To the relief of more than 1,000 Palisades Charter High School students who have held protests and signed petitions, PaliHi and the Los Angeles Unified School District officials have reached an agreement to continue busing for the next three years. ’Yay, we have busing!’ exclaimed PaliHi junior Ashley Gomez-Lopez when the Palisadian-Post told her the news. ‘I’m like speechless right now.’ In February, LAUSD, which faces a $640-million budget shortfall, proposed eliminating busing for 1,180 students who travel from various communities all over Los Angeles, for a savings of about $2 million annually. Gomez-Lopez, who lives in Van Nuys, said she was determined to graduate from PaliHi, but she and her parents hadn’t figured out transportation. Her parents had discussed dropping her off and picking her up at a city bus stop on Sunset Boulevard. On March 19, PaliHi Executive Director Amy Dresser-Held met with LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines and his senior staff, and they agreed to consolidate PaliHi and Paul Revere’s buses and to streamline PaliHi’s pick-up times in the afternoon for a savings of about $700,000. The buses board students at 2:15 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. LAUSD officials offered to continue busing the current juniors to provide continuity in their education. PaliHi will pay as much as $600,000 next school year and in 2011-12 to transport the current freshmen and sophomores. The school will pay a maximum of $300,000 to bus the current freshmen in 2012-13. Incoming freshmen in September will not receive busing. LAUSD agreed to charge PaliHi $1,000 annually for each student who rides the bus. PaliHi will not have to pay for current freshmen and sophomores who have other means of transportation this fall. ’We will finalize the roster [for the kids needing busing] by June,’ Dresser-Held said, adding that each student riding will receive a bus pass. The cuts would have affected students who attend PaliHi through the Permits with Transportation (PWT) and magnet programs, which are court-mandated and intended to desegregate schools. PWT provides transportation for Hispanic, black, Asian and other non-Anglo-Saxon students to predominantly white schools and vice versa, while the magnet gives students of different ethnicities the opportunity to focus their studies on a specific subject area. PaliHi’s magnet program, which is one of 173 programs within the district and is geared toward math, science and computer technology, will be phased out over the next three years. LAUSD plans to start a new magnet at University High to replace PaliHi’s for incoming freshmen and build that program over the next four years, Dresser-Held said. The district will continue to provide transportation to Paul Revere, so PaliHi officials will meet with Revere staff later this week and then with parents to discuss alternative transportation options, Dresser-Held told the Post on Tuesday. Paul Revere students have preference for admissions into PaliHi. The district will also continue to transport about 150 PaliHi students in all grade levels through Public School Choice (PSC), a No Child Left Behind mandate that requires the district to provide transportation from low-performing schools to higher-performing schools. LAUSD receives federal funding for PSC, while the PWT and magnet programs are covered under a state grant, the Targeted Instructional Improvement Grant. PaliHi is not eligible for this grant. Dresser-Held explained that Paul Revere eighth graders who are in the PWT or magnet programs cannot simply re-apply to the PSC program to receive busing next school year. They have to transfer from a low-performing school, and Paul Revere is considered high-performing. PaliHi, with an operating budget of $22 million, cannot afford to pay for busing beyond the three years. ‘It would redirect funding out of the classroom,’ Dresser-Held said. In fact, the school faces a budget shortfall of $725,000 next school year. The deficit is down from an earlier projection of $1.1 million because of possible salary reductions and a recent freeze on textbook spending, reported PaliHi Chief Business Officer Greg Wood. On March 9, PaliHi’s board of directors feared that the school could lose a large number of students if LAUSD eliminated busing transportation, so the board voted to send out letters to 24 teachers and three certificated administrators, warning them that they could be laid off this summer. PaliHi junior Cecila Placido-Mejia, who would have lost busing transportation from Venice, told the Palisadian-Post that ‘now that we are keeping busing, I hope we get to keep all our teachers’We would be so disappointed since those teachers have been with us since freshman year.’ Dresser-Held explained that according to the contract with the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, the board was required to notify teachers and certificated administrators (who work on academics) about potential layoffs by March 15. The final layoff notices must be issued by May 15. The board postponed issuing layoff notices to classified staff and non-certificated administrators (who work on business and operations, such as the chief business officer, human resources director and operations manager) because they did not have such a stipulation in their employment contracts. ’My hope is to bring to the board on April 8 a plan to balance the budget and cover the transportation costs and a motion to rescind the layoff notices,’ Dresser-Held told the Post.
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