George Laase

Undefeated and tied atop the Ocean League, the baseball teams of Culver City High School (18-4, 8-0) and Santa Monica (18-10, 8-0), meet on Tuesday afternoon in a 3:15 showdown on the Culver High campus. After Culver Coach Rick Prieto won his18th straight league game,The Front Page spoke with him about the Centaurs’ much anticipated two-game series with Santa Monica.

In an onsite interview, Balfour-Beatty site supervisor Gary Nenadal, the man behind the machinery of the massive, summer-long renovation of Helms Field, said the construction team has enjoyed good co-operation from the School District, the sub-contractors and neighbors.

In a previous comment, Teachers Union President David Mielke rightly said Culver City USD teacher salaries are about 10 percent below the L.A. County median. He suggested negotiating a 2 percent annual increase for five years to reach the County median target. While giving his latest public update on School District/union negotiations, he finally acknowledged that the union’s goal...

The Culver City Federation of Teachers has called for negotiating a new raise in their District salary schedule so that members would end up earning the median salary of other L.A. County teachers in the next five years. If this is going to be a new, short-term salary goal for the Culver City USD, it makes me wonder whether...

In using our state Dept. of Finance’s data for the 46 unified school districts in Los Angeles County, it shows that by implementing Gov. Brown’s Local Control Fund Formula, Los Angeles County will lose over $11 billion dollars in state education funding.

Gov. Brown plans to shift significant amounts of state education funding from the more successful, more prosperous school districts to districts with large numbers of low-income students and English learners. His hope is that the districts with high-needs students eventually will do better under his newly weighted formula. But if he believes that spending more money on these students will lead to better educational outcomes, what about those students in districts that will have some of their funding siphoned off?

According to the state Dept. of Finance’s report, 19 of the 45 Los Angeles County unified school districts would be given more money each succeeding year under Gov. Brown’s proposed K-12 Local Control Funding Formula. When it is fully implemented, around 2020, the other 26 districts, including Culver City, will be receiving significantly less money in ADA funding had the system been left in place.

In his proposed revenue shifting plan, called the Local Control Funding Formula, Gov. Brown is not asking that our Culver City USD take a $5M hit in state funding all at once, in one year. His plan, incrementally, would increase the amount of funding taken annually from our District and transfer it to other districts. Our losses would happen slowly, over six years, the time it would take to implement his revenue-shifting plan.

In this concluding installment, Jerry Chabola, who retired last year as a teacher and the Athletic Director at Culver City High School, resumes talking about his thoughts on seeing that his hard work on renovation of Helms Field finally is coming to pass.

Jerry Chabola, who retired last year as a teacher and the Athletic Director at Culver City High School, resumes talking about his thoughts on seeing that his hard work on renovationb of Helms Field finally is coming to pass.