Tidbits from the last three weeks:
Half of all art & music positions will be eliminated next year, and the remaining ones will be cut the year after. In 2012, there will be no art, music, dance, or theater teachers in LAUSD.
A teacher who went down to file paperwork at Beaudry (the district-owned skyscraper downtown) told [...]
Posts Tagged ‘waste’
Ugh!
More LAUSD Waste and Mismanagement
NBC Los Angeles recently aired a great report on ways to save the classrooms:
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Danger!!!!! (More Tales of LAUSD Waste)
This week we had an inspector come by from the safety branch of LAUSD. He had a grim face, a clipboard, and a scratchy pen he wielded with gusto and relish. He scuttled through classroom after classroom and uncovered MANY examples of clear and present DANGER!!!!
Most notably: couches. Yep. That’s right. Couches. Sofas. Cushy chairs. [...]
Cracked, Broken, and Mute: How LAUSD Wastes Money
Yesterday’s LA Times reported the following from our globe-trotting, glad-handing, tv-anchor-bopping mayor (this isn’t TMZ but, btw, who was that cute lady beside him gazing adoringly at him on yesterday’s news reports?):
At Liechty, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa led a forum Monday with teachers and parents, stressing the need for “shared sacrifice” and “creative solutions” to save [...]
Pink Slips Continued
OK, so maybe it’s not the clearest data on Planet Earth, but it’s what arrived in my mailbox today. Basically, it says the union is asking for a 95:5 teacher: administrator ratio.
That would mean 30,057 teachers and 1024.18 administrators in the union’s ideal world.
The latest district proposal is 30,057 teachers: 1582 administrators (rounding so we [...]
Pink Slips
Yesterday was Pink Slip Friday in LAUSD. Friends and colleagues started texting at 6:30 in the morning reminding each other to wear pink, though preferably not pink slips or lingerie of any public sort, to work. It was festive and light-hearted, perhaps because it (and we) were still bleary-eyed about it all.
Then we went to [...]
Uh-oh Arne Duncan!
OK, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus here, what with winter breaks and winter flus and winter doldrums and winter personal lives (would you believe, teachers have personal lives?!). But I’m making my way through the educational headlines for the last week, and along comes this doozy from Arne Duncan, the Secretary of [...]
Buy-bye Brewer?
All week LA’s newsmedia have been buzzing excitedly about the possibility that flailing David Brewer might be forced out or bought out or somehow thrown overboard the leaky ship that is LAUSD. The LA Times (which, not so by the way, has rolled its education blog, The Homeroom, into a new blog that covers not [...]
Thank God We’re Not Washington, D.C.
I just discovered an amazing, horrific series done last year by The Washington Post investigating D.C.’s school district. Bureaucratic red tape, mismanagement, fraud, outright thievery! Granted, educating in D.C. is tougher than in LA because the US Congress, not any particular state, controls funding for the District, and so they get buffeted by all sorts [...]
LAUSD Mismanagement
Everything Will Be Forgotten
Does anyone remember this time last year when KCAL/KCBS was running an expose on millions of dollars being mispent by administrators using their school credit cards? Ring a bell in the dusty reaches of memory? Here’s the video version to jog your brain:
LAUSD Credit Card Scandal: October, 2007
I wonder what ever happened [...]
