Culver City voters, your schools need your help.
Our schools get almost all of our funds from Sacramento. Unless you’ve been napping with Rip van Winkle, you know that the state has made unprecedented and damaging cuts to our schools.
Over the past three years, we’ve lost over $10 million in funding, 15 percent of our operating budget! And we’re not done yet; CCUSD must cut another $3 million before school starts next September.
As the President our Teachers Union and a fulltime teacher, I see the effects of these cuts every day. We’ve lost teachers, counselors and support staff. Kids are jammed into classrooms. If you stop by my room at at Culver City High School, No. 129, you will see 41 desks.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that by voting “yes” on Measure EE, the parcel tax, on the Nov. 3 ballot, you will help bring $1.3 million into our schools each year for the next five years.
It’s simple. If the state won’t fund our schools, we need to do it ourselves.
While you’re voting “yes” on EE, please consider voting for the candidates your teachers are supporting: Karlo Silbiger, Kathy Paspalis and Gary Abrams.
Karlo’s a teacher at a charter school in L.A.
Kathy is an activist parent at El Marino.
Gary, who is also a parent, volunteers daily (yes, daily) at Linwood E. Howe School.
On Election Day, you can help save our schools. Don’t let that opportunity pass you by. Vote.
David Mielke, President of the Culver City Federation of Teachers/AFT, may be contacted at dmielke@ca.rr.com
A Few Cents Make Perfect Sense
By Laura Chardiet
Twenty-six cents a day . . . $8 a month . . . $96 tax deductable dollars a year . . . to protect countless thousands in property value . . . your property value . . .
Go to any real estate page on the web. You will find a direct, indisputable correlation between property values and . . . ?
Schools.
The condition of the schools serving your attendance area raises and lowers property values like no other local variable except perhaps crime rates.
As Council PTA President, I can’t deny that I have a special interest in the passage of Measure EE. For me, it’s about Culver City’s schools and the children they serve.
As a Culver City property owner, it also is about real estate values.
As the President of USC stated recently, one of the few things harder than teaching reading is teaching the value of education to policy makers.
It is not news that Sacramento has cut funding for education. If the budget reductions are allowed to stand without local offsets, we can be sure that our schools will deteriorate and our property values will decline proportionally.
What Sacramento doesn’t understand is that declining property values result in lower tax revenues. And so begins a downward spiral. It’s a hard lesson for them.
For me, it’s a no brainer. A few cents make perfect sense.
Join me and vote “yes” on Measure EE.
Laura Chardiet, Culver City Council PTA President, may be contacted at laura.chardiet@lausd.net
