Westside Parents, Teachers Facing ‘Deasy’s Revenge’
EDUCATION POLITICS - It seems that while Superintendent John Deasy gets famously mad, when crossed he gets pretty darned even as well. Evidently there was an enormous rift in the political structure of the LAUSD board at their meeting of last Tuesday, 3/19/13. Signaled by the de-throning of long-time board chair Mónica García, Steve Zimmer’s surprising reelection early this month has realigned power behind-the-scenes. Reflective of this is the citing of a pilot school in his community with absolutely zero respect for the due process that governs these propositions.
Slated for approval as an agenda item ingeniously annealed to two non-controversial, exemplary projects each in separate districts, was a pilot school championed by Steve Barr, the provocative founder and former chairman of Green Dot Public Schools. His new venture, Future Is Now (FIN) Schools, shepherded a pilot school proposed for co-location on Venice High School’s campus (VHS), without ever informing a single stakeholder of this impending, irreparable change.
Apart from two individuals — the schools’ principal and UTLA chair — the entire VHS community of teachers, students, alumni, staff, at-large community members, families and administrators, was deliberately and systematically excluded from any awareness of, or involvement in, the planning of this pilot school.
Dr Deasy, the Executive Director of his Division of “Intensive Support and Intervention”, and Boardmember Zimmer all acknowledge publically that “mistakes were made” in
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- Written by Sara Roos