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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education | California Watch

Ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education | California Watch:

Ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education

Konstantin Sutyagin/Flickr

For public school students in California, where you live usually determines where you can learn. To David Haglund, that's not right.

This month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative [PDF] that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses – wherever they are.

The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative is "designed to eliminate control by ZIP code," Haglund said.


Artists restore Chicano Park murals, symbols of '70s political struggle

Patricia Leigh Brown/California WatchGuillermo Rosette recently restored this mural, "Chicano Park Takeover," which depicts the story of the park's creation.

More than 40 years before Occupy protesters camped in New York's Zuccotti Park, Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza and elsewhere, Chicano activists in San Diego wielding paint and primer transformed a bleak urban netherworld into an epic work of art.

On April 22, 1970, this turbulent piece of ground in the shadows of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge became a conduit for a displaced community’s rage. That day was the beginning of a 12-day occupation by residents of Barrio Logan, the historic heart of the city’s Mexican American community, which resulted in Chicano Park: a seamy underbelly of massive gray concrete freeway ramps and pylons re-imagined by muralists as dazzling