Winners Will Get $2,000 From Charter Foundation

Four individual teachers and a teaching team have each been selected to receive a $2,000 Lori Petrick Educator Award from the Palisades Charter Schools Foundation. The award was established in 2003 to honor the late, much-beloved second grade teacher at Palisades Charter Elementary. This year’s winners are Jeff Lantos (Marquez Elementary), Marlene Morris (Canyon School), Charlena TerVeer and Kathie Yonemura (team teachers at Canyon), Shari Laham (Kenter Elementary) and Larry Newman (music teacher at Kenter, Marquez, Palisades Elementary and Topanga Elementary). The awards ($10,000 total) are underwritten by the Boone Foundation, and will be presented at a private home in Pacific Palisades on May 20 at 2 p.m. According to Charter Foundation member Paula Leonhauser, the award process was broadened this year in order to reach more nominees and honor more individuals who are achieving excellence in education within the Palisades Charter Complex. “Teachers, teams, departments, administrators, counselors, etc. who have been part of the Palisades Complex of schools for five or more years are eligible,” Leonhauser said. The Lori Petrick Award was first given in June 2003 to Bud Petrick, Lori’s husband. A year later, the honor went to former Palisades High principal Merle Price, who played a leading role in gaining charter status for all five Palisades schools. Last year, after gaining feedback from the school community and parents, the Foundation decided to expand the award by giving out five grants. Individuals interested in applying for the award were asked to either submit a 10-minute videotape or a 2,000-word essay. A panel of judges then observed each instructor in the classroom. “We received no applications from Paul Revere or Palisades High,” Leonhauser said. “There are many outstanding teachers at both schools and we feel perhaps they didn’t apply because the process is new. Next year we expect many more applicants.” The Boone Foundation is a philanthropic group whose mission is to support “passionate people who provide excellent programs to youth.” The family foundation has members residing in the Palisades and attending local schools. “After attending a Foundation board meeting, the family chose to underwrite the Petrick Awards as a show of support for our work to recognize community excellence in public school education,” Leonhauser said. The Palisadian-Post will profile each of this year’s winners, beginning with JEFF LANTOS, a well-known fifth-grade teacher at Marquez Elementary, where he has taught for 11 years. Lantos was a history major at Brown University and worked as a freelance journalist for Movieline magazine and the L.A. Times before entering the teaching profession in 1987. In the mid-1970s, he took a musical theater workshop in New York run by legendary conductor Lehman Engel. He later received a fellowship to the American Film Institute and then went back to school to get his teaching credential. ‘Teaching is a great job for someone with a liberal arts education–you put everything to use and are never bored,’ said Lantos, who has continually searched for creative ways of teaching basic classroom subjects like history, math and literature through the arts. He makes history come alive by having students perform musicals he has written with jazz musician Bill Augustine that deal with historical events like the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 (‘Carry On’), the Constitutional Convention (‘Miracle in Philadelphia’), the Industrial Revolution (“Water and Power”) and the Louisiana Purchase (‘Hello Louisiana’). He has also written a children’s history book entitled ‘My Adventures with John Smith.” “Ask any fifth grader who’s not in my class what they think of history,” Lantos said. “They’ll tell you it’s boring. But there is a palpable change in the mood of the class when you don’t just tell them you’re going to learn history, but you tell them we’re going to sing a song or we’re going to put on a play. Then they get excited about learning.” Using this teaching philosophy, Lantos leads the school’s fifth graders in three musical productions each year, all of them performed in public. The Lori Petrick Award judges commented: ‘Jeff Lantos deserves a 10++ in best practices in education (10 is the highest score). He uses a strategy called ‘No Talk, No Chalk’ which allows the kids to ‘own’ the material. This is an excellent program with a clear and unique presentation of American history. His methods seem truly exceptional and innovative.’

