[Editor’s Note: In the wake of a major public school policy change in Los Angeles, community/schools activist Bonnie Wacker, a parent, has busily been coordinating responses from throughout the Culver City Unified School District. Mrs. Wacker is owner/director of My Friends’ Montessori Preschool Coop, president of Panther Partners at the Culver City Middle School and co-chair of the Farragut Elementary School Art Committee.]
I believe the recent announcement by the Los Angeles Unified School District that it no longer will be accepting out-of-city permits will severely impact Culver City schools.
There is a way that Culver City residents can fundraise for our kids without donating any money.
Register your Vons/Pavilions/Safeway grocery card numbers on Escrip.com and designate the Culver City Middle School.
The Middle School will receive a percentage of the purchases every time a customer swipes his or her card, and there is no cost to the customer.
Albertsons.com and Ralphs.com have similar programs.
If you do your shopping at www.shoptoearn.net/ccmsshops, up to 30 percent can be saved on your purchases at.
Click on the Culver City Middle School portal, and the school will receive between 5 percent and 15 percent of your purchases.
It is easy, it saves you money, and helps our kids.
I have included a commentary by Alan Elmont (parent and longtime schools activist).
From: Ari Noonan
To: Bonnie Wacker
Sent: Mon, March 15, 2010 8:09:03 AM
Subject: Bonnie: Thanks very much, but could you pls send in Microsoft Word instead of zip. Thanks, ari noonan
On Mar 13, 2010, at 3:37 PM, Bonnie Wacker wrote:
—– Forwarded Message —-
From: Alan Elmont To: CulverCityMiddleSchool@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sat, March 13, 2010 2:51:55 PM Subject: RE: [CulverCityMiddleSchool] article/LAUSD permit change link
The decision by LAUSD was not unexpected, and it has been has been anticipated with baited breath for years.
The Inglewood District instituted a similar policy a few years ago.
Pointing out the hardships to districts like ours, where LAUSD students no longer will attend will be countered by the argument that in the past it was a hardship to LAUSD to lose so many students with too few permitted back in.
Whose hardship wins?
Focus should be more on the hardship to the students and families.
In Culver City, we receive about $5200 per year per ADA = average daily attendance, not quite the same number as registered students.
This is down from what we should be getting, which I believe is closer to $6000.
We are projected to lose about $27 million in funding over three years from Sacramento, underfunding what is guaranteed by Prop. 98.
We currently have over 1,000 students on permit.
If we lost those students, we would lose about $5 million per year in existing ADA.
Culver City would get a year to adjust, as it is allowed to use this year’s ADA count next year if the actual count is lower next year, which it would be.
But consider that if there is an average of 30 students per class, we would lose those classes and 33 teachers.
If the average loaded cost of a teacher is $65,000 per year, that’s only about $1.1 million in reduced costs.
We likely would lose some (teachers’) aids and support staff to bring the reduction to close to $2 million.
That would leave another $3 million to cut after the new $2 million to be cut this year and the $6 million cut in recent years.
With about 88 percent of the budget going to personnel currently and teachers representing the bulk of personnel expenditures, no matter how many “other” positions are cut, the number of teachers would have to be reduced even further.
Money from Measure EE, the parcel tax passed in November, will kick in for the 2010-2011 budget. But that is only a bit over $1 million.
In 1992 when our eldest daughter entered kindergarten, there were fewer than 5000 students in the Culver City School District.
Class sizes in K-12 were between 30-35, and fewer programs were offered.
Scholars and AP classes were fewer and more limited. That also was the year El Marino was “re”opened as the language immersion school.
We had one less elementary school before that, I believe.
Our administration was somewhat smaller also, but I would need to research how much smaller.
Today, however, there are many more state and federal mandates that must be met, and much more testing that has to be conducted, scored and reported.
Given the same structure, we still would need more employees than back then just to handle the paperwork, never mind educating our students.
Clearly, the problem is exacerbated by LAUSD’s new policy.
But the solution is getting fully funded by Sacramento and fully funded by the federal government from its mandates, specifically Special Education, which never has been fully funded. It costs our District around $4 million per year that should be provided by the Feds.
I’ve heard that currently Sacramento budgets about $12,000 per student per year (this might be too high, but it remains higher than CCUSD gets), but it goes first to the state Office of Education,then to the L.A. County Office of Education and finally to us.
Not to make bad things worse, but in a mere 15 years, 2025, slightly over $1 million that CCUSD receives from the City Redevelopment Agency will go away completely.
Yeah, it is 15 years away, but it will start to impact the District budget three years earlier, or in the senior year of those with children in kindergarten today.
Mrs. Wacker may be contacted at bonniewacker@yahoo.com
Mr. Elmont may be contacted at aelmont@ca.rr.com
