we did not see the achievement gap narrow. It’s real and we have to redouble our efforts,” Torlakson said when asked by a reporter about the achievement gap. He then added that he is working to create a team on equity in education to focus on the achievement gap.

Zimmer said the new results should “supercharge our urgency around the achievement gap and take very, very clear steps in terms of our investments.”

When it came to the improvements that have occurred, Torlakson said not all the reasons are known, but he did credit the increased education budgets over the last few years from Gov. Jerry Brown as a key factor.

“Why did this occur? We don’t have all the answers to that question. There is research and further analysis of data to be done, but I believe that it is because we have set new, higher, rigorous standards, relevant standards to our students, and it is because we have had better budgets, so we have had the resources to make a difference,” Torlakson said.