“Education is my mother and my father.” This African saying reveals the strength and suffering of an estimated 20,000 young boys driven from their homes in southern Sudan, Africa, in the late 1980s, during the country’s violent civil war. Separated from their parents’many of whom were killed’and suffering from thirst and hunger, they walked barefoot across 1,000 miles to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. They became known as the “Lost Boys,” and 3,800 of them were eventually relocated to the United States through the efforts of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Three of those boys’now in their mid-20s’have told their story in a book entitled “They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky.” Living near San Diego, they are pursuing their dreams of getting an education’a way to reconstruct their identities. One of the authors, Alephonsion Deng, spoke about his journey and assimilation in the U.S. at Palisades Charter High School on March 29. His visit was organized by Human Rights Watch Student Task Force representatives from PaliHi as part of their efforts to further understand the ongoing conflict in Sudan’currently in the Darfur region of western Sudan. “I was used to a life of escaping bullets and taking care of myself,” Deng told the large crowd of students and teachers who gathered to hear him speak in Mercer Hall. He was only 7 years old in 1989 when northern government troops attacked his village and he began his journey across the war-ravaged country. He walked for five years, stopping at refugee camps, before finally reaching a camp in Kenya where he lived for nearly a decade on a half cup of cornmeal a day. “It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to keep me from dying and starving to death,” he said of the meager portion. Deng told of an earlier time in a camp when he did think he was going to starve to death. He saw a woman preparing some grain and, when she wouldn’t let him have any, he began to pick up the pieces that had fallen into the fire'”like a chicken on the floor,” he said. She kicked the granules out of his hand and asked him questions like where his parents were, which he could not answer. He understood that the woman’s own children had died. “War doesn’t have any boundaries between who’s a child and who’s an adult,” Deng said. “This war is taking everybody.” When one student asked how he dealt with the everyday pain of walking without food or water, Deng said he had to get used to it. “I didn’t want to lag behind because some of the boys left behind were left to die.” According to the book, half of them did die before the others reached the Kenyan refugee camp. Many of their sisters were sold into slavery and taken to northern Sudan. Deng said the UN aid workers would follow them to camps and give them food, which is how some of them survived. But he believes that what really kept him going was the basic education he received in the Kenyan refugee camp, where he started studying English. After a long application and interview process, he was chosen, along with his brother and cousins, to come to the United States. They arrived in San Diego in 2001. “It was frustrating for them that first year,” said Judy Bernstein, chair of the advisory committee of the San Diego International Rescue Committee and co-founder of the IRC Lost Boys Education Fund, who mentored Deng as well as his brother and cousins. “The hard part was assimilation and learning the [American] ways.” Deng said that in his first job in the States, as a bag boy at Ralphs, “customers would get upset because I put the meat together with the soap.” He explained how, even though he could move quickly in Sudan when he needed to go from one camp to another or defend himself, “I couldn’t move very fast in an American, modern-day grocery store.” He found that speaking about and writing his story helped him mentally and emotionally. “I think it is important for my self-esteem to be able to tell the stories,” Deng told the Palisadian-Post. “I think if I’m helping myself, than I’m helping other people.” Bernstein, who assisted the three young men in developing their stories and structuring the book, agreed. “Most of our [U.S.] veterans keep it inside,” she said. She added, “I thought their writing was exceptional’it had a lyrical quality.” The book was published in May 2005 by Public Affairs. Deng currently attends San Diego City College and works in the Medical Records Department at Kaiser Permanente Hospital. “I take the challenges day by day,” Deng said, adding that the hardest thing for him now is adjusting to having a schedule’getting up and going to school. In Sudan, his life was precarious, and he continually had to move from place to place. He recently took a pantomime class, another artistic form of self-expression that he said helped him “get back to what it was like when I was a kid.” Deng said that every time he speaks to an audience about his experiences in Sudan, “it feels different.” But the message is the same: to spread peace. “Peace has never existed in my world,” he told a group of Student Task Force representative who gathered around him after his talk. “We should take our peace [here] and place it over there.” But the war in Darfur, Sudan is complicated. Unlike the north v. south/Arabs v. blacks/Muslims v. Christians conflict of which Deng is a victim, the conflict in Darfur pits Muslims against Muslims. The enemy is the Sudanese government, which has backed Janjaweed militia troops that are attacking and killing civilians. More than two million people have been displaced and are living in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad, which borders Darfur to the west. When one student asked if Deng feels angry towards other governments that are not doing anything to help the people of Sudan, he replied, “I feel angry towards my own government.” Deng admitted that while he likes to read the newspaper, he does not like to read the articles about the war in Iraq or the few that appear about the conflict in Darfur, which the United States has labeled a genocide. “It’s the political perspective. I don’t think they really know what is the bottom line,” he said, referring to how the war is affecting civilians, especially the women and the children. “All I know is we are the ones who get caught in between.”

