More than a third of the staff at Palisades Charter High School have the option to return to Los Angeles Unified School District this fall, but school leaders say they don’t think turnover will be that high. ‘I’m not worried,’ said Colleen McCarthy, the new human resources director. ‘I think people want to stay here. They love this school.’ LAUSD gives teachers, administrators and classified staff the option to take a five-year leave of absence to work at a charter school. At the end of the five years, they must decide whether to stay at the charter school or return to LAUSD. This is PaliHi’s fifth year as a fiscally independent charter school, meaning that the school receives funding directly from the state. Before that the school was a dependent charter school receiving funding from LAUSD. Until 2003, the school’s staff were considered employees of the district. Ninety-two of the school’s 235 employees were granted the five-year leave of absence to stay at the school. They will now have to decide by April 15 whether or not to return to LAUSD. A major concern among PaliHi’s 74 administrators and faculty and 18 classified employees is whether they will receive their lifetime retirement benefits from the district, McCarthy said. LAUSD has promised that after they retire, employees will have access to the same medical, dental and vision benefits they receive now. This health coverage is meant to supplement Medicare. LAUSD officials have yet to decide if they will give Pali employees lifetime retirement benefits after June 30, according to Amy Dresser-Held, the school’s executive director. LAUSD is reviewing the situation and will make a decision soon, said district spokeswoman Nadia Gonzalez. Because of the uncertainty, the PaliHi board of directors has set aside $1.5 million in a trust fund to offer lifetime retirement benefits to employees, said board chair Rene Rodman. ‘We want to ensure that they receive the benefits that they were promised,’ she said. ‘We’re managing the fund, and we know where the money is going.’ Obviously, the money is not enough, McCarthy said, but it’s a start for saving toward the future. Pali’s board currently purchases health benefits from the district and gives the district an additional $600,000 a year for retirement benefits. At this moment, the board does not know how the retirement money will be allocated to Pali employees. Dresser-Held said the district and PaliHi do not have a written agreement regarding the matter. School officials are working with the district to resolve this issue. As for the future, ‘Pali will either continue purchasing benefits through LAUSD if we have a clear agreement or will purchase them independently,’ Dresser-Held said. On February 26, the board will meet to discuss purchasing health benefits independently. The board will later vote whether to set aside the $600,000 for retirement in the newly created trust fund rather than giving it to LAUSD. Photography and yearbook teacher Rob Doucette, 61, said he had planned to retire in another year, but has chosen to retire this June while he is still considered an LAUSD employee. This will ensure that he receives his lifetime retirement benefits from the district. ‘It would have only been another year,’ Doucette said. ‘I don’t feel forced. It’s time.’ He has taught at Pali for 34 years and hopes to continue to work part-time at the school. McCarthy and Rodman said they understand why teachers who are close to retirement may decide to leave now rather than gamble with their retirement benefits. ‘It’s such a personal decision,’ Rodman said. ‘It depends on where they are in their career and their plans for the next three to five years. It’s hard to guess what will happen.’ Board vice chair James Paleno wonders whether LAUSD can even provide lifetime benefits because the district itself could be financially strapped in the future. McCarthy said she has heard that the money given to LAUSD for retirement, including the annual $600,000 from PaliHi, is being spent now for retirees. According to discussions she’s had with LAUSD, lifetime benefits are a $10-billion unfunded liability. The cost to fund those benefits is expected to increase from 4.1 percent to 20 percent of the district’s general fund annual budget in the next decade. ‘It’s a question of do you trust them?’ said Paleno, the boys basketball coach and special education teacher, who started working at the high school in 1981. He and Spanish teacher Ruth Mills, who taught at Pali from 1976 to 1982 and returned in 1996, plan to stay. They said they feel secure financially because the school board has set aside money for retirement benefits. They also agree with Pali’s educational mission. With fiscal independence, the school can directly spend money to improve the academic environment, Mills said. Officials have purchased more books, refurbished the library, hired additional counselors and installed bungalows for additional classroom space. If the school had remained financially attached to LAUSD, Mills doesn’t think those changes could have occurred. ‘I’ve been a big supporter of Pali going charter from the beginning,’ she said. Health teacher Susan Ackerman, who has taught at Pali for 10 years and is not close to retirement, has also chosen to stay. ‘To go where?’ she asked. ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would leave.’ Ackerman likes how the charter school gives teachers the opportunity to develop new educational programs. English teacher Dennis Danziger, however, is concerned about the vitality of the school and has decided to return to LAUSD. Pali has had three principals and two executive directors in the past five years, which is a sign of instability, he said. Danziger, who has taught at Pali for 12 years and is at least six years away from retirement, also thinks school leaders do not have a history of openness regarding the budget. He doesn’t trust them with his retirement benefits. In 2003-04 and 2004-05, Pali administrators failed to contribute money from employees’ checks to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System because of computer glitches. School officials put the money in a private bank account until the matter was resolved. Danziger said administrators did not inform teachers of this decision until a retiree asked why her contributions to CalSTRS were not made. Dresser-Held, who has headed the school for two years, said school leaders make decisions in a public forum and are always working to improve communication between teachers, parents and the community. Danziger and the other teachers who leave PaliHi will be assigned to a LAUSD school where there is an opening. Teachers can interview for open positions of their choice, but if a mutually agreeable spot is not found, the district will place the teacher, according to the United Teachers Los Angeles-LAUSD contact. In addition, the past five years teachers spent at Pali do not count toward their seniority status at LAUSD. Their seniority will be the same as when they left the district to work for the charter. This means they may have to teach a lower grade level. At this point, McCarthy hasn’t heard that many teachers are leaving. She estimates an eight to 15 percent turnover rate from this spring to next fall. In the U.S., schools typically have a 15 percent annual turnover rate, she said. Last year, Pali had a turnover rate of 10 percent for the entire staff. McCarthy plans to recruit at 15 job fairs and post openings on teacher employment Web sites. She hopes to hire experienced and new teachers. ‘I will be out early and be visible,’ she said.

The time has come for Dr. Susan Love to close up shop and move out of the Palisades. The pioneer breast cancer researcher, whose investigation into the causes of breast cancer, boosted by a recently awarded $1-million grant, is moving to larger digs in Santa Monica in March. ‘The ironic part is that in 1995, I relocated my research foundation from Santa Barbara to Pacific Palisades to be close to home,’ says Love, who has lived here for the past 25 years with her partner Dr. Helen Cooksey and their daughter Katie, now a sophomore at Swarthmore. So close, in fact, that Love has been commuting by bike to her office on Via de la Paz. ‘Now, we’ve been so successful we’ve outgrown our space.’ Celebrating her 60th birthday last week, Love retains the buoyancy of youth which accounts for her clear-eyed optimism in conquering breast cancer, tempered by 20 years of direct patient care, and for last dozen years a devotion to research. When in 1990 Love wrote her groundbreaking book ‘Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book,’ which offered women a complete guide to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, the state of the art in breast cancer therapy was mastectomy. ‘I liken it to the way doctors 40 years ago routinely recommended a hysterectomy if a woman had an irregular Pap smear.’ Her frustration with the lack of progress and new ideas in breast cancer research propelled Love to devote her energy not only to educating women with breast cancer, but also to raising awareness and funds for more research. ‘Increased funding for breast cancer really began in 1991,’ Love explains. ‘It was a pivotal time for a couple of reasons. After AIDS had become political, we started wondering Where’s the political move for breast cancer? ‘I remember I was out touring the country on my book tour. I was in Salt Lake City in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, and frankly looking for a laugh. So I said Maybe we should all march topless to the White House (Bush senior was president), and to my surprise all these women shouted, When do we leave? A nationwide advocacy campaign and lobbying paid off in an hundredfold increase in federal funding from $3 million to $300 million. The second big step in funding came from Revlon, thanks to the dogged work of Lilly Tartikoff, who with Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman created the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research program, and in 1994 launched the first Revlon Run/Walks for Women. Love believes that corporations’ reluctance to fund breast cancer research was dispelled with the success of Revlon. While there have been enormous increases in funding, Love regrets that ‘much of the money is not well spent. A lot is going to the same thing, and there is resistance to using women in studies. One researcher, who favors rats and mice, actually told me ‘But women are so messy.” Love set out to change the approach, and found herself swimming against the tide. ‘It’s unusual for a clinician to go back to research,’ she says. ‘It’s usually the other way around–from the bench to the bedside.’ Despite the steep learning curve, including how to write grants, Love has been successful in landing significant foundation money, particularly from the Avon Foundation that has been amenable to underwriting her studies on women. ‘Because Avon Cosmetics does no animal research–no rats, no mice–we could study the lining of the milk ducts, where all breast cancer starts,’ Love says Love believes that examining the ductile fluid will give researchers clues to identifying which women are at risk of developing breast cancer. In one study, Love is looking at how the breast works: hormone levels, cells, proteins, and their changes over time. A second study will try to explain why an early first pregnancy reduces the risk of breast cancer, and the most recent Avon grant will be used to test for risk. ‘We call it the Band-aid grant, which works in a similar way to a dip stick,’ Love says. ‘We really need a simple test that finds out which cells are pre-cancer.’ An adhesive strip containing five markers for risk is applied to the breast. You massage the breast to express some fluid and examine the color changes on the strip. ‘It won’t tell you if you have cancer; it will tell you that you are at higher risk.’ In the future, Love envisions injecting a low dose of chemo into the affected milk duct to eliminate pre-cancerous cells. All her energies are focused on her main objective: Moving from treating breast cancer to understanding breast cancer. ‘Every day women are being diagnosed and dying from breast cancer. We cure three-fourths of all breast cancer, but one-quarter of the women are still dying.’ ‘At some point we have to take a leap and test these new theories. I say to donors, we’re a high-risk fund. ‘I’ve found over my career there are two ways to get rid of disease,’ Love continues. ‘A slow way which is long-term research and a fast way, like putting a stent through an artery to reduce the risk of heart failure, while continuing to research prevention. You can save a lot of lives with the fast way, while you’re waiting for research.’ While Love and her team of four are moving to Santa Monica, where Susan will have a fifth-floor office with a view of the ocean, her ties to the Palisades remain. ‘We have a great group of women in the Palisades who have volunteered for many of our various studies. It really is a big sisterhood.’

While most kids head home at the end of the school day, nine Palisades Charter High School students often stayed until 9 p.m. this fall, studying subjects such as math, economics and literature. Last week, they were rewarded for their hard work when they won the Los Angeles Unified School District’s annual Academic Decathlon. The contest took place on January 26 and February 2 at Bravo Magnet High School and UCLA. The PaliHi team competed against more than 550 students representing 64 schools, winning for the first time since 1990. ‘I had never won anything before,’ senior Weylin Wagnon told the Palisadian-Post. ‘It felt good’ I worked really hard, and I didn’t know it would pay off as well as it did.’ The students were honored for their achievement during a dinner at the L.A. Convention Center on February 5. They will now compete at the state tournament March 8 to 10 in Sacramento. If they win, they will head to the nationals in Garden Grove. ‘They are so disciplined and dedicated,’ said Chris Lee, a social studies teacher who coached the team with math teacher Minh Ha Ngo. ‘They are supportive of each other and goal-oriented. I’m so proud of them.’ The team includes Wagnon, Kevin Gould, Sun Jong Ji, Thomas Krane, Jamie Lopez, Marvin Lopez, Preston Mendell, Hannah Moulthrop and Karl Niu. The students competed in 10 events. They took written exams in math, economics, science, literature, art and music. They also participated in the Super Quiz and Super Quiz Relay, a written and oral exam that tests students on a different academic topic every year. This year’s subject was the Civil War. In addition, each competitor wrote an essay and gave a speech. The judges interviewed them about their goals, accomplishments and extracurricular activities. The students were divided into groups of three to compete in three divisions based on their grade point average: Honors (3.75 to 4.0), Scholastic (3.0 to 3.74) and Varsity. The top two students in each division had their scores count toward the overall team score, which for Pali was 50,122 points out of a possible 60,000. Although there were separate divisions, the students were judged by the same standards. ‘I like that everyone is on a level playing field,’ said Wagnon, who competed for the first time. ‘The subjects are different every year, so how hard we work at it determines how well we do.’ Gould and Wagnon had the second-highest scores of all competitors in the Honors and Varsity divisions, respectively. Niu and Mendell were the third-highest scorers of all students in Honors and Varsity, respectively. Krane and Wagnon earned perfect scores in the Super Quiz Relay. Senior Jamie Lopez received a $100 award as one of L.A. city’s most inspirational participants. Her coaches nominated her based on input from the team. ‘Jamie worked extremely hard and pushed herself,’ Lee said. ‘Her efforts really inspired the others.’ The students were chosen for the team based on teacher recommendations and test scores. About 50 students tried out last May; 12 students were chosen to prepare for the contest and from that group, nine were selected to compete. The team began preparing in July, meeting two days a week. In the fall, the students started studying at 12:30 p.m. and stayed on campus until 7 to 9 p.m. They received an elective credit for their participation. A number of parents and teachers helped. English teacher Rose Gilbert, who is 89 and still in the classroom, coached the students in speech, and six of them received gold medals. Trisha Murray, a doctor and Kevin Gould’s mom, taught the team about infectious diseases ‘ a topic that would be on the science test. The students also scrimmaged against other high schools. Some of the team members say the competition exposed them to career possibilities. Wagnon, 17, enjoyed learning about infectious diseases and is now interested in a career in medicine. He plans to attend a UC school. Gould, also 17, discovered a passion for economics and is considering studying the subject at Columbia University in New York this fall. Senior Jamie Lopez, 17, never imagined that she would develop such close bonds with her teammates. They spent so much time together ‘we are like a family,’ she said. Gould agreed. ‘I love the camaraderie of the team. We study and work hard, but we also tell jokes and have a great time.’

After 38 years doing business in Pacific Palisades and the last 22 years at 874 Via de la Paz, Carpets West owner Bob Byrne has retired. ‘It was just time,’ Byrne, 65, told the Palisadian-Post on Tuesday. ‘I don’t want to kill myself any more.’ He figured out that after working every Saturday for 38 years, he had added 5.4 work years to his life. ‘I didn’t tell everybody I was retiring,’ he said. ‘I’m kind of shy that way. The funny part is, I wrote more business the first week of February than all of January.’ He was surprised that so many people would give him business when he warned them he was retiring. ‘It made me feel really good that they had that kind of faith in me,’ Byrne said. Byrne, who lives in Marina del Rey, plans to travel, play golf and still do some business for people he’s known for a long time. His daughter Brenna, who attended Corpus Christi School, received her master’s degree from the University of Maine and now lives in Maine. He plans to visit her more frequently. ‘I appreciate all the business the people of the Palisades gave me, so that she could have that opportunity.’ Landlord Don Hecker praised Byrne as a businessman who ‘was always early with his rent. He was a superb tenant and a model human being–a super nice guy.’ ‘He loved his customers,’ said Richard Klein, who owns the adjacent Chefmakers store. Hecker said that Byrne had spoken to him about retirement in October, but didn’t make the decision until January. Once he decided there was no hesitation. On Friday, February 1, there was merchandise in the store and the following Monday the store was empty. Meanwhile, Hecker has already found a new tenant: Paul Buchanan, who will open a carpet store in the same location with his daughter, Claire. Buchanan, who is from England, spent 15 years as a carpet apprentice. ‘I’m excited that he’s going to be selling a product that he knows intimately,’ Hecker said. The new owner has been a carpet manufacturer representative for nine years, which is how he met Byrne. When Buchanan learned that Byrne was retiring, he decided to take the opportunity and open a store. ‘I’ll be taking care of the day-to-day operations, but my daughter will be running the store,’ Buchanan said. ‘She will be the main person selling the carpet. She has some fresh ideas from Europe and we’re going to combine my experience with her flair.’ After redecorating the store, the Buchanans plan to open the second week in March. ‘As a landlord, I’m very excited about the combination of experience and fresh new ideas coming to the Palisades,’ Hecker said about his new tenants. Byrne can be reached at (310) 454-0697 or (310) 301-2445. He warns callers that they have to let it ring.