Canter Addresses School Bond, Parent Concerns at Paul Revere

The audience was noisy and at times contentious as LAUSD School Board President Marlene Canter addressed the monthly PRIDE and PTSA meeting at Paul Revere Charter Middle School last Wednesday morning. The meeting began calmly as Canter urged parents to vote for the $3.985-billion Measure Y in the November 8 election. Part of the money would be used to build new schools and part for renovation of old schools. ‘This area has the least amount of schools being built, but this is the area where the highest concentration of people vote,’ Canter said about her campaign stop. Canter explained that the BB bond (which passed in 1997 and provided $2.4 billion in bonds), didn’t cover all proposed building and maintenance projects because the amount needed wasn’t estimated correctly. ‘They had the wrong people building them and they had to reallocate,’ she said. ‘They really screwed it up.’ According to Canter, the District has hired a new chief facilities executive, Jim O’Connell, who is making sure things are being done right. The tone of the meeting became more confrontational when Canter said that Paul Revere had benefited from BB. The parents wanted to know how, because it wasn’t apparent. She told them that since it was a middle school and they were there only three years they wouldn’t have seen the improvements. Many parents disputed that, saying they had more than one child and had been at the school during the BB expenditures. Canter promised to get a list of the projects that had been completed at Revere. She also noted that parents at all LAUSD schools say ‘It’s not enough and we’re not satisfied.’ ‘By 2015, the District would like all children who want to be able to go to neighborhood schools to do so,’ Canter said. ‘We hope to bring kids back to public schools. By building more schools the District could accomplish that.’ A parent asked, ‘What would Paul Revere get from measure Y?’ ‘It’s unclear exactly what they would get because the District has to look out for all of its schools,’ Canter said. Although the Revere campus is beautifully landscaped, a slide show of maintenance problems was played for Canter and Diane Elander, co-chair for PRIDE, explained: ‘When constituents walk into a school and see all the construction and maintenance that needs to be done and hasn’t, then it’s hard to get people to vote for more money for another bond issue.’ Two years ago, when leaks were discovered in the breezeway overhangs, the plaster was stripped to investigate further. The moisture in the wood had caused dry rot. A year later it was discovered that other overhangs had the same problem. Currently, there are three large overhangs with exposed wood and wires waiting for repair. From LAUSD maintenance records it appears that the last time any of the buildings were painted was six years ago. ‘We would paint it ourselves, but we can’t because the District won’t let us,’ one parent pointed out. ‘We frequently find, in dealing with the District, that there’s incompetence,’ said Jill Frank, who has an eighth grader at the school. ‘It’s a bureaucracy with people who write us memos and tell us why things can’t get done.’ Elander added, ‘There’s been garbage and old classroom equipment just thrown in a pile in the middle of the campus, and after four years, it’s still sitting there. There are holes in buildings, falling ceiling tiles and windows that haven’t been repaired. It’s embarrassing to take people on a tour and ask them to come here when the property looks like that.’ Canter listened and responded: ‘Bruce Kendall, deputy chief facility executive for existing facilities at LAUSD, will come here and walk with you. We’ll see what you’ve got and what you need and how we can get it done. If the District can’t pay for it, we’ll see where we can get the funds to get it done.’ Principal Art Copper added a plea to Canter: ‘We’re a California Distinguished School. We have excellent teachers. Our students are some of the brightest in the state. We’d like to have a school that’s a visible showcase as well.’ Last year, PRIDE hired a seventh grade English teacher, which reduced class sizes to under 27 in seventh grade. The state already mandates a class size of under 26 for eighth grade English. This year, with enrollment down by 136 students, the District said Revere would have to let three teachers go. In response, Copper was able to get a waiver to retain one teacher, and parents raised money to help pay salaries for the other two teachers in order to keep smaller academic classes. Revere is considered a desegregated/receiver school, and those schools are told they should have an average of 37.5 students for each teacher for an academic class. Canter was asked why the District pays for a lower student/teacher ratio in schools designated PBHAO (predominately black, Hispanic, Asian and others, which is 76 percent of the District). That average class size is 32. Canter said that PBHAO was started by a federal mandate to stop racial isolation. Another parent pointed out that if kids live in a community that is all Korean, for example, and the District wants them to go to their community school, then by definition it’s racially isolated and the District still pays for a lower class size. Canter said that class-size reduction is a high priority for the school board. Other parents said it seemed as if Revere parents were discriminated against, and they wondered why the minorities at Paul Revere don’t receive the same treatment as the minorities at schools labeled PBHAO. Amy Dresser Held, Canter’s director of policy, pointed out that Paul Revere has a block grant that they can use to fund additional teachers’ salaries. The state funds charter schools through a general-purpose block grant and a categorical block grant. Fiscally independent charter schools like Palisades High receive both funds directly from the state. Dependent charters like Revere and the three Palisades elementary schools basically get the money the District decides to allocate. Parents battled hard four years ago to make the District give the school the categorical block grant directly, although the District still takes an administrative fee. The problem with funding teachers out of the categorical block grant is that the amount given to a school changes every year. Currently, the block grant and donations from parent groups help fund part of the school nurse and psychologist, plus a mandated attendance clerk, technical support for computers, substitute days, seven auxiliary periods (which helps to reduce class size), a dean of discipline and now part of the salaries for two teachers. At the meeting with Canter, parents responded by pointing out that many of the PBHAO schools also receive Title I funds, which Paul Revere does not receive. At that point the room was so noisy that Canter complained, ‘The way you are all communicating is not going to get anything accomplished.’ Eileen Savage, a parent, once again raised the question about how different schools are allowed to have different class sizes depending on their demographics. As Canter’s time was limited, she promised to talk about that issue with parents at a later time.