Half-Day Culver Park Forced to Submit to a Full-Day Kindergarten

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

Digging for sunshine and for answers behind Culver Park High School’s forced evacuation from its historic home in Sunkist Park, sharing a campus with El Marino Language School:

It is not as if civic leaders rang bells and ordered a celebratory parade starring blaring marching bands and fancy-stepping drum majorettes to flood the streets of Culver City to spread the good news on the day the School Board overwhelmingly voted to dump the continuation school from its home on the verdant grounds of El Marino, into a parking lot.

The Shame of Culver City

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

It is appropriate that on one of the happiest mornings in modern Culver City times – the double-tiered arrival of the train, at 9 a.m. and at 12 noon – we remember, sadly, the least among us.

My candidate: The wretchedly unlucky students of Culver Park High School.

Where’s My Hoodie?

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

While hordes of the hoodie-sporting Easily Bamboozled roam the country like the savage Indians of two and three centuries ago before flying off to the Vatican to get Trayvon canonized, for us grownups, four related pieces of business are on today’s agenda.

Where Is El Marino? Underground, Only Open After Midnight?

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

Summoning a maximum amount of meticulous memory, even if my union membership hinged on it, I cannot remember what the color was of my first wife’s hair. We lived together close to an hour. But I have an excuse. A nice person in eight out of 10 ways – the other two were painful zingers – she covered her hair every day. Furthermore, we lived 75 miles from my office. Who notices hair when you are concentrating on 150 miles of freeway five days a week? I think she worked weekends. Or she should have.

The Ache of the Moment Will Not Die

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

Turns out that when the five members of the School Board sat there flat-faced last night when Supt. Patti Jaffe declared her resignation, it was the second time they were hearing the news.

West L.A. College Calls Him Mr. President

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

While we share financial difficulties with all California agencies and educational institutions, West is also flowering with the completion of some long-awaited facilities that will cement the college as a fully developed institution of higher education. When students see that they have a proper college environment they are much more likely to believe that they are deserving, and are much more likely to be successful as college students. Students are also much more likely to use this environment to connect with the excellent faculty who will engage them and fire them up to become self-directed learners and active citizens. These are both my dreams and my goals for students at West. Nabil S. Abu-Ghazaleh, President, West Los Angeles College