For Easter, ‘Momma’ Reiner has prepared some special treats. Which means that for weeks now, she and her three helpers have been busy in the commercial kitchen she leases on Pico Blvd. turning out confections, including chocolate-covered marshmallows, as well as semisweet and white chocolate fudge. Reiner’s delicacies, which are individually packed in powder blue tins with brown ribbon for the holiday season, are available in half a dozen stores, including Black Ink at 873 Swarthmore. “I always recommend that people store their fudge in the refrigerator if they like more firm fudge or in a cool, dry place if they prefer it soft,” Reiner said. “Fudge can be frozen for up to three months. I put the fudge in a Ziploc bag inside the freezer.” Kimberly Reiner, a former attorney, has come a long way in the two years since she started her candy business in her Palisades home, when she would spend hours in her kitchen dipping a long spoon into a large pot of hot fudge and dropping spoonfuls onto sheets of wax paper. Row upon row, column after column, the treats accumulated on the counter, each made with the artful swirl of Reiner’s hand. “I like the dipping part,” Reiner said. Up until 2004, Reiner had been making the candy mostly for family and friends. She started cooking when she was about 5 years old’first with her mother, then with her own children. It was at the suggestion of her friend and neighbor, Palisadian business owner Patti Black, that Reiner began selling her homemade treats, which she now does seasonally. “Patti inspired me [to sell],”Reiner said. “Kimberly’s been giving [the fudge] to me every Christmas and I’ve been telling her we should sell it,” said Black, who’s been in the customized stationery business since 1998. “It’s selling great. People come in every day for samples [available at the counter].” Reiner and Black were neighbors in the Las Casas/Grenola neighborhood, where Reiner still lives with her husband, Steve, and sons, Alex, 7, and Emmett, 3. Reiner, a graduate of Pepperdine Law School, worked for five years as an immigration attorney in Los Angeles and Houston, Texas, where she and her husband moved after marrying in 1997. Originally from Beverly Hills, Reiner put her law career on hold when Alex was born. Her Texas friends gave her the name ‘Momma’ Reiner because she was the first among them to have a baby. When her husband’s job brought them them back to L.A. in late 1999, the same friends presented her with a white apron with the nickname embroidered on it. Even when Reiner was working as an attorney, she always made fudge for the holidays. “I think it brings back [childhood] memories.” She believes that the family fudge-making tradition began with her maternal grandmother, who used to make it with her daughter (Reiner’s mother, Terri Aidikoff). “I always knew I wanted to start a business,” Reiner said about the evolution of her “cottage industry.” While she won’t reveal the “secret recipe,” Reiner does say that the fudge has to boil at a high temperature and has to be the proper consistency before it’s shaped into pieces and set out to dry. Reiner announced this week that her company has been hired to provide fudge for the grand opening party of American Girl Place, which is owned by Mattel, at The Grove on April 21. There will be approximately 1,100 guests to this event.’Information is on-line at www.AmericanGirl.com’ ‘ Reiner’s next business moves include attending the candy food show in New York in July and to eventually open a retail shop of her own. She believes in “slow, steady” growth for her fudge factory. Contact: 454-2704 or www.mommareiner.com.

