Northridge Community Council 2-9-02 Update |
We are sending you this E-mail as you have requested to be notified concerning Northridge Community Council events and projects affecting it.
We’re having another meeting of the Northridge Community Council Education Committee on Wednesday, February 13th at 7:00 p.m. CSUN has thoughtfully provided us a conference room (277) in University Hall. This is reached through the information booth at Prairie Street on the West side of the campus.
Please note this is on the West, not on the East, with the elementary school, side of the campus. Tell the booth attendant that you are from the Northridge Community Council, and that will get you free parking.
Here is a map
http://www.northridgecouncil.org/images/unhallcsun.htm
The meeting is to develop ideas from the stakeholder’s on additional issues to be raised on the entire High School issue.
The Education Committee met and then collaborated online and produced an eight-page response to the revised traffic DEIR. It is posted on our web site at
http://www.northridgecouncil.org/education/revisedtraffic.htm
Several committee members also provided their own response, and some of them are posted on our web site, but others have never reached us to post, so the community can’t read them.
We have activated an EIR site on the Education Committee page at
http://www.northridgecouncil.org/education/EIR.htm
On this site is posted our preliminary comments based on our November 7th meeting, with written comments and testimony. We would like the stakeholders to read these and make comments and additions in the final document.
To minimize meetings we're doing most of the work online.
We will be posting our proposed final version incorporating all the recommended changes. We will then use that document as our written position for the LAUSD 2-19-02 Facilities Committee meeting.
For those of you who want to be on our education committee we've slightly changed our procedures. Because of our privacy Policy we will not release your e-mail address or show it publicly without your specific permission. We are adopting the following procedures to keep your e-mail address private but to allow full discourse to be read by the full Committee.
All E-mail for the Education Committee will be immediately copied and sent by E-mail to all members of the committee. Any suggestions raised in the e-mail will be posted online at our website either with or without your e-mail address and/or name as you desire.
In this matter the Education Committee can see the back-and-forth e-mail's and all stakeholders can see the suggestions.
LAUSD is supposed to have provided us their response to all comments of the main EIR from the November 7th meeting and on the revised traffic DEIR on February 4th.
To date LAUSD has provided nothing except attendance data. They’ve refused to provide copies of various exhibits as requested in our November letter. This most specific missing is the agreement between CSUN and LAUSD. CSUN tells us that there is no signed agreement and I personally fully believe them. LAUSD lists the agreement as an attachment to the original DEIR, and LAUSD has refused to provide us a copy of that document.
Without the agreement showing that LAUSD can use the science and language laboratories and athletic fields as claimed in the EIR, the EIR is just wishful thinking.
Again, all of you who want to join the Education Committee, send us an e-mail asking to join and if you can come to the meeting on the 13th. For those of you who don’t, try and check back on our web site to see what we’re doing.
There is a fifth dimension as vast as Los Angeles Unified and as timeless as any bureaucracy. It is the middle ground between schools and tax dollars, and it lies between the pit of man's expedience and the summit of his aspirations. This is the dimension of moral corruption. It is an area which we call ... the Roy Zone.
In this, Superintendent Roy Romer's Los Angeles Unified School District, the rules that are honored elsewhere barely exist. The Roy Zone is difficult to penetrate and almost impossible to comprehend. But thanks to LAUSD Inspector General Don Mullinax, we have been given a glimpse.
Mullinax's latest report paints a picture of The Roy Zone in all its darkness, where expedience takes priority over both ethics and results. About six months ago, LAUSD director of real estate Scot Graham spotted something suspicious, but no doubt familiar in The Roy Zone: an apparent conflict of interest.
Graham observed that The Eastridge Companies, one of three contractors vying to complete the star-crossed Belmont Learning Center project, had an employee serving as a LAUSD consultant for property acquisition and new school construction in the San Fernando Valley. At the same time, TEC employee Jeff Baize had access to confidential LAUSD information that could have helped TEC put together its Belmont bid.
Such insider information could have given TEC an unfair advantage over fellow bidders and should have disqualified it from the bidding process.
But not in The Roy Zone. In The Roy Zone, there are no clear rules for what constitutes a conflict of interest. Romer and his team dismissed Graham's concerns, glossing over the potential improprieties and let TEC continue with its bid.
In the real world, whistle-blowers like Graham would be honored as heroes. In The Roy Zone, he has probably endangered his job, and certainly jeopardized his future.
But every once in a while, light from the real world manages to crack into The Roy Zone. Mullinax has provided such a ray. After following up on Graham's reports, Mullinax recognized the apparent conflict of interest that Romer had denied.
A week after he got the Mullinax report, the Daily News got a copy and Romer finally gave in when he was questioned about it, dropping TEC from the bidding process. This after the company spent as much as $500,000 preparing its proposal with the assurance there was no problem.
Haste makes waste, even in The Roy Zone. That's been the story of Belmont ever since its beginning.
District officials well before Romer turned a blind eye to unethical conduct in their haste to build a school in the worst of all places. They ignored huge problems -- like the fact that the campus sits atop a leaky oil field -- in the interest of completing the project as quickly as possible. In their rush to get the nation's costliest school built, they managed to squander $175 million without ever finishing the job.
Rather than learning from his predecessors' mistakes, Romer has blindly repeated them. The TEC foul-up is one in a long list of similar blunders. Worse yet, Romer hopes to build some 85 more schools in the next few years.
That could mean 85 more Belmonts, unless the culture of The Roy Zone is drastically overhauled. Ethics and honesty must be put ahead of expedience, and safeguards must be put into place to protect taxpayer dollars and the public interest.
Re "CSUN freshman lack basic skills," (Jan. 31):
California State University, Northridge, does have reason to be embarrassed. For the past 20-plus years their math and English professors have watched K-12 education spiral downward. California state universities accept the top third of the applying students, of which over 60 percent can't pass the basic English and math requirements. CSUN educates 70 percent of the English and math teachers. Of those 70 percent, the California State University Board found that 25 percent believe they aren't ready to teach math or English.
It is nice to learn that CSUN has a remedial teacher's program to mentor those "unprepared" teachers.
Terry Kinsella Westlake Village
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