California's Children

"You can leave your hat on" ... LAUSD ends "willful defiance" suspensions

UPDATE, May 17, 2013: The Los Angeles Unified School District board voted on Tuesday, May 14, to end suspensions for "willful defiance" (see history below). According to CBS News, the policy, which was affecting black and Hispanic students in disproportionate numbers, allowed staff to suspend "disruptive" students for such offenses as refusing to remove their hats or turn off their cell phones.

UPDATE, April 17, 2013: Reporting yesterday in EdSource, Louis Freedberg announced that Friday State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will release a new database showing that fully 50% of California school suspensions (and 25% of expulsions) are for "willful defiance" of authority.

Meanwhile, tonight, the Santa Clara County Board of Education heard a report on SC county suspension numbers. As reported by Jennifer Wadsworth in San Jose Inside: 

...In Santa Clara County, which counted an enrollment last school year of 265,618 pupils, 52 percent of the 19,770 suspensions last year were “discretionary,” ordered for things like “willful defiance,” cutting class and smoking on campus, according top a 2012 report from child advocacy group Kids in Common.

Dana Bunnett, director of Kids in Common, and Mariel Caballero at left, of the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, will deliver a report titled “Zero Suspension Policy,” which outlines not only recent stats but also suspension alternatives.

From Freedberg's article:

The new database shows that African American students, who make up only 6.5 percent of public school students, comprise 19 percent of all suspensions. By contrast, white students make up 26 percent of student enrollment, but only  20 percent of suspensions. Latino students are suspended at approximately the same level as their proportion of the total student enrollment.

California Department of Education officials provided a preview of some of the new data at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Delinquency Prevention and Youth Development chaired by Assemblymember Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento. “The California data is long overdue and I am very pleased that the department has collected the data and is releasing it,” he said.

Legislation authored by Dickinson (AB 420) that will restrict the use of the ill-defined “willful defiance” category [see history below the jump]...

The new database [was] collected as part of the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS)...

In the 2011-12 school year, there were 710,869 in-school and out-of-school suspensions in California schools, but many students were suspended more than once. The new database shows that a total of 366,629 students were suspended during that year – a suspension rate of approximately 6 percent. That means that about one in 16 of all public school students were suspended at least once during the school year. Because students are suspended much more frequently in high school, suspension rates for grades 9-12 are likely to be far higher than that.

Winners & losers: not all urban school districts will benefit from LCFF

April 29, 2013: George Skelton, posting today in Capitol Journal for the Los Angeles Times, casts a gimlet eye on Governor Brown's Local Control Funding Formula for redirecting California's education monies toward schools and districts with the most need (i.e., highest percentage of students who are English learners, and/or who are eligible for free or reduced-price meals), noting:

...Among the 50 largest districts, more than half would be losers under Brown's plan, based on education department calculations.

Winners would include Los Angeles Unified, Compton, Fontana, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Bakersfield and Stockton.

These districts would be losers: Anaheim, Capistrano, Chino, Chula Vista, Glendale, Irvine, Montebello, Mt. Diablo, Placentia-Yorba Linda, Pomona, Poway, Saddleback, San Jose, San Ramon Valley, Temecula and Torrance.

In the capital, Sacramento City Unified would be a winner. But in the adjacent 'burbs, Elk Grove and San Juan would be losers...

Buchanan: "Brown is taking the gloves off..."

UPDATE, April 25, 2013: Governor Brown's campaign to pass the '13-'14 budget with his centerpiece of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) for public education has reached a passionate political peak. As he state at meetings this week with school administrators, "the state has an obligation to provide more help to low-income [school] districts"..."[He noted] that nearly 60 percent of [California's] students are either from families that make less than $23K a year or speak a language other than English," according to Judy Lin of the Associated Press. 

At left, Brown with, from left, Mary Jane Burke, Marin County Office of Ed., Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana of the Santa Ana USD, and John Deasy, Los Angeles USD.Photo by Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press.

Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan (D-Alamo), says "she agrees with [Brown's] aims to provide more local control and more financial aid to [EL students]...but...the governor is wrong to pit rich suburbs against poor communities. [Buchanan] said she would ..."raise the base grant amount to every school district for essential items...and maintain some existing funding rules."

"It looks like [Brown] is taking the gloves off and we're still here, working on a solution," she said.

Democratic senators enter the legislative ring with a bill to be announced today -- SB 69 -- that "will include measures to make districts more accountable for the extra spending on low-income [and EL] students...and eliminate a key feature of [LCFF]: bonus dollars awarded to districts in which high-neeeds students constitute a majority...," according to a post on EdSource Tuesday.

In a story in the Los Angeles Times posted last night, Anthony York and Chris Megerian report that Brown promised yesterday that lawmakers will get "the battle of their lives" if they balk at his bid to overhaul state education. "Everything we have to bear in this battle, we're bringing it in," Brown vowed.

ACF: "potential winners" of 1st round Head Start grant competition

UPDATE, April 8, 2013: The Administration for Children & Families (ACF) of the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services announced last Wednesday, April 3, that it has begun negotiations "with approximately 160 potential winners" of the competition for filve-year grants to run Head Start programs across the country, a program announced nearly a year ago (see history below). California had four wobbly Head Start administrators open for the contested grant: Contra Costa County, Los Angeles County Office of Education, E-Center in Mendocino County, and San Francisco's Institute for Human and Social Development (San Mateo County sites). All had their grants renewed, but some of the grants will be smaller as competitors picked off some of the programs. (In northern California, E Center retained Butte, Sutter & Yuba Counties, apparently without viable competition.)  As Lillian Mongeau reported on EdSource: 

The most notable change will be in Los Angeles County, where the Los Angeles County Office of Education has for many years maintained the largest Head Start grant in the country, serving more than 30,000 children. Now they could share their Head Start and Early Head Start funding with 14 other organizations, according to the list of preliminarily selected grantees released by the national Office of Head Start. A finalized list is expected in July, according to the office. The exact amount of the awards has not been released, pending negotiations with the awardees.

“Mostly, it’s really going to shrink the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s staff and influence,” said Laura Escobedo, the child care planning coordinator for Los Angeles County.

Sequestration in CA: 8,200 Head Start kids will be dropped

UPDATE, March 11, 2013: The estimates from the California Head Start Association (story below) may have been conservative, according to a story in the Sunday Los Angeles Times by Dalina Castellanos that states 2,000 children are slated to be cut from Head Start in Los Angeles, and up to 8,200 state-wide.

 ..."The long-term projection is devastating. The level of cuts is so dramatic and so concentrated on non-defense discretionary spending that its ultimate impact will carry on for generations," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) during a visit to the Mothers' Club Family Learning Center in Pasadena (photo) on Friday...If the sequester cuts go through as proposed, more than 2,000 of the 24,000 Head Start seats and dozens of teacher positions in Los Angeles County would be eliminated, according to the L.A. County Office of Education. California stands to lose $78 million in Head Start funding, terminating services for 8,200 children.

It might not seem like much, but "for me, one family is too many," said Hector LaFarga Jr., executive director of Mothers' Club.

March 9, 2013: Reporting this week in EdSource, Lillian Mongeau, writes: 

Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, director of the federal Office of Head Start, held a conference call for Head Start administrators on Friday, March 1, to help local programs begin planning for the 5.1 percent cuts that are going to affect all of the primary funding streams Head Start uses to keep its doors open. Sanchez Fuentes also verified that local programs would not be cut until their current fiscal year ends, and their funds are renewed. Head Start programs have varying grant renewal dates that can fall on the first of the month throughout the year.