Academy Award-winning writer Robert Towne, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in San Pedro, has lived in Pacific Palisades for over 20 years. He resides in an English Tudor-style house in the Riviera with his Italian wife, Luisa, and their 14-year-old daughter, Chiara. Asked what he likes about our town, the former philosophy major says “the way the weather comes in over the ocean, having friends like Sydney Pollack in the neighborhood” and “‘ la tarte,” where he often eats with his brother Roger, who is also a writer. Asked if living here has influenced his work, Towne says: “No, it doesn’t inspire me in that way.” However, it may some day, given the scope of his career. Towne, who got his start acting and writing for director Roger Corman, came into his own writing what he knows best’Southern California. His Oscar-winning screenplay for “Chinatown” (1974) was critically acclaimed and “Shampoo” (1975), which he wrote with his friend Warren Beatty, was a commercial hit. “Tequila Sunrise” (1988) reflected his roots, as does his latest release, “Ask the Dust.” Known as one of the best script doctors in Hollywood, Towne worked on other Academy-Award-winning films, including “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972). What do all these films have in common? They’re all “period” pieces in that they reflect the reality of the times in which they are set’be it the sexual mores of the 1970’s or the racial prejudice of the 1930’s. Still considered one of the finest writers in Hollywood, Towne at 72 is the quintessential Californian: laid back, opinionated, hip. He swaggers around his room in the Four Seasons Hotel in faded jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt looking for a match to light his cigar. He was meeting with the media here for two days to promote “Ask the Dust,” which opened in early March. The film, which Towne both wrote and directed, is based on the novel by John Fante. Set in Depression-era Los Angeles, it stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, the son of Italian immigrants who comes to L.A. determined to write the great American novel and marry a beautiful blonde. Instead, he falls for Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek), a passionate Mexican waitress who can’t read and longs to marry a WASP. Their explosive relationship (the curdled milk Camilla accidentally puts in Arturo’s coffee says it all) is meant to be a metaphor of the larger issues facing Angelenos at the time: the underlying racial tension, given the steady influx of Mexicans into California seeking a better life. “This whole book and movie is really about Los Angeles,” Towne says. “It’s a love story about the city and the relationship between two angry people, who are essentially angry for the same reason. Both feel like outsiders.” Asked if the film is somewhat autobiographical, Towne says that when he first read Fante’s novel “I almost thought I was reading about my own past. While there is a point where the movie and the book diverge, it was hard for me to tell where one ends and the other begins.” For Towne, “Ask the Dust” became a 30-year labor of love. After discovering the book while researching “Chinatown,” he began a friendship with Fante that would last until the author’s death in 1983. In the mid-1990s, 20 years after he first read the novel, Towne wrote a screenplay on spec and then spent the next decade years trying to secure financing. He says the reason the novel became a passion for him is that it taps into strong feelings he has for this city and his work as a writer. “It’s about a writer who feels neglected, unappreciated,” Towne says. “What writer doesn’t feel that way? How could I not identify with that?” Fante was born in 1909 in Colorado, the son of an Italian immigrant bricklayer. After a childhood spent in poverty and battling anti-Italian prejudice, he moved to California in 1929 and began writing stories for H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury magazine. By 1936, he had created Arturo Bandini, the character who would become his alter ego in four novels. The first novel, “Wait Until Spring, Bandini,” was published in 1938 (and made into a film in 1989), followed by “Ask the Dust,” “Dreams from Bunker Hill,” and “The Road to Los Angeles” (published posthumously). The saga chronicles the writer’s acceptance of his working-class background, his Italian-American heritage and his longing for assimilation. “If there’s a better piece of fiction written about L.A., I don’t know about it,” Towne says of “Ask the Dust.” “I saw the story as a sort of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in Bunker Hill. In its way, it’s as old a story as ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It ends, as all great love stories do, tragically. [But] it makes us believe that there is such a thing as love.” In the opening shot of “Ask the Dust,” which was filmed in South Africa, Towne pans a series of drawings of the California landscape over a radio weather report. The drawings come to life, taking us to the Alta Loma Hotel on Bunker Hill, where Mexicans and Jews are not welcome. It is here that Bandini finds a room. The view outside his window? A dusty palm tree. “You can feel the sand that comes in from the Mojave, even between the sheets,” writes Bandini. Although self-absorbed, Bandini is surprisingly likeable, as played by Farrell. As for Hayek’s Camilla, her feisty spirit can still be found in almost any small downtown coffee shop’given the ongoing racial tension in L.A. (Note: In 1988, as an entertainment writer for The Toronto Star, I interviewed Robert Towne when “Tequila Sunrise,” which he also both wrote and directed, was released. At the time, Towne said he saw the film as a modern morality tale about loyalty, friendship and love and hinted that some day he could end up as a character in one of his own films. As what? I predicted as an incurable romantic, which could certainly describe Bandini. Towne says his next film, which he’s already working on for Sony, is the tale of an American mining engineer, Wendell Fertig. It will be set during World War II and filmed in the Philippines.)