School District Issues a Fact Sheet

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

      Locked in a contractural logjam with the Teachers  Union for months, the School District has issued a paper that it calls a fact sheet, offering its version of broken down negotiations.
      The two sides are scheduled to meet with a mediator on April 17.

      The Teachers Union, still seeking a contract for last school year, has turned down the District’s offer of “a more than  five percent”  salary increase because the offer included elimination of retiree health benefits for teachers hired after July 1.  Elimination of these benefits was first proposed by the District on Feb. 2.

 

Davies Gets His Answer Tomorrow

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Drama will be thick and irresistible tomorrow when the City Council sits down to choose the finalists for Police Chief.
     Too bad for the community that the undeniable theatrics, which will be lavishly draped over several hours of deliberations, won’t be televised. Or podcast. Or somehow trumpeted to a panting world.
     From an original field of sixty-six, six men and women are left standing. Only one candidate is a magnet, a lightning rod on two legs, attracting nearly all of the attention:
     Asst. Chief Hank Davies.
     The single surviving hometowner, he enters the first face-to-face round uniquely armed:
     Blessed and cursed, he possesses more advantages — and taller handicaps — than anyone in the fast draining pool.

Stark Warning for School Board Members

Ari L. NoonanSports

     For three School Board members, a drama that played out on Monday in a  South Bay courtroom may serve as a cautionary tale.  Hopefully, the sobering outcome will prod Stew Bubar, Dana Russell and Marla  Wolkowitz into doing the right thing.
     There are eerie parallels between what happened in Culver City and the twin filings against a retired Manhattan Beach school superintendent and a former Manhattan Beach School Board member.
     By some peopleÕs standards, not much money was involved in the case of the three Culver City Board members, a shade more than $60,000. 
`An assertion was made that the three Board members violated the state Government Code by obtaining an excessive amount of healthcare benefits.

Murder Rap Is Called an Oddity

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Passenger — Not Driver?—  Charged with Murder in Fatal Car Crash.
     “Strange, very strange,” one police officer said yesterday of the charges filed by the District Attorney’s Office. “It’s like man bites dog.”
     Law enforcement officials still were shaking their heads this morning. They were trying to rationalize the heavier charge against the passenger and the unusual disparity in the charges filed against the driver in last week’s school death tragedy.
     With the girlfriend driving and the boyfriend riding along, they were in the midst of feuding last Wednesday afternoon, police say, when their car allegedly ran down and killed a Culver City teacher and injured a group of students.

Passenger Is Charged With Murder

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Twisted oddly from the beginning, the case of last week’s spectacular car crash that killed a Turning Point School teacher took another peculiar turn when the passenger in the death car was charged with murder but the driver was not.
The driver, judged by the County District Attorney to be much less culpable, is facing a lighter charge.
     Nineteen-year-old Reynaldo Cruz of Los Angeles, the passenger, was charged with second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of fifteen years to life.
     The driver, Laura Samayoa, twenty, of Los Angeles, believed to be his girlfriend, also was charged with a felony. After at least one eyewitness said she fled following the crash, she was accused by the D.A. of leaving the scene of an accident in which there was a death.

A Time for Men To Be Manly

Ari L. NoonanSports

     If there is any validity to reincarnation, I would like to come back as Harvey Mansfield. Until recently, his conservative political credentials were compressed, quietly, inside his ankle-high reputation as a professor of government and political theorist at Harvard.
     This week, he is the Hottest Author in the Land. His new book “Manliness” (Yale), has feminists and their emasculated men pals in a titter.
     For those who appreciate bloodletting in the culture wars, one captivating round played out deliciously on Sunday afternoon on C-Span. When the Elmer Fudd of the feminist movement was mismatched against the cool Prof. Mansfield, the jousting unmasked the lady’s foam-filled agenda.
     She wanted to talk about sex. He insisted on being serious. She stomped her feet. She pushed her right hand through her overgrown hair and smirked.

Recovering Mentally from Tragedy

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     As the students of Turning Point School in the Hayden Tract start to recover from losing one of their teachers in a bizarre car crash, they will face a checkerboard of complicated psychological issues, a Westside therapist said Friday.
     The Turning Point case involves a combination of factors, both loss and trauma, which will make it more complex for people, Dr. Carol Mayhew of Brentwood told thefrontpageonline.com.
     When she leads a group in therapy, her message is that they will be experiencing a whole panoply of feelings about their loss, including anger and sorrow.
     Additionally, they may feel trauma, which would account for anger, fear, jumpiness. Some may experience flashbacks.

Was the Teacher Killing Deliberate?

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED


Ms. Samayoa                                Mr. Cruz


      On the day after a car ploughed into fifteen Culver City students on an outing and killed a young teacher shepherding them, police were looking into the possibility the crash may have been deliberate.
      A feuding young couple were at the controls of the car at the point of impact.
      “We don’t know yet if this was accidental,” Culver City Police Lt. Dean Williams said yesterday at a news conference. Directly addressing the media, he said, “We have many of the same questions that you do.”

      Police still were trying to piece together widely strewn, sometimes-conflicting parts of a bloody, chaotic scenario.

A Turning Point Family’s Love Story

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     The otherwise impenetrable wall of silence that the community of Turning Point School in the Hayden Tract imposed yesterday was breached briefly, fleetingly, a little after 8:30 in the sun-sprayed morning.
     Clasped hand in clasped hand, Clabe Hartley and his wife Thea, parents of a student, strode stolidly across the parking lot. Their eyes never adjusted their trajectory as they walked wordlessly through the huge entry-exit gateway — out into the rest of the world.
     For the longest time, the Hartleys were the only pedestrian sign of  parental life. They appeared at an hour when students, teachers and a smattering of families were mourning the senseless killing the day before of a teacher and a flamboyant assault on fifteen vulnerable students.