George Laase

In the First Interim Report that will be presented to the School Board at tonight's 7 o’clock meeting in the District Office, there is an explanation in the Executive Summary about a teacher-only reimbursement of one of the nine previously taken furlough days.

I am not so sure whether the School Board members clearly understood just how generous they were being when they agreed to give the teachers a firm 1 percent raise, if Prop. 30 passed last month. Its passage meant the teachers would receive about a $260K (1 percent of $26.1M). Board members didn't know then, nor do they know now, just how much the School District will be receiving under Prop. 30.

Once again California voters have turned away another initiative backed by an ultra-rich family.

Re “Not Everyone at City Hall Is Broke. Fire Dept. Says Thanks a Million and a Half”

Whether the Parents Union, formally United Parents of Culver City, will advocate for all students or end up just advocating for their students is yet to be seen. But there is a group of students whose parents seem almost powerless and disconnected from the local school community. Permit students. Although many parents are quite happy to have their children attend our schools, they have little or no say in how the ADA (Average Daily Attendance) funding brought into our District by their children is being spent. They cannot effect change at the ballot box because they vote in their home districts. These parents should be eager to join the UPCC and have a larger voice.

I'm afraid the public may never know the real reason why Culver Park High School, our successful, state-recognized continuation high school, is being driven from its quiet, tree-lined home on Berryman Avenue and onto the back corner of some parking lot behind Farragut Elementary School.

It seems Gov. Brown and our state Legislature just want more of our hard-earned money so they can continue putting off making the tough budgetary decisions they were elected to make.

The $96 parcel tax passed by local voters is going to be coming up for renewal in 2014. Back in 2009, the School Board-appointed Parcel Tax Committee presented voters with a purposely vague, non-prioritized list suggesting where the funds were going to be spent. Yet, after its passage, the community found out that 82 percent ($920K) of the $1.12M funding raised was going to pay for teacher salaries in the Advanced Math & Science programs. Little was going to impact the general student population, if any. Surprisingly, the elementary schools’ libraries, one of the top priorities on a previous community survey, only received $8,525, a mere three-quarters of one percent of the $1.12M.

I noticed in one of the Fiesta La Ballona announcements that our local Parents-Teacher Assn. (PTA) and the newly-formed United Parents of Culver City (UPCC) are going to compete in a tug-of-war. I could not help but think that this could foreshadow an upcoming power struggle between the two local organizations: The 115-year-old PTA, with its locally organized school units and lobbyists at both the state and national levels, and the new local upstart UPCC, which will advocate for students at the local district level.

Regarding the most recent developments surrounding the transfer of the Culver Park High School campus: