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Sunday, April 30, 2017

NO "FULL DISCLOSURE" IN KPPC LAUSD PENSION REPORTING - Perdaily.com

NO "FULL DISCLOSURE" IN KPPC LAUSD PENSION REPORTING - Perdaily.com:

NO "FULL DISCLOSURE" IN KPPC LAUSD PENSION REPORTING

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One of the most disturbing and regrettable trends in today's news reporting is the systematic and often premeditated failure to even mention often highly relevant facts that if merely addressed would most assuredly cause the reader to come up with a completely different interpretation or conclusion after reading the article.

One recent case in point can be found in a KPCC 89.3 FM reporter Kyle Stokes' article: What should LAUSD do about its ballooning benefits costs? While Stokes approaches this issue through the respective positions of incumbent LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer and his challenger and charter schools backed opponent Nick Melvoin, in how they each would deal prospectively with what now amounts to a looming $13.6 billion unfunded health and other benefits package, nowhere in the article is the easily verifiable fact mentioned that for the last 8 years LAUSD has already been "dealing" with this problem by systematically and illegally targeting and removing with clearly fabricated charges, teachers at the top of the salary scale and/or others about to vest in expensive lifetime health or other retirement benefits.

Approximately 93% of the literally thousands of teachers who have and continue to be targeted for removal from their more expensive senior teaching positions at LAUSD find it difficult to get others to believe them that they did nothing wrong and that this kind of heinous and clearly illegal behavior is going on, because people just don't want to think LAUSD administration would have any motive for so acting.

If nothing else, the magnitude of just how far in the red LAUSD is with its health and other benefits programs now offers that clear and unequivocal motivation for LAUSD targeting its more senior and expensive employees. To quote the late Vito Corleone, "It's just business."

And why hasn't the State of California gone after LAUSD to defend senior teachers and other targeted certificated and classified employees? Because if, and more likely when LAUSD goes bankrupt, it is the State of California that will be left holding the bag in having to bail out LAUSD. This clearly gives the State a conflict of interest, when it comes to defending wrongfully charged teachers, whose greatest actual "crime" is that they are too expensive.

But if LAUSD can save $60,000 a year in salary and benefits by getting rid of high seniority teachers in its attempt to balance an LAUSD benefits budget that is billions of dollars in the red and stands a very good chance of bankrupting LAUSD in the next two years, all of a sudden the NO "FULL DISCLOSURE" IN KPPC LAUSD PENSION REPORTING - Perdaily.com: