2012-06-27 "Bill regulating state's medical marijuana industry delayed" by Linda Leff from "Associated Press"
[http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120627/WIRE/120629606/1350]
SAN FRANCISCO — California's medical marijuana industry and critics who contend it has become a cover for illegal drug dealing will have to wait at least another year for the state to set up a system for licensing and regulating pot shops and growers.
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on Monday pulled his bill that would have established an appointed board to vet and oversee medical marijuana businesses. The delay will allow a Senate committee that deals with professional licenses to do research and hold a public hearing on the issue while preventing the measure from being killed.
AB2312 narrowly passed the Assembly last month, but Ammiano said it was unlikely the Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development would have endorsed it or that Gov. Jerry Brown would have signed the legislation if it made it out of the Legislature.
Instead, he and committee chairman Sen. Curren Price, D-Los Angrles, agreed to give senators time to evaluate and possibly amend Ammiano's proposal once the current legislative session ends. The San Francisco Democrat says he hopes to introduce a reworked version of the bill next year.
"I want the votes and I want the governor to sign this thing," he said. "It's still in play. We have some success under our belt and the best thing is the committee itself will now partner with me, they will help shepherd this."
The measure that Ammiano shelved was modeled after a ballot initiative that medical marijuana advocates crafted last winter after the four federal prosecutors based in California launched a coordinated crackdown on dispensaries and growers they maintained were making huge profits selling pot to people who are not sick.
Ammiano and others, including state Attorney General Kamala Harris, had argued that the state's medical marijuana industry, which operates with virtually no oversight, would be less tempting a target if California could show it was doing its part to weed out pot shops that made no effort to comply with the state's liberal medical marijuana laws.
The framework Ammiano proposed would have required marijuana dispensaries, growers, delivery services and manufacturers of pot products to register with the state. It also would have compelled cities and counties to authorize one dispensary for every 50,000 residents unless officials secured voter approval to ban them.
To get the measure through the Assembly, where it squeaked by with the minimum 41 votes, the assemblyman agreed to amend it so city councils or boards of supervisors could implement bans on their own, as lawmakers in more than 170 California jurisdictions already have done. He also agreed to lift a cap on the taxes local governments could charge medical marijuana businesses.
The changes cost the bill support with medical marijuana advocates, who now are just as glad to have the statewide regulatory scheme put on hold, Americans for Safe Access spokesman Kris Hermes said Tuesday.
"In a sense, a lot of progress has been made, but we are also happy to go back to the drawing board to make sure we are all on the same page in terms of who this bill is supposed to help," Hermes said.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
2012-01-26 "California’s state of hunger; Voices from the frontlines of the battle against food scarcity in California" by Sasha Abramsky
[http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/californias-state-of-hunger/content?oid=4978550]
A decade ago, Tammy Jaime lost everything to drugs. She her husband spent through their savings, lost their home and car, and ended up in the mountainous, rural far north of California, begging for food for their children.
But that’s not why Jaime struggles to feed her kids today. These days, Jaime, 39, is sober, enrolled in college, and working part-time for Cisco Headstart where she earns $12 an hour. It’s the most money she has ever made, far above the minimum wage. But routinely, as the month draws to a close, she and her husband run out of funds, not least because when somebody in the family falls sick, they end up with high medical bills.
“We live from paycheck to paycheck,” said Jaime. “Once in a while we see a movie. We don’t eat out very much. We don’t have TV. … Yes, next week is payday. But then, you know what, my check is gone the next day, because it’s all lined up for bills.”
For Billye and George McPherson, an octogenarian couple with 14 great-grandkids, who have long run the Siskiyou County food pantry that Jaime used to frequent, hunger is now a permanent companion for many friends and neighbors.
“When we were younger,” explained George McPherson, “and we had moved up here from the Bay Area, we had some really hard times raising our family. … So we understand what it is to be hungry.”
These days, the families who come to the McPherson’s pantry number about 350 out of a total local population of a couple thousand.
“One of the things that I’ll never forget is this [50-year-old] lady came in. … She needed food,” said McPherson. “When we gave her her box, she looked in it, and she saw toilet paper. And she said, ‘Oh, toilet paper,’ and she broke into tears. That just shows you how grateful these people are for everything you can do for them.”
Many of these men and women have jobs, but the jobs pay low wages—many far lower than the hourly rate paid to Jaime—and competition for them is fierce in the current economic climate. For these Californians, said Billye McPherson sadly, all too often “the month is longer than the money.” A week or two out from the next paycheck, they turn up on pantry lines, looking for boxes of food to tide them over until they have money in their bank accounts once more.
Hunger’s numbers -
Four-plus years into the worst financial, housing and unemployment crisis to hit the country since the Great Depression, America’s hunger numbers continue to climb. Forty-six million people are enrolled in food-stamp programs; they receive benefits that average $133.80 per month per individual, and $283.65 for a household. Millions more, based on their income numbers, ought to be so enrolled, but for many reasons aren’t. Additional millions don’t qualify for food stamps, but the part-time, low-wage work that they can find in practice doesn’t pay enough to cover all their bills. Like Tammy Jaime, they juggle expenses, and, in the process, frequently end up with insufficient money to buy enough food for themselves and their children.
While California doesn’t have the highest rate of poverty or hunger in the country, its raw hunger and food insecurity numbers are stunning simply by virtue of its size. Yes, the state with the largest population in the country has the second highest number of food-stamp enrollees (Texas holds the dubious distinction of having the highest), with more than 3.8 million residents on its CalFresh program. Of these, 1.39 million are children.
California would, however, have far more food-stamp recipients if it did even a remotely decent job at reaching out to those poor enough to qualify for the federally funded program. As it is, while some states successfully enroll upwards of 90 percent of food-insecure households, more than half of all Californians who should be covered by food stamps remain outside of that part of the safety net. That translates to nearly 4 million hungry Californians going without basic food assistance from the government. To survive, these men, women and children are reliant either on the largesse of local charities, churches and food pantries, or they are simply missing meals to stretch their meager food dollars as long as possible.
“California’s about the bottom of the barrel,” said California Food Policy Advocates executive director Ken Hecht, of the low food-stamp-enrollment rate. Hecht’s organization published a report in 2010, titled Lost Dollars, Empty Plates, which concluded that approximately 3.6 million Californians who qualify for food stamps are nevertheless not enrolled—thus sacrificing federally funded benefits worth a total of more than $4.8 billion annually. Since food-stamp expenditures circulate rapidly through the economy, the CFPA researchers calculated that the total cost to the California economy of these unclaimed benefits was a staggering $8.68 billion.
Last year, hunger advocates from around the state convened in Sacramento to highlight the urgency of the problem. Members of Hunger Action Los Angeles showed up at the Capitol carrying cardboard cut-out figures, on each of which was glued a paper plate on which was printed out hunger data, generated by the California Health Interview Survey, from individual counties. Whichever part of the state one chose to focus on, the numbers were dismal.
In Los Angeles County, there were nearly 1.13 million “food insecure” adults in 2009, the most recent year for which such CHIS data exists, most of them insecure because they were not enrolled in the food stamp program. In Riverside County, the number was close to 250,000. San Diego had 210,000, Sacramento 126,000, Santa Clara 96,000. In Alameda, there were 169,000 adults in this category. Even in eminently middle-class counties, the numbers were high: Sonoma came in with 51,000 food-insecure adults; Yolo with 16,000.
Cumulatively, the survey found that statewide, even after the expansion in food-stamp usage since the start of the recession, 3.7 million Californian adults were struggling to put food on the table in 2009, up from 2.8 million just two years previously.
California, meet your hungry -
Hunger in 21st-century America transcends stereotypes: It might be portrayed by a food line snaking through a dirt-poor neighborhood in a dilapidated inner city, an image redolent of Great Depression-era photographs by chroniclers such as Dorothea Lange. But at this point, it’s just as likely to be embodied by somebody like Marcy Glickman, who for most of her life was upper-middle class, a denizen of L.A.’s fashionable west side, but who has recently been brought low by medical bills following her husband’s illness and death, and her own disability.
“I’ve had [a Mercedes-Benz car], we could travel, we could buy nice things, jewelry. … We lived a great life. Great medical coverage. Children in private schools. Then, all of a sudden, it changed, because of illness. … My husband had cancer. Those bills are horrendous. It’s the nightmare that you’d never, never want. One day, you’re high on the hill. The next day … you’re a part of those that don’t have.”
Hunger is also the face and voice of Graciela R., who lives in the hardscrabble L.A. suburb of Silmar. The 50-year-old mother of two used to scrape by with jobs in laundromats, but she has been unemployed since the start of the recession. Where she and her husband once brought in nearly $2,000 a month, today they squeak by on the $700 a month that her husband earns repairing windows in cars. How much money does she have? “The $3 in my purse,” she answered in Spanish. And laughed, as if to say, “What can you do?”
For food, the family of four lives on the food stamps that one of her two children is eligible for, and food boxes given out by the community group Meet Each Need With Dignity, in the nearby town of Pacoima, as well as neighborhood churches. She and her husband sometimes miss meals to make sure that their children have enough to eat.
Hunger is also the face of Matthew Joseph, a middle-aged steel worker and church deacon, brought to the edge of destitution by Stockton’s collapsed housing market combined with a long spell of unemployment in the first years of the recession. “You realize that everything you’ve worked for can be gone, completely gone,” said Joseph, as he recounts his struggle to keep his home and to put food on the table for his wife and himself. “I had to start looking for things in my lifestyle where I could say, ‘We can’t do this any longer.’ I was always looking to say, ‘What can I get out of this meal? What can I make that will last me not just a meal but two meals?’ I need to be able to thin everything; thin what we’re doing in life, what we’re doing for our house. Where do I come up with money for food, PG&E, garbage and everything else?”
At his church, Joseph was struck “by the amount of people at Christmas or Thanksgiving not looking for presents, but just looking for food. I hear these stories at the cathedral day in and day out.”
This changing face of hunger became particularly noticeable in 2008, recalls Blake Young, executive director of the Sacramento Food Bank, as he details demographic shifts in his clientele in recent years. Throughout 2009 and most of 2010 the total numbers of food bank clients—men, women and children who can be seen lining city blocks on mornings that the banks and pantries distribute free food—continued to grow. And even after the total numbers stabilized, the number of “ex-middle-income, first-time visitors has gone through the roof,” Young noted. “And it’s growing every day.”
There must be food -
Yet, for all of the “food insecurity” in California, actual hunger would be far more extensive without government programs in place to tackle the problem; or were those programs replaced by block grants, as an increasing number of Republican politicians are advocating.
Food stamps are the one part of the social safety net that, for those enrolled, still works really well. The program keeps users from hunger, being available to all legal residents who are at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line—though individual states can determine what value of assets, such as cars, applicants are allowed to hang on to. It is counter-cyclical—the availability and usage of food-stamp benefits increasing during recessions, with the federal government currently bankrolling the program to the tune of approximately $65 billion per year—and can help to keep local economies afloat during downtimes, and it is flexible enough to deal with the needs of individuals and families in a multitude of ways. The benefits are given to clients via the EBT card, which means that once the messiness of enrolment is over, the delivery of services is actually pretty efficient. And, unlike the old paper vouchers, modern EBT benefits are hard to sell, thus eliminating, or at least much reducing, black markets around their usage, and making sure the benefits get spent properly on food—especially food for children.
That’s one reason that the GOP attacks against food stamps in recent months, by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum on the presidential campaign trail, and by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—who proposed replacing food stamps with capped block grants to the states—haven’t resonated all that well.
People in America don’t like welfare programs in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics, food stamps and other nutritional programs actually enjoy pretty high levels of support. Polling data quoted by the Food Research and Action Center shows that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe that “those who are unable to earn enough money for food should be helped by others”; in 2003, the Alliance to End Hunger found that seven in 10 voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who proposed cuts to the school-lunch program and found that 63 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a politician who proposed cutting food stamps.
But while there are many success stories associated with the country’s federally funded anti-hunger programs, the states responsible for administering these benefits vary tremendously in how they enroll people and how they access the federal dollars. And on this front, the Golden State does very badly. Despite years of efforts, only about half of eligible Californians receive the benefits. In many counties, that number is actually far less than 50 percent.
In the six counties of the Sacramento region alone, more than 110,000 residents eligible for food stamps go without. The benefits lost by these people equal more than a quarter of a billion dollars per year.
Analysts blame the low-enrollment percentage on an array of factors: first among these was that, until a recent reform, Assembly Bill 6, kicked in January 1, California was one of only three states to fingerprint food-stamp applicants, placing both a stigma and a fear of law enforcement and immigration authorities in the way of access to the program.
That requirement was changed, in a rare display of legislative bipartisanship in Sacramento, after years of prodding by President Barack Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture officials responsible for administering food stamps. Both in D.C. and at the department’s regional offices in Oakland, USDA personnel held numerous meetings with state officials, sent out letters to key legislators, and otherwise made it clear that they wanted to see reform.
At the same time, A.B. 6 also set in place a timeline for ending, over the next two years, several other bureaucratic obstacles to easy enrollment. Currently, California mandates that recipients apply for re-enrollment four times a year, subjecting them to a cumbersome means test that frequently deters applicants; A.B. 6 reduces the returning applications to twice a year. Also, the state insists that applicants apply, in person, at food-stamp offices, which produces a strong disincentive for the working poor to apply: after all, if applying means turning up during work hours and thus losing hourly wages, or even forfeiting a job, why bother to apply? A.B. 6 allows for telephone interviews and online applications.
At the same time, the federal Affordable Care Act gives the newly created state health insurance exchanges boards the option of setting up systems that would automatically enroll into the food-stamp program applicants who successfully enroll in Medicaid. California’s board is likely to go for this option. The rationale, here, is that a dollar spent on helping people eat well saves many dollars in health costs down the road.
Finally, following passage of Jim Beall’s Assembly Bill 69, California will also soon allow low-income elderly residents to access food stamps more easily when they enroll in Social Security, in an attempt to end a pattern of extraordinarily low CalFresh participation among this portion of the population.
Hunger advocates hope that the effect of this series of changes will be dramatically increased enrollment levels in CalFresh over the next few years, and a corresponding decrease in levels of food insecurity in California.
The public-health ingredient -
In addition to the state changing the ways in which residents can access food stamps, many localities are also getting creative on the nutrition front. Programs such as The Veggie Voucher Program, funded by local food networks and foundations, are pushing recipients to eat healthier foods, leveraging their federal food stamps with matching funds for clients to spend specifically on fruits and vegetables in select farmers markets around the state.
“If you are consuming your fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, it’ll prevent you from getting sick,” explained Maribel Diaz, a CalFresh recipient since she lost her job, and currently a part-time worker with Hunger Action Los Angeles. “It’s very important to have access to fruits and vegetables.”
More broadly on the public-health front, many of the state’s large food banks are moving away from a reliance on USDA surplus and grocery-store contributions—mainly carbohydrates and canned goods—and toward privately donated and bought fruits and vegetables. Some, like the Sacramento Food Bank, are also inaugurating large demonstration farms from which their clients can harvest produce.
This is, nutritional specialists have long argued, a critical public-health ingredient in the food equations of the moment, given the challenges of low-income obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes; and given, also, the large number of regions (including in south Sacramento, Del Paso Heights and north Sacramento) that have significant shortages in the numbers of stores offering fresh produce at affordable prices. “Access to fresh food via either grocery store or farmers market—a large portion of the low-income population don’t have access,” explained Blake Young.
In addition to The Veggie Voucher Program, that piggybacks off of CalFresh, local school districts such as Compton Unified, with endemic poverty rates, are experimenting with Classroom Breakfast, seeking to raise breakfast-enrollment levels to the same levels as those of free-lunch programs. Again, the assumption is that hungry kids—who might not be able to get to school early enough to access breakfast in the cafeteria before classes begin—can’t learn to their full potential, whereas well-fed kids are better able to concentrate on their academic responsibilities, thus allowing them to use education to break cycles of poverty.
The family of 18-year-old high-school senior Uriel R., who attends a school in the East Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, was recently evicted from its home. As a result, the large family—siblings, parents and grandparents—was split up; his sisters now live elsewhere. Uriel lives in a small apartment with his mother, who finds occasional work cleaning homes, and who routinely struggles to feed her family. The student said, “My mom only cooks on Monday, so I expect a hot meal on Mondays. Sometimes it’s just eggs and cheese. From Tuesdays all the way to Sunday we don’t have hot meals; we just eat whatever’s left in the fridge.”
A smart student, with ambitions to attend college, Uriel has slid into depression as his family’s economic situation has worsened. He sits outside a lot. He often cries. The American Dream, he declaims angrily, means nothing to him anymore. “The weekends,” he said, “I just eat soup or quesadillas. I don’t eat breakfast in the mornings.”
When Compton moved its breakfast program into the classroom to try to tackle the kind of hunger that Uriel describes, the number of children accessing meals increased by 250 percent—from 98,353 in September 2010, to 238,716 a year later.
Scale of emergency -
For all the good work being done on the hunger front in California, the scale of the crisis remains daunting.
Despite her access to Veggie Vouchers and CalFresh, for Maribel Diaz and her three sons, the sense of dislocation following the family’s slide into poverty remains acute. “I’m hoping that there is a way out of this, that everything starts getting better. But right now, I feel like I’m stuck, there’s no way to go, right or left. … Poverty to me means not having access to a normal life. Not having access to go to a movie. Not having access when my kids need shoes or clothing. If it wasn’t for the CalFresh program, we would have no access to food. If it wasn’t for those programs out there helping us, I’d basically be a homeless person. ”
For Marcy Glickman, that sense of dislocation has been just as profound. These days, with her income having been reduced from $10,000 a month to $1,000. Glickman has lost her house to foreclosure, her car to the repo man. She now lives in a small apartment, relying on monthly disability checks and on a network of food charities to put enough food on her table. “I started collecting coupons for groceries. … We ended up having to get food stamps. At first, I felt embarrassed, but after a while, I realized, ‘At least we’re eating.’”
These stories are unfortunately all too common these days, said Jessica Jones of the Los Angeles Food Bank. “We get stories like that almost all the time,” she explained. “The people who did everything right and had the rug pulled out from under them. And the people who were already struggling are struggling even more. When I first started [working at the food bank] in December 2008, we served 39 million pounds of food. In 2010, we did 62 million pounds of food. The number of people we serve has gone up by 73 percent since the recession started.”
[http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/californias-state-of-hunger/content?oid=4978550]
A decade ago, Tammy Jaime lost everything to drugs. She her husband spent through their savings, lost their home and car, and ended up in the mountainous, rural far north of California, begging for food for their children.
But that’s not why Jaime struggles to feed her kids today. These days, Jaime, 39, is sober, enrolled in college, and working part-time for Cisco Headstart where she earns $12 an hour. It’s the most money she has ever made, far above the minimum wage. But routinely, as the month draws to a close, she and her husband run out of funds, not least because when somebody in the family falls sick, they end up with high medical bills.
“We live from paycheck to paycheck,” said Jaime. “Once in a while we see a movie. We don’t eat out very much. We don’t have TV. … Yes, next week is payday. But then, you know what, my check is gone the next day, because it’s all lined up for bills.”
For Billye and George McPherson, an octogenarian couple with 14 great-grandkids, who have long run the Siskiyou County food pantry that Jaime used to frequent, hunger is now a permanent companion for many friends and neighbors.
“When we were younger,” explained George McPherson, “and we had moved up here from the Bay Area, we had some really hard times raising our family. … So we understand what it is to be hungry.”
These days, the families who come to the McPherson’s pantry number about 350 out of a total local population of a couple thousand.
“One of the things that I’ll never forget is this [50-year-old] lady came in. … She needed food,” said McPherson. “When we gave her her box, she looked in it, and she saw toilet paper. And she said, ‘Oh, toilet paper,’ and she broke into tears. That just shows you how grateful these people are for everything you can do for them.”
Many of these men and women have jobs, but the jobs pay low wages—many far lower than the hourly rate paid to Jaime—and competition for them is fierce in the current economic climate. For these Californians, said Billye McPherson sadly, all too often “the month is longer than the money.” A week or two out from the next paycheck, they turn up on pantry lines, looking for boxes of food to tide them over until they have money in their bank accounts once more.
Hunger’s numbers -
Four-plus years into the worst financial, housing and unemployment crisis to hit the country since the Great Depression, America’s hunger numbers continue to climb. Forty-six million people are enrolled in food-stamp programs; they receive benefits that average $133.80 per month per individual, and $283.65 for a household. Millions more, based on their income numbers, ought to be so enrolled, but for many reasons aren’t. Additional millions don’t qualify for food stamps, but the part-time, low-wage work that they can find in practice doesn’t pay enough to cover all their bills. Like Tammy Jaime, they juggle expenses, and, in the process, frequently end up with insufficient money to buy enough food for themselves and their children.
While California doesn’t have the highest rate of poverty or hunger in the country, its raw hunger and food insecurity numbers are stunning simply by virtue of its size. Yes, the state with the largest population in the country has the second highest number of food-stamp enrollees (Texas holds the dubious distinction of having the highest), with more than 3.8 million residents on its CalFresh program. Of these, 1.39 million are children.
California would, however, have far more food-stamp recipients if it did even a remotely decent job at reaching out to those poor enough to qualify for the federally funded program. As it is, while some states successfully enroll upwards of 90 percent of food-insecure households, more than half of all Californians who should be covered by food stamps remain outside of that part of the safety net. That translates to nearly 4 million hungry Californians going without basic food assistance from the government. To survive, these men, women and children are reliant either on the largesse of local charities, churches and food pantries, or they are simply missing meals to stretch their meager food dollars as long as possible.
“California’s about the bottom of the barrel,” said California Food Policy Advocates executive director Ken Hecht, of the low food-stamp-enrollment rate. Hecht’s organization published a report in 2010, titled Lost Dollars, Empty Plates, which concluded that approximately 3.6 million Californians who qualify for food stamps are nevertheless not enrolled—thus sacrificing federally funded benefits worth a total of more than $4.8 billion annually. Since food-stamp expenditures circulate rapidly through the economy, the CFPA researchers calculated that the total cost to the California economy of these unclaimed benefits was a staggering $8.68 billion.
Last year, hunger advocates from around the state convened in Sacramento to highlight the urgency of the problem. Members of Hunger Action Los Angeles showed up at the Capitol carrying cardboard cut-out figures, on each of which was glued a paper plate on which was printed out hunger data, generated by the California Health Interview Survey, from individual counties. Whichever part of the state one chose to focus on, the numbers were dismal.
In Los Angeles County, there were nearly 1.13 million “food insecure” adults in 2009, the most recent year for which such CHIS data exists, most of them insecure because they were not enrolled in the food stamp program. In Riverside County, the number was close to 250,000. San Diego had 210,000, Sacramento 126,000, Santa Clara 96,000. In Alameda, there were 169,000 adults in this category. Even in eminently middle-class counties, the numbers were high: Sonoma came in with 51,000 food-insecure adults; Yolo with 16,000.
Cumulatively, the survey found that statewide, even after the expansion in food-stamp usage since the start of the recession, 3.7 million Californian adults were struggling to put food on the table in 2009, up from 2.8 million just two years previously.
California, meet your hungry -
Hunger in 21st-century America transcends stereotypes: It might be portrayed by a food line snaking through a dirt-poor neighborhood in a dilapidated inner city, an image redolent of Great Depression-era photographs by chroniclers such as Dorothea Lange. But at this point, it’s just as likely to be embodied by somebody like Marcy Glickman, who for most of her life was upper-middle class, a denizen of L.A.’s fashionable west side, but who has recently been brought low by medical bills following her husband’s illness and death, and her own disability.
“I’ve had [a Mercedes-Benz car], we could travel, we could buy nice things, jewelry. … We lived a great life. Great medical coverage. Children in private schools. Then, all of a sudden, it changed, because of illness. … My husband had cancer. Those bills are horrendous. It’s the nightmare that you’d never, never want. One day, you’re high on the hill. The next day … you’re a part of those that don’t have.”
Hunger is also the face and voice of Graciela R., who lives in the hardscrabble L.A. suburb of Silmar. The 50-year-old mother of two used to scrape by with jobs in laundromats, but she has been unemployed since the start of the recession. Where she and her husband once brought in nearly $2,000 a month, today they squeak by on the $700 a month that her husband earns repairing windows in cars. How much money does she have? “The $3 in my purse,” she answered in Spanish. And laughed, as if to say, “What can you do?”
For food, the family of four lives on the food stamps that one of her two children is eligible for, and food boxes given out by the community group Meet Each Need With Dignity, in the nearby town of Pacoima, as well as neighborhood churches. She and her husband sometimes miss meals to make sure that their children have enough to eat.
Hunger is also the face of Matthew Joseph, a middle-aged steel worker and church deacon, brought to the edge of destitution by Stockton’s collapsed housing market combined with a long spell of unemployment in the first years of the recession. “You realize that everything you’ve worked for can be gone, completely gone,” said Joseph, as he recounts his struggle to keep his home and to put food on the table for his wife and himself. “I had to start looking for things in my lifestyle where I could say, ‘We can’t do this any longer.’ I was always looking to say, ‘What can I get out of this meal? What can I make that will last me not just a meal but two meals?’ I need to be able to thin everything; thin what we’re doing in life, what we’re doing for our house. Where do I come up with money for food, PG&E, garbage and everything else?”
At his church, Joseph was struck “by the amount of people at Christmas or Thanksgiving not looking for presents, but just looking for food. I hear these stories at the cathedral day in and day out.”
This changing face of hunger became particularly noticeable in 2008, recalls Blake Young, executive director of the Sacramento Food Bank, as he details demographic shifts in his clientele in recent years. Throughout 2009 and most of 2010 the total numbers of food bank clients—men, women and children who can be seen lining city blocks on mornings that the banks and pantries distribute free food—continued to grow. And even after the total numbers stabilized, the number of “ex-middle-income, first-time visitors has gone through the roof,” Young noted. “And it’s growing every day.”
There must be food -
Yet, for all of the “food insecurity” in California, actual hunger would be far more extensive without government programs in place to tackle the problem; or were those programs replaced by block grants, as an increasing number of Republican politicians are advocating.
Food stamps are the one part of the social safety net that, for those enrolled, still works really well. The program keeps users from hunger, being available to all legal residents who are at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line—though individual states can determine what value of assets, such as cars, applicants are allowed to hang on to. It is counter-cyclical—the availability and usage of food-stamp benefits increasing during recessions, with the federal government currently bankrolling the program to the tune of approximately $65 billion per year—and can help to keep local economies afloat during downtimes, and it is flexible enough to deal with the needs of individuals and families in a multitude of ways. The benefits are given to clients via the EBT card, which means that once the messiness of enrolment is over, the delivery of services is actually pretty efficient. And, unlike the old paper vouchers, modern EBT benefits are hard to sell, thus eliminating, or at least much reducing, black markets around their usage, and making sure the benefits get spent properly on food—especially food for children.
That’s one reason that the GOP attacks against food stamps in recent months, by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum on the presidential campaign trail, and by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)—who proposed replacing food stamps with capped block grants to the states—haven’t resonated all that well.
People in America don’t like welfare programs in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics, food stamps and other nutritional programs actually enjoy pretty high levels of support. Polling data quoted by the Food Research and Action Center shows that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe that “those who are unable to earn enough money for food should be helped by others”; in 2003, the Alliance to End Hunger found that seven in 10 voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who proposed cuts to the school-lunch program and found that 63 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for a politician who proposed cutting food stamps.
But while there are many success stories associated with the country’s federally funded anti-hunger programs, the states responsible for administering these benefits vary tremendously in how they enroll people and how they access the federal dollars. And on this front, the Golden State does very badly. Despite years of efforts, only about half of eligible Californians receive the benefits. In many counties, that number is actually far less than 50 percent.
In the six counties of the Sacramento region alone, more than 110,000 residents eligible for food stamps go without. The benefits lost by these people equal more than a quarter of a billion dollars per year.
Analysts blame the low-enrollment percentage on an array of factors: first among these was that, until a recent reform, Assembly Bill 6, kicked in January 1, California was one of only three states to fingerprint food-stamp applicants, placing both a stigma and a fear of law enforcement and immigration authorities in the way of access to the program.
That requirement was changed, in a rare display of legislative bipartisanship in Sacramento, after years of prodding by President Barack Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture officials responsible for administering food stamps. Both in D.C. and at the department’s regional offices in Oakland, USDA personnel held numerous meetings with state officials, sent out letters to key legislators, and otherwise made it clear that they wanted to see reform.
At the same time, A.B. 6 also set in place a timeline for ending, over the next two years, several other bureaucratic obstacles to easy enrollment. Currently, California mandates that recipients apply for re-enrollment four times a year, subjecting them to a cumbersome means test that frequently deters applicants; A.B. 6 reduces the returning applications to twice a year. Also, the state insists that applicants apply, in person, at food-stamp offices, which produces a strong disincentive for the working poor to apply: after all, if applying means turning up during work hours and thus losing hourly wages, or even forfeiting a job, why bother to apply? A.B. 6 allows for telephone interviews and online applications.
At the same time, the federal Affordable Care Act gives the newly created state health insurance exchanges boards the option of setting up systems that would automatically enroll into the food-stamp program applicants who successfully enroll in Medicaid. California’s board is likely to go for this option. The rationale, here, is that a dollar spent on helping people eat well saves many dollars in health costs down the road.
Finally, following passage of Jim Beall’s Assembly Bill 69, California will also soon allow low-income elderly residents to access food stamps more easily when they enroll in Social Security, in an attempt to end a pattern of extraordinarily low CalFresh participation among this portion of the population.
Hunger advocates hope that the effect of this series of changes will be dramatically increased enrollment levels in CalFresh over the next few years, and a corresponding decrease in levels of food insecurity in California.
The public-health ingredient -
In addition to the state changing the ways in which residents can access food stamps, many localities are also getting creative on the nutrition front. Programs such as The Veggie Voucher Program, funded by local food networks and foundations, are pushing recipients to eat healthier foods, leveraging their federal food stamps with matching funds for clients to spend specifically on fruits and vegetables in select farmers markets around the state.
“If you are consuming your fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, it’ll prevent you from getting sick,” explained Maribel Diaz, a CalFresh recipient since she lost her job, and currently a part-time worker with Hunger Action Los Angeles. “It’s very important to have access to fruits and vegetables.”
More broadly on the public-health front, many of the state’s large food banks are moving away from a reliance on USDA surplus and grocery-store contributions—mainly carbohydrates and canned goods—and toward privately donated and bought fruits and vegetables. Some, like the Sacramento Food Bank, are also inaugurating large demonstration farms from which their clients can harvest produce.
This is, nutritional specialists have long argued, a critical public-health ingredient in the food equations of the moment, given the challenges of low-income obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes; and given, also, the large number of regions (including in south Sacramento, Del Paso Heights and north Sacramento) that have significant shortages in the numbers of stores offering fresh produce at affordable prices. “Access to fresh food via either grocery store or farmers market—a large portion of the low-income population don’t have access,” explained Blake Young.
In addition to The Veggie Voucher Program, that piggybacks off of CalFresh, local school districts such as Compton Unified, with endemic poverty rates, are experimenting with Classroom Breakfast, seeking to raise breakfast-enrollment levels to the same levels as those of free-lunch programs. Again, the assumption is that hungry kids—who might not be able to get to school early enough to access breakfast in the cafeteria before classes begin—can’t learn to their full potential, whereas well-fed kids are better able to concentrate on their academic responsibilities, thus allowing them to use education to break cycles of poverty.
The family of 18-year-old high-school senior Uriel R., who attends a school in the East Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, was recently evicted from its home. As a result, the large family—siblings, parents and grandparents—was split up; his sisters now live elsewhere. Uriel lives in a small apartment with his mother, who finds occasional work cleaning homes, and who routinely struggles to feed her family. The student said, “My mom only cooks on Monday, so I expect a hot meal on Mondays. Sometimes it’s just eggs and cheese. From Tuesdays all the way to Sunday we don’t have hot meals; we just eat whatever’s left in the fridge.”
A smart student, with ambitions to attend college, Uriel has slid into depression as his family’s economic situation has worsened. He sits outside a lot. He often cries. The American Dream, he declaims angrily, means nothing to him anymore. “The weekends,” he said, “I just eat soup or quesadillas. I don’t eat breakfast in the mornings.”
When Compton moved its breakfast program into the classroom to try to tackle the kind of hunger that Uriel describes, the number of children accessing meals increased by 250 percent—from 98,353 in September 2010, to 238,716 a year later.
Scale of emergency -
For all the good work being done on the hunger front in California, the scale of the crisis remains daunting.
Despite her access to Veggie Vouchers and CalFresh, for Maribel Diaz and her three sons, the sense of dislocation following the family’s slide into poverty remains acute. “I’m hoping that there is a way out of this, that everything starts getting better. But right now, I feel like I’m stuck, there’s no way to go, right or left. … Poverty to me means not having access to a normal life. Not having access to go to a movie. Not having access when my kids need shoes or clothing. If it wasn’t for the CalFresh program, we would have no access to food. If it wasn’t for those programs out there helping us, I’d basically be a homeless person. ”
For Marcy Glickman, that sense of dislocation has been just as profound. These days, with her income having been reduced from $10,000 a month to $1,000. Glickman has lost her house to foreclosure, her car to the repo man. She now lives in a small apartment, relying on monthly disability checks and on a network of food charities to put enough food on her table. “I started collecting coupons for groceries. … We ended up having to get food stamps. At first, I felt embarrassed, but after a while, I realized, ‘At least we’re eating.’”
These stories are unfortunately all too common these days, said Jessica Jones of the Los Angeles Food Bank. “We get stories like that almost all the time,” she explained. “The people who did everything right and had the rug pulled out from under them. And the people who were already struggling are struggling even more. When I first started [working at the food bank] in December 2008, we served 39 million pounds of food. In 2010, we did 62 million pounds of food. The number of people we serve has gone up by 73 percent since the recession started.”
2012-01-26 "State Senate hits stalemate on universal healthcare for California"
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/01/universal-healthcare-california-state-senate-stalemate.html]
State lawmakers deadlocked Thursday over a controversial measure that would provide universal healthcare in California.
In a vote in which some Democrats did not participate, the measure received only 19 of the 21 votes needed for passage in the Senate, but it was put over for another possible vote next week.
[Updated, 12:55 p.m. Jan. 26: Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said later Thursday that the bill will "probably not" make it out of the Legislature by a deadline next week.
The proposed legislation is a vehicle "to raise the visibility of the issue," Steinberg said. "I don't think that there is any reasonable prospect that in the short term a 'Medicare for All' bill will be signed in the country or in California. But that doesn't mean it's not important."]
Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) noted that some people have argued there is no need for state legislation because the federal government has already approved an affordable healthcare system to begin in 2014.
But Leno said states are allowed to provide greater healthcare under that system, and that California should act because the courts are considering lawsuits to overturn the federal plan.
Leno said SB 810 is needed because healthcare premiums have increased five times the rate of inflation in the last decade and 12 million Californians went without coverage during some time last year.
"Clearly, the current system is not working for businesses, for employers, for employees, for families," he said.
Sen. Tony Strickland of Moorpark was part of the mostly Republican bloc that opposed the measure, which he said would create a large, inefficient bureaucracy.
"Clearly, if you want the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the DMV doing your healthcare, this bill is for you," Strickland said during floor debate on the measure.
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/01/universal-healthcare-california-state-senate-stalemate.html]
State lawmakers deadlocked Thursday over a controversial measure that would provide universal healthcare in California.
In a vote in which some Democrats did not participate, the measure received only 19 of the 21 votes needed for passage in the Senate, but it was put over for another possible vote next week.
[Updated, 12:55 p.m. Jan. 26: Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said later Thursday that the bill will "probably not" make it out of the Legislature by a deadline next week.
The proposed legislation is a vehicle "to raise the visibility of the issue," Steinberg said. "I don't think that there is any reasonable prospect that in the short term a 'Medicare for All' bill will be signed in the country or in California. But that doesn't mean it's not important."]
Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) noted that some people have argued there is no need for state legislation because the federal government has already approved an affordable healthcare system to begin in 2014.
But Leno said states are allowed to provide greater healthcare under that system, and that California should act because the courts are considering lawsuits to overturn the federal plan.
Leno said SB 810 is needed because healthcare premiums have increased five times the rate of inflation in the last decade and 12 million Californians went without coverage during some time last year.
"Clearly, the current system is not working for businesses, for employers, for employees, for families," he said.
Sen. Tony Strickland of Moorpark was part of the mostly Republican bloc that opposed the measure, which he said would create a large, inefficient bureaucracy.
"Clearly, if you want the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the DMV doing your healthcare, this bill is for you," Strickland said during floor debate on the measure.
Friday, January 20, 2012
2012-01-19 "Death Valley students face loss of
lifeline; California has pulled funding for school transportation for
the rest of this fiscal year and may eliminate it entirely next year. In
Death Valley, where some students have a two-hour round trip, the cut
is 'catastrophic.'" by Teresa Watanabe from "Los Angeles Times"
[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rural-schools-20120119,0,4691011.story]
Reporting from Death Valley -- As the day's first light streaks pink across the sky, a yellow school bus appears on a lonely road leading to an Indian village in Death Valley National Park. The bus rumbles past desert mesquite and ocher mountains to pick up Marlee RedWolf Rave for one of the longest school bus rides in California.
It is 6:54 a.m. Marlee, a 14-year-old with raven hair and red nail polish, climbs aboard. She is one of nine students who spend more than two hours riding this bus 120 miles every school day to and from the Furnace Creek area to their school in Shoshone.
The long distance and light passenger load make this bus ride exorbitantly expensive. The Death Valley Unified School District spends about $3,500 a year for each of its 60 students on home-to-school transportation — compared with about $26 per student in more densely populated districts, according to data compiled by the California School Boards Assn.
So when Gov. Jerry Brown announced that lagging state revenue would require eliminating all school transportation funding for the rest of this fiscal year, it hit this tiny school district harder than just about any other in California. Death Valley Supt. Jim Copeland calls the cut, which took effect Jan. 1, "catastrophic."
For students like Marlee, the issue goes way beyond dollars and cents. The bus is her lifeline from the desolation of the desert to a wider world of teachers and friends, school sports and art projects and academic stimulation.
"School is the highlight of my life, and we can't get to school without the buses," Marlee said after a recent morning ride.
Educators statewide have decried the busing cuts as particularly unfair to small and rural districts that shoulder disproportionately high transportation costs. They are scrambling to reverse the move with legal action, letter-writing campaigns and legislative lobbying. Some are arguing that if cuts have to be made, they should be distributed equitably across the state.
The Small School Districts' Assn. is advising its 330 members to consider transportation fees and independent study for far-flung students.
State funding is based on each district's transportation costs. Districts in rural mountain counties such as Tuolumne and Mariposa, and in such desert communities as Inyo, are losing $200 or more per student.
Those in densely populated urban and suburban counties such as Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside will lose $50 or less. Los Angeles Unified, the largest school system in the state, is taking a hit of $59 per student.
Because Brown acted in the middle of the school year, districts got half the state funding they were counting on. Next year, they'll get nothing: Brown has proposed wiping out the entire $619-million school transportation program. Without state funding, districts would have to find the money elsewhere or stop busing their students.
"Home-to-school transportation is about the worst place to cut because it hits districts so differently," said Dennis Meyers of the school boards group, which is considering joining a lawsuit filed last month by L.A. Unified against the reductions. "It's a killer for some districts."
Southern Humboldt Unified recently sent layoff notices to all 14 transportation department employees. The district spends about $1,780 a year per student transporting 650 of them in 11 buses over 200,000 miles of rugged mountain roads, Supt. Jim Stewart said.
Without relief, he said, the district will run a skeleton program next year for physically disabled students who are guaranteed busing under federal law and for a limited number of others. Parents may have to carpool or buy public bus passes, he said.
That won't work for most families in Death Valley, where 85% of the students come from low-income households, Copeland says.
For Marlee, no bus means no school. Her single mother, Deb Watterson, who is also a Death Valley school board member, hasn't had a steady job since 2004, when she was paid through a federal grant to monitor wells on her Timbisha Shoshone tribal land.
Watterson said she suffers from several health problems, survives on welfare and food stamps and could never afford the $5-a-gallon gas to make the round trip every day herself. Sometimes, she said, she can't afford the gas to make monthly board meetings.
Home schooling is also out. The family has no computer or Internet access, and Watterson, 53, said she feels unqualified to teach her daughter because she never finished high school herself.
In this distant outpost, where only about 10 families live in the Indian village and 24 others were counted in the 2010 census for Furnace Creek, tutors are few and far between.
Watterson would never consider putting her daughter in boarding school. The idea stirs ugly images of the well-documented beatings and other abuse inflicted on Native American children in some Christian boarding schools, Watterson said.
Moving closer to school is out of the question; she can't afford to pay rent. The family's compact two-bedroom home, decorated with Indian quilts and art, is fully paid for.
In any case, Watterson said, she never intends to leave the land of her ancestors again. An interlude in Des Moines before Marlee was born depressed her — the concrete buildings, the pollution and noise, the crime. "I felt like I was choking to death," she said.
She missed the vast beauty of her tribal homeland — the desert blooms and splash of starlight, the yowl of coyotes piercing an otherwise silent night. Shortly after Marlee was born, she returned to Death Valley.
"This is our land — all of it," said Watterson, sweeping her arm across the desert vista as she and Marlee sat outside with Batman, their dog. "I'm never leaving Timbisha again."
Other Death Valley families are considering their options. Barb and Paul Taylor say they may move to Texas with their son, 11-year-old Zachary. They both have steady work at a Furnace Creek restaurant but say the drive to school would cost them $1,000 a month in gas — wiping out much of their disposable income — and conflict with their work hours.
They can afford a computer and Internet service, should home schooling be their only option, but say they would not want that for their son.
"School is about more than learning; it's the only time Zach can socialize with other kids," his mother said.
Paul Taylor said the transportation cuts amount to discrimination.
"The poor won't have an opportunity to educate their kids, and this is the only chance they have to get out of poverty," he said. "They'll be forced to use welfare and cost the state more in the long run."
In Death Valley, the $210,000 transportation budget is one-sixth of the district's $1.2-million operating budget, a far higher proportion than in more compact districts. Copeland said he will use the district's reserve funds to maintain bus service for the rest of the school year, at a cost of $105,000.
But there won't be any money left to pay for busing next year, he said. That's why Copeland has discussed layoffs or pay cuts with some of his 22 employees. He has contacted his state legislative representatives about trying to restore Death Valley's state funding.
Copeland also supports Brown's proposed ballot measure to raise money for schools through tax increases, although the nonpartisan state legislative analyst has said the taxes could bring in much less than the governor is counting on.
At least for now, the buses are still rolling.
On a recent afternoon at Death Valley High School, Marlee chats with a classmate as she works on an art project about a rare trip away from the desert to San Diego. The students wonder whether there will be enough money to bus the track team to meets; if not, there may be no track this year.
The school has already pulled out of a basketball and volleyball league because the games were as far as seven hours away by bus and required overnight stays. Instead, Copeland is trying to arrange games with schools "close to home," which means within a two-hour drive.
At 2:30 p.m., Marlee, Zachary and seven classmates board the bus for the long ride home. Most of them sleep. Zachary listens to Usher and Bruno Mars on his iPod Nano, puzzles over math homework and stares out the window.
On good days, there is something new to see: thick blankets of fog and mist, maybe some road kill, maybe a red-tailed hawk. Mostly, it is a long, boring trip.
But the students can't imagine life without it.
"Without the bus," Marlee said, "I would die."
[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rural-schools-20120119,0,4691011.story]
Reporting from Death Valley -- As the day's first light streaks pink across the sky, a yellow school bus appears on a lonely road leading to an Indian village in Death Valley National Park. The bus rumbles past desert mesquite and ocher mountains to pick up Marlee RedWolf Rave for one of the longest school bus rides in California.
It is 6:54 a.m. Marlee, a 14-year-old with raven hair and red nail polish, climbs aboard. She is one of nine students who spend more than two hours riding this bus 120 miles every school day to and from the Furnace Creek area to their school in Shoshone.
The long distance and light passenger load make this bus ride exorbitantly expensive. The Death Valley Unified School District spends about $3,500 a year for each of its 60 students on home-to-school transportation — compared with about $26 per student in more densely populated districts, according to data compiled by the California School Boards Assn.
So when Gov. Jerry Brown announced that lagging state revenue would require eliminating all school transportation funding for the rest of this fiscal year, it hit this tiny school district harder than just about any other in California. Death Valley Supt. Jim Copeland calls the cut, which took effect Jan. 1, "catastrophic."
For students like Marlee, the issue goes way beyond dollars and cents. The bus is her lifeline from the desolation of the desert to a wider world of teachers and friends, school sports and art projects and academic stimulation.
"School is the highlight of my life, and we can't get to school without the buses," Marlee said after a recent morning ride.
Educators statewide have decried the busing cuts as particularly unfair to small and rural districts that shoulder disproportionately high transportation costs. They are scrambling to reverse the move with legal action, letter-writing campaigns and legislative lobbying. Some are arguing that if cuts have to be made, they should be distributed equitably across the state.
The Small School Districts' Assn. is advising its 330 members to consider transportation fees and independent study for far-flung students.
State funding is based on each district's transportation costs. Districts in rural mountain counties such as Tuolumne and Mariposa, and in such desert communities as Inyo, are losing $200 or more per student.
Those in densely populated urban and suburban counties such as Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside will lose $50 or less. Los Angeles Unified, the largest school system in the state, is taking a hit of $59 per student.
Because Brown acted in the middle of the school year, districts got half the state funding they were counting on. Next year, they'll get nothing: Brown has proposed wiping out the entire $619-million school transportation program. Without state funding, districts would have to find the money elsewhere or stop busing their students.
"Home-to-school transportation is about the worst place to cut because it hits districts so differently," said Dennis Meyers of the school boards group, which is considering joining a lawsuit filed last month by L.A. Unified against the reductions. "It's a killer for some districts."
Southern Humboldt Unified recently sent layoff notices to all 14 transportation department employees. The district spends about $1,780 a year per student transporting 650 of them in 11 buses over 200,000 miles of rugged mountain roads, Supt. Jim Stewart said.
Without relief, he said, the district will run a skeleton program next year for physically disabled students who are guaranteed busing under federal law and for a limited number of others. Parents may have to carpool or buy public bus passes, he said.
That won't work for most families in Death Valley, where 85% of the students come from low-income households, Copeland says.
For Marlee, no bus means no school. Her single mother, Deb Watterson, who is also a Death Valley school board member, hasn't had a steady job since 2004, when she was paid through a federal grant to monitor wells on her Timbisha Shoshone tribal land.
Watterson said she suffers from several health problems, survives on welfare and food stamps and could never afford the $5-a-gallon gas to make the round trip every day herself. Sometimes, she said, she can't afford the gas to make monthly board meetings.
Home schooling is also out. The family has no computer or Internet access, and Watterson, 53, said she feels unqualified to teach her daughter because she never finished high school herself.
In this distant outpost, where only about 10 families live in the Indian village and 24 others were counted in the 2010 census for Furnace Creek, tutors are few and far between.
Watterson would never consider putting her daughter in boarding school. The idea stirs ugly images of the well-documented beatings and other abuse inflicted on Native American children in some Christian boarding schools, Watterson said.
Moving closer to school is out of the question; she can't afford to pay rent. The family's compact two-bedroom home, decorated with Indian quilts and art, is fully paid for.
In any case, Watterson said, she never intends to leave the land of her ancestors again. An interlude in Des Moines before Marlee was born depressed her — the concrete buildings, the pollution and noise, the crime. "I felt like I was choking to death," she said.
She missed the vast beauty of her tribal homeland — the desert blooms and splash of starlight, the yowl of coyotes piercing an otherwise silent night. Shortly after Marlee was born, she returned to Death Valley.
"This is our land — all of it," said Watterson, sweeping her arm across the desert vista as she and Marlee sat outside with Batman, their dog. "I'm never leaving Timbisha again."
Other Death Valley families are considering their options. Barb and Paul Taylor say they may move to Texas with their son, 11-year-old Zachary. They both have steady work at a Furnace Creek restaurant but say the drive to school would cost them $1,000 a month in gas — wiping out much of their disposable income — and conflict with their work hours.
They can afford a computer and Internet service, should home schooling be their only option, but say they would not want that for their son.
"School is about more than learning; it's the only time Zach can socialize with other kids," his mother said.
Paul Taylor said the transportation cuts amount to discrimination.
"The poor won't have an opportunity to educate their kids, and this is the only chance they have to get out of poverty," he said. "They'll be forced to use welfare and cost the state more in the long run."
In Death Valley, the $210,000 transportation budget is one-sixth of the district's $1.2-million operating budget, a far higher proportion than in more compact districts. Copeland said he will use the district's reserve funds to maintain bus service for the rest of the school year, at a cost of $105,000.
But there won't be any money left to pay for busing next year, he said. That's why Copeland has discussed layoffs or pay cuts with some of his 22 employees. He has contacted his state legislative representatives about trying to restore Death Valley's state funding.
Copeland also supports Brown's proposed ballot measure to raise money for schools through tax increases, although the nonpartisan state legislative analyst has said the taxes could bring in much less than the governor is counting on.
At least for now, the buses are still rolling.
On a recent afternoon at Death Valley High School, Marlee chats with a classmate as she works on an art project about a rare trip away from the desert to San Diego. The students wonder whether there will be enough money to bus the track team to meets; if not, there may be no track this year.
The school has already pulled out of a basketball and volleyball league because the games were as far as seven hours away by bus and required overnight stays. Instead, Copeland is trying to arrange games with schools "close to home," which means within a two-hour drive.
At 2:30 p.m., Marlee, Zachary and seven classmates board the bus for the long ride home. Most of them sleep. Zachary listens to Usher and Bruno Mars on his iPod Nano, puzzles over math homework and stares out the window.
On good days, there is something new to see: thick blankets of fog and mist, maybe some road kill, maybe a red-tailed hawk. Mostly, it is a long, boring trip.
But the students can't imagine life without it.
"Without the bus," Marlee said, "I would die."
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
2012-01-17 "The Great Dispensary Freeze of 2012" by David Downs from "East Bay Express" newspaper
[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/LegalizationNation/archives/2012/01/16/the-great-dispensary-freeze-of-2012]
San Francisco, the hotbed of marijuana law reform, has frozen medical cannabis dispensary permitting this winter as the City — and dozens of others across the state — nervously await a decision by the California Supreme Court on the very legality of such permits.
Nine groups that are seeking permits to open new San Francisco clubs — mostly in the Mission — have been caught in limbo, the Department of Public Health told Legalization Nation. San Francisco currently has 26 permitted dispensaries. However, an October decision by California's Second District Court of Appeals, in the case of Pack v. Superior Court, states that local regulations — such as permits and fees — are preempted by federal drug law.
California cities and counties can either help Uncle Sam prosecute the Drug War or stand idly by, the appeals court found. But local jurisdictions can't actively contravene federal law with medical marijuana distribution permits, fees, and mandates for lab testing.
As a result, progressive cities with dispensary regulations have paused their programs, cities and counties opposed to medical marijuana are using Pack to ban all clubs, and unregulated clubs now have legal cover to open without any rules. The city of Long Beach is planning an appeal, and the California Supreme Court has until February 8 to decide to either hear it or let the appellate decision stand. Their decision will be pivotal, lawyers say.
If Pack stands, “we have an out-of-control industry we could not effectively regulate,” said Bob Shannon, Long Beach's city attorney. “It's a totally unacceptable set of circumstances, at least for us.”
Shannon said his office will go to the Long Beach City Council January 17 and request a ban on all dispensaries until the Pack appeal is settled. There are about sixty dispensaries in Long Beach — and no one has a permit under the city's spring 2010 ordinance, which called for a lottery system and steep fees to determine which operators could stay open. It also mandated safety testing.
Long Beach dispensary operator Ryan Pack, represented by attorney Matt Pappas, sued Long Beach over its permit program in September of 2010. Pappas argued that the federal Drug War preempts localities from picking winners for pot permits. Astonishingly, the appellate court upheld the interpretation in October, prompting Long Beach's appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The American Civil Liberties Union, several cities, and national marijuana patient lobby Americans for Safe Access have denounced the appellate court's decision and asked the Supreme Court to wipe out its existence by de-publishing it. Pack stymies regulation and leads to bans that prevent safe access, they say. Three other California appellate courts have ruled to the contrary on issues of federal preemption, critics note.
Shannon agrees. “The law on this issue is chaotic, and has not been consistently applied,” he said.
Los Angeles City Attorney Asha Greenberg seemed exasperated. “With Pack we can't regulate, we can't control what kind of quality products people are getting when it comes to things people eat, pesticides, potency, any of that.” Los Angeles is also mulling a ban again.
Seven-year old delivery-only dispensary The Green Cross has been applying for a permit to open a physical location at 4218 Mission in San Francisco for a year. Manager Caren Woodson said the city put her permit hearing on hold in November, citing the Pack case. She called the situation “unfortunate” and awaits the Supreme Court's decision.
Five other groups are seeking permits on Mission. The popular dispensary The Green Door is seeking a second location on Lombard Street.
Northern California dispensary developer Debby Goldsberry said cities and counties quickly used Pack as an excuse to ban dispensaries. “Right now is the worst time to pursue a city permit almost anywhere. Pack has had a big effect. A lot of cities are just waiting it out at this point. Some big change is coming if Pack stands.”
However, some cities are advancing: Oakland intends to permit four groups to open new dispensaries by the month's end, and in December, the City of Richmond permitted its first three dispensaries, said city attorney Mary Renfro.
Cities might be able to re-word their permitting schemes to survive preemption, Pack notes. Arturo Sanchez, assistant to the city administrator in Oakland, indicated it could take three weeks to four months for the city to rewrite its ordinances around Pack, if it's upheld.
The San Francisco City Attorney's office stated in an email, “If the Supreme Court does not grant review, the City Attorney's Office will work with the City to address SF's conformance with this decision.”
But Shannon said rewording ordinances to comply with Pack is too hard. It would mean switching from a system of “permits” to something like a “certificate of non-disallowal”.
“It doesn't make any sense,” Shannon said.
Oakland lawyer and dispensary permit applicant Robert Raich expects the Supreme Court to de-publish Pack. The high court has a history of upholding state law in the face of federal preemption challenges, he said.
“It was wrongly decided and it will be de-published or review will be granted," Raich said. "Eventually the state Supreme Court will reverse it."
Still, the Pack decision exposes the fault line running through the national terrain of marijuana law.
“We've known for some time that [regulation] isn't consistent with federal law,” Shannon said. “Unfortunately Long Beach just got put at the front of the class.”
Pending San Francisco medical cannabis dispensary applications as of 11/10/11
The Green Cross — 4218 Mission St.
Bay Area Compassion Health Care Center, Inc — 2139 Taraval St.
Tree-Med, Inc — 5234 Mission St.
Mission Organics Center — 5258 Mission St.
Mission Herbal Care — 3139 Mission St.
Grassroots — 952 Mission St.
To be determined — 101 Jessie St. (70 2nd St.)
Axis of Love — 1260 Mission St.
Happy Days — 100 Sickles Ave.
Cambon Connoiseur Cooperative — 33 Cambon Dr.
Bay Area Medicinal Facility — 17 Halleck St.
JM Collective — 471 Jessie St.
Green Door — 2414 Lombard St.
Permitted San Francisco medical cannabis dispensaries
Market St. Cooperative — 1884 Market St.
Re-leaf Herbal — 1284 Mission St.
Med Thrive Co-op — 933 Mission St.
1944 Ocean Collective — 1944 Ocean Ave.
Bernal Heights Collective — 33 29th St.
Sanctuary — 669 O'Farrell St.
San Francisco Med Cannabis Clinic — 122 10th St.
The Vapor Room — 607A Haight St.
The Divinity Tree — 958 Geary St.
Emmaylns — 1597 Howard St., Ste A
Good Fellows Cannabis Club — 473 Haight St.
Green Cross — 230 11th St.
The Green Door — 843 Howard St.
Hemp Center (aka Patient Place) — 4811 Geary Blvd.
Hope Net Co-Op — 22 9th St.
Ketama Collective — 14 Valencia St.
Love Shack — 502 14th St
Grass Roots — 1077 Post St.
B.A.C.H. — 1545 Ocean Ave.
Mr. Nice Guy — 174 Valencia St.
BASA — 1328 Grove St.
Valencia Street Caregivers — 208 Valencia St.
SPARC — 1256-1258 Mission St.
Igzactly Health Center — 527 Howard St.
Shambala Healing Center - 2441 Mission St.
The Apothecary — 2095 Market St.
— San Francisco Department of Public Health
[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/LegalizationNation/archives/2012/01/16/the-great-dispensary-freeze-of-2012]
San Francisco, the hotbed of marijuana law reform, has frozen medical cannabis dispensary permitting this winter as the City — and dozens of others across the state — nervously await a decision by the California Supreme Court on the very legality of such permits.
Nine groups that are seeking permits to open new San Francisco clubs — mostly in the Mission — have been caught in limbo, the Department of Public Health told Legalization Nation. San Francisco currently has 26 permitted dispensaries. However, an October decision by California's Second District Court of Appeals, in the case of Pack v. Superior Court, states that local regulations — such as permits and fees — are preempted by federal drug law.
California cities and counties can either help Uncle Sam prosecute the Drug War or stand idly by, the appeals court found. But local jurisdictions can't actively contravene federal law with medical marijuana distribution permits, fees, and mandates for lab testing.
As a result, progressive cities with dispensary regulations have paused their programs, cities and counties opposed to medical marijuana are using Pack to ban all clubs, and unregulated clubs now have legal cover to open without any rules. The city of Long Beach is planning an appeal, and the California Supreme Court has until February 8 to decide to either hear it or let the appellate decision stand. Their decision will be pivotal, lawyers say.
If Pack stands, “we have an out-of-control industry we could not effectively regulate,” said Bob Shannon, Long Beach's city attorney. “It's a totally unacceptable set of circumstances, at least for us.”
Shannon said his office will go to the Long Beach City Council January 17 and request a ban on all dispensaries until the Pack appeal is settled. There are about sixty dispensaries in Long Beach — and no one has a permit under the city's spring 2010 ordinance, which called for a lottery system and steep fees to determine which operators could stay open. It also mandated safety testing.
Long Beach dispensary operator Ryan Pack, represented by attorney Matt Pappas, sued Long Beach over its permit program in September of 2010. Pappas argued that the federal Drug War preempts localities from picking winners for pot permits. Astonishingly, the appellate court upheld the interpretation in October, prompting Long Beach's appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The American Civil Liberties Union, several cities, and national marijuana patient lobby Americans for Safe Access have denounced the appellate court's decision and asked the Supreme Court to wipe out its existence by de-publishing it. Pack stymies regulation and leads to bans that prevent safe access, they say. Three other California appellate courts have ruled to the contrary on issues of federal preemption, critics note.
Shannon agrees. “The law on this issue is chaotic, and has not been consistently applied,” he said.
Los Angeles City Attorney Asha Greenberg seemed exasperated. “With Pack we can't regulate, we can't control what kind of quality products people are getting when it comes to things people eat, pesticides, potency, any of that.” Los Angeles is also mulling a ban again.
Seven-year old delivery-only dispensary The Green Cross has been applying for a permit to open a physical location at 4218 Mission in San Francisco for a year. Manager Caren Woodson said the city put her permit hearing on hold in November, citing the Pack case. She called the situation “unfortunate” and awaits the Supreme Court's decision.
Five other groups are seeking permits on Mission. The popular dispensary The Green Door is seeking a second location on Lombard Street.
Northern California dispensary developer Debby Goldsberry said cities and counties quickly used Pack as an excuse to ban dispensaries. “Right now is the worst time to pursue a city permit almost anywhere. Pack has had a big effect. A lot of cities are just waiting it out at this point. Some big change is coming if Pack stands.”
However, some cities are advancing: Oakland intends to permit four groups to open new dispensaries by the month's end, and in December, the City of Richmond permitted its first three dispensaries, said city attorney Mary Renfro.
Cities might be able to re-word their permitting schemes to survive preemption, Pack notes. Arturo Sanchez, assistant to the city administrator in Oakland, indicated it could take three weeks to four months for the city to rewrite its ordinances around Pack, if it's upheld.
The San Francisco City Attorney's office stated in an email, “If the Supreme Court does not grant review, the City Attorney's Office will work with the City to address SF's conformance with this decision.”
But Shannon said rewording ordinances to comply with Pack is too hard. It would mean switching from a system of “permits” to something like a “certificate of non-disallowal”.
“It doesn't make any sense,” Shannon said.
Oakland lawyer and dispensary permit applicant Robert Raich expects the Supreme Court to de-publish Pack. The high court has a history of upholding state law in the face of federal preemption challenges, he said.
“It was wrongly decided and it will be de-published or review will be granted," Raich said. "Eventually the state Supreme Court will reverse it."
Still, the Pack decision exposes the fault line running through the national terrain of marijuana law.
“We've known for some time that [regulation] isn't consistent with federal law,” Shannon said. “Unfortunately Long Beach just got put at the front of the class.”
Pending San Francisco medical cannabis dispensary applications as of 11/10/11
The Green Cross — 4218 Mission St.
Bay Area Compassion Health Care Center, Inc — 2139 Taraval St.
Tree-Med, Inc — 5234 Mission St.
Mission Organics Center — 5258 Mission St.
Mission Herbal Care — 3139 Mission St.
Grassroots — 952 Mission St.
To be determined — 101 Jessie St. (70 2nd St.)
Axis of Love — 1260 Mission St.
Happy Days — 100 Sickles Ave.
Cambon Connoiseur Cooperative — 33 Cambon Dr.
Bay Area Medicinal Facility — 17 Halleck St.
JM Collective — 471 Jessie St.
Green Door — 2414 Lombard St.
Permitted San Francisco medical cannabis dispensaries
Market St. Cooperative — 1884 Market St.
Re-leaf Herbal — 1284 Mission St.
Med Thrive Co-op — 933 Mission St.
1944 Ocean Collective — 1944 Ocean Ave.
Bernal Heights Collective — 33 29th St.
Sanctuary — 669 O'Farrell St.
San Francisco Med Cannabis Clinic — 122 10th St.
The Vapor Room — 607A Haight St.
The Divinity Tree — 958 Geary St.
Emmaylns — 1597 Howard St., Ste A
Good Fellows Cannabis Club — 473 Haight St.
Green Cross — 230 11th St.
The Green Door — 843 Howard St.
Hemp Center (aka Patient Place) — 4811 Geary Blvd.
Hope Net Co-Op — 22 9th St.
Ketama Collective — 14 Valencia St.
Love Shack — 502 14th St
Grass Roots — 1077 Post St.
B.A.C.H. — 1545 Ocean Ave.
Mr. Nice Guy — 174 Valencia St.
BASA — 1328 Grove St.
Valencia Street Caregivers — 208 Valencia St.
SPARC — 1256-1258 Mission St.
Igzactly Health Center — 527 Howard St.
Shambala Healing Center - 2441 Mission St.
The Apothecary — 2095 Market St.
— San Francisco Department of Public Health
Saturday, January 14, 2012
2012-01-14 "California Leads Nation in Unaccredited Schools, and Enforcement Is Lax" by JENNIFER GOLLAN from "New York Times"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/frederick-taylor-universitys-cheap-mbas-on-the-internet-may-not-be-such-a-bargain.html?ref=us]
Dibyendu Malakar needed a graduate business degree to advance his career, but he was working full time and could not afford $100,000 or more for a two-year M.B.A. program at Berkeley, Stanford or another accredited business school. So Mr. Malakar enrolled at Frederick Taylor University, an unaccredited school in Moraga.
Because Frederick Taylor is listed in California as a state-approved school, he said, “I thought, ‘It can’t be completely bogus.’ ” In fact, he got his M.B.A. via the Internet in just a year, for less than $5,000.
That may not have been quite the bargain it seemed to be, though. “I did not realize that it did not carry the same weight as Berkeley or Stanford,” said Mr. Malakar, who emigrated from India. “But it was not a complete waste.” Mr. Malakar said his M.B.A. helped him get a job as director of product management at a software company in Cupertino.
Shakila Marando, a 33-year-old doula from El Cerrito, is seeking a bachelor’s degree in management from Frederick Taylor. Although she has been a student for nearly a year, she has never spoken to a teacher, she said. “They e-mail you a package of reading materials to read with a multiple-choice exam that is open book,” said Ms. Marando, who is from Tanzania. “For me, it is very convenient and I can work full time and read a little bit on the side. It is pretty easy.”
For Mr. Malakar, Ms. Marando and hundreds of students like them, it matters little that Frederick Taylor has no library or dorms; or that some states, including California, Michigan and Oregon, refuse to hire its graduates for many civil service jobs; or that its degrees are worthless for most professional licenses or teaching certificates.
Education experts say California leads the nation in unaccredited schools. Frederick Taylor is one of nearly 1,000 unaccredited or questionably accredited colleges and vocational schools that have been operating in the state without regular inspections or evaluations of educational quality, which is required under a state law that has rarely been enforced. State approval is basically a license to operate. Accreditation comes from national or regional agencies that review curriculums and educational standards.
“There are a lot of schools that beg the question ‘What exactly is going on in California?’ ” said Eyal Ben Cohen, managing director of Accredibase Limited, a company based in London that monitors diploma mills. “California has very weak oversight procedures as far as allowing an institution to operate within its borders. An institution within California can obtain a license very easily.”
Based in a cramped office on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Moraga, Frederick Taylor is run by Mansour S. Saki and Zhilla Nayeri Saki. Mr. Saki’s own curriculum vitae lists a Ph.D. from the C.S.M. Institute of Graduate Studies, which forfeited its accreditation in 2004.
Zhilla Nayeri Saki lists a doctorate in business administration from the same institution. Both are listed among Frederick Taylor’s six-person faculty, along with the couple’s 32-year-old daughter, Maryam S. Boller.
Selling diplomas over the Internet is a thriving business. The Sakis live in Orinda in a three- bedroom home with an assessed value of $1.1 million, according to property records.
The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is responsible for overseeing schools like Frederick Taylor, which was named for a late-19th-century management consultant. But in interviews, state officials conceded that many unaccredited schools had operated with state approval for decades without regular inspections. Frederick Taylor initially received approval to award degrees in 1994, but state records do not show that it was ever inspected.
In October, state officials renewed the school’s application to operate, again without a visit.
“They received approval because the eight-page application that they filled out was in compliance with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the postsecondary education bureau.
Frederick Taylor charges $5,212 for a bachelor’s degree or a master’s in business administration. The academic requirements are less stringent than those at accredited universities. Full-time M.B.A. students at the University of California’s Haas School of Business at Berkeley, for example, must complete 51 semester units of course work. Frederick Taylor requires 32 units.
In a brief interview recently, Mr. Saki defended his school’s quality but said he had no plans to apply for accreditation from an organization recognized by the United States Department of Education.
“Licensing organizations and the civil service department in Michigan are entitled to set their own selection policies,” Mr. Saki said in a subsequent e-mail. “For some reasons, they have decided to disallow graduates of state-approved schools to join their organizations.”
Two people who were listed as faculty members on Frederick Taylor’s Web site and its course catalog said they no longer worked there when they were contacted by phone.
One of them, Pamela Berkman, a production manager at John Wiley & Sons, was listed as a faculty member but said she had not taught at the school for at least five years. Robert Deer, who teaches marketing and business courses in Florida, said he was hired to teach at Frederick Taylor about a year ago but had not been contacted to teach a class.
“I would not have applied for the job if I had known they were unaccredited,” Mr. Deer said.
Mr. Deer’s and Ms. Berkman’s names disappeared from the faculty list soon after a reporter contacted them about the school.
Mr. Saki said his school had as many as 500 students, many from Europe, Asia or Africa. He declined to elaborate on how foreign students were recruited or how many American students were enrolled.
A branch of Frederick Taylor University, called Frederick Taylor International University, joined with recruiters based in India, China and other countries to enroll students, most of them from abroad. After officials in Hawaii found the school had failed to notify students that it was unaccredited, and falsely claimed it was licensed by the state, among other state violations, the school was closed in 2001 and ordered to pay a $35,000 fine.
California regulators say they concern themselves only with whether schools abide by California law, in keeping their promises to students.
“The only thing we can go by is what they have been doing in California,” Mr. Heimerich, the consumer affairs spokesman, said. “If they are compliant with California law, then what standing do we have to take any action against them?”
Given the state’s history of lax oversight, it now faces the enormous challenge of completing roughly 1,300 compliance inspections by its stated goal of fall 2013.
“The former staff had more of a consultant role,” said Joanne Wenzel, the deputy bureau chief of the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education. “Now we are trying to bring them into compliance to regulate them” and make sure they follow state laws. “There weren’t a lot of teeth in the old law. We have moved away from that in the new law. We’ve gone to a consumer protection stance.”
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/frederick-taylor-universitys-cheap-mbas-on-the-internet-may-not-be-such-a-bargain.html?ref=us]
Dibyendu Malakar needed a graduate business degree to advance his career, but he was working full time and could not afford $100,000 or more for a two-year M.B.A. program at Berkeley, Stanford or another accredited business school. So Mr. Malakar enrolled at Frederick Taylor University, an unaccredited school in Moraga.
Because Frederick Taylor is listed in California as a state-approved school, he said, “I thought, ‘It can’t be completely bogus.’ ” In fact, he got his M.B.A. via the Internet in just a year, for less than $5,000.
That may not have been quite the bargain it seemed to be, though. “I did not realize that it did not carry the same weight as Berkeley or Stanford,” said Mr. Malakar, who emigrated from India. “But it was not a complete waste.” Mr. Malakar said his M.B.A. helped him get a job as director of product management at a software company in Cupertino.
Shakila Marando, a 33-year-old doula from El Cerrito, is seeking a bachelor’s degree in management from Frederick Taylor. Although she has been a student for nearly a year, she has never spoken to a teacher, she said. “They e-mail you a package of reading materials to read with a multiple-choice exam that is open book,” said Ms. Marando, who is from Tanzania. “For me, it is very convenient and I can work full time and read a little bit on the side. It is pretty easy.”
For Mr. Malakar, Ms. Marando and hundreds of students like them, it matters little that Frederick Taylor has no library or dorms; or that some states, including California, Michigan and Oregon, refuse to hire its graduates for many civil service jobs; or that its degrees are worthless for most professional licenses or teaching certificates.
Education experts say California leads the nation in unaccredited schools. Frederick Taylor is one of nearly 1,000 unaccredited or questionably accredited colleges and vocational schools that have been operating in the state without regular inspections or evaluations of educational quality, which is required under a state law that has rarely been enforced. State approval is basically a license to operate. Accreditation comes from national or regional agencies that review curriculums and educational standards.
“There are a lot of schools that beg the question ‘What exactly is going on in California?’ ” said Eyal Ben Cohen, managing director of Accredibase Limited, a company based in London that monitors diploma mills. “California has very weak oversight procedures as far as allowing an institution to operate within its borders. An institution within California can obtain a license very easily.”
Based in a cramped office on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Moraga, Frederick Taylor is run by Mansour S. Saki and Zhilla Nayeri Saki. Mr. Saki’s own curriculum vitae lists a Ph.D. from the C.S.M. Institute of Graduate Studies, which forfeited its accreditation in 2004.
Zhilla Nayeri Saki lists a doctorate in business administration from the same institution. Both are listed among Frederick Taylor’s six-person faculty, along with the couple’s 32-year-old daughter, Maryam S. Boller.
Selling diplomas over the Internet is a thriving business. The Sakis live in Orinda in a three- bedroom home with an assessed value of $1.1 million, according to property records.
The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is responsible for overseeing schools like Frederick Taylor, which was named for a late-19th-century management consultant. But in interviews, state officials conceded that many unaccredited schools had operated with state approval for decades without regular inspections. Frederick Taylor initially received approval to award degrees in 1994, but state records do not show that it was ever inspected.
In October, state officials renewed the school’s application to operate, again without a visit.
“They received approval because the eight-page application that they filled out was in compliance with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the postsecondary education bureau.
Frederick Taylor charges $5,212 for a bachelor’s degree or a master’s in business administration. The academic requirements are less stringent than those at accredited universities. Full-time M.B.A. students at the University of California’s Haas School of Business at Berkeley, for example, must complete 51 semester units of course work. Frederick Taylor requires 32 units.
In a brief interview recently, Mr. Saki defended his school’s quality but said he had no plans to apply for accreditation from an organization recognized by the United States Department of Education.
“Licensing organizations and the civil service department in Michigan are entitled to set their own selection policies,” Mr. Saki said in a subsequent e-mail. “For some reasons, they have decided to disallow graduates of state-approved schools to join their organizations.”
Two people who were listed as faculty members on Frederick Taylor’s Web site and its course catalog said they no longer worked there when they were contacted by phone.
One of them, Pamela Berkman, a production manager at John Wiley & Sons, was listed as a faculty member but said she had not taught at the school for at least five years. Robert Deer, who teaches marketing and business courses in Florida, said he was hired to teach at Frederick Taylor about a year ago but had not been contacted to teach a class.
“I would not have applied for the job if I had known they were unaccredited,” Mr. Deer said.
Mr. Deer’s and Ms. Berkman’s names disappeared from the faculty list soon after a reporter contacted them about the school.
Mr. Saki said his school had as many as 500 students, many from Europe, Asia or Africa. He declined to elaborate on how foreign students were recruited or how many American students were enrolled.
A branch of Frederick Taylor University, called Frederick Taylor International University, joined with recruiters based in India, China and other countries to enroll students, most of them from abroad. After officials in Hawaii found the school had failed to notify students that it was unaccredited, and falsely claimed it was licensed by the state, among other state violations, the school was closed in 2001 and ordered to pay a $35,000 fine.
California regulators say they concern themselves only with whether schools abide by California law, in keeping their promises to students.
“The only thing we can go by is what they have been doing in California,” Mr. Heimerich, the consumer affairs spokesman, said. “If they are compliant with California law, then what standing do we have to take any action against them?”
Given the state’s history of lax oversight, it now faces the enormous challenge of completing roughly 1,300 compliance inspections by its stated goal of fall 2013.
“The former staff had more of a consultant role,” said Joanne Wenzel, the deputy bureau chief of the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education. “Now we are trying to bring them into compliance to regulate them” and make sure they follow state laws. “There weren’t a lot of teeth in the old law. We have moved away from that in the new law. We’ve gone to a consumer protection stance.”
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
2012-01-11 "California Teachers Take On Jerry Brown; The Working Class Begins to Fight Back" by BILL LEUMER and ANN ROBERTSON
[http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/11/the-working-class-begins-to-fight-back/]
Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association.
Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). They can be contacted atsanfrancisco@workerscompass.org.
---
After decades of losing ground and feeling helpless, working people are beginning to fight back. This development has emerged in part because the Occupy Wall Street movement has thrown a national spotlight on the growing inequalities in wealth and the mainstream politicians who have enabled this trend to continue for decades. The Occupy Wall Street movement drew the obvious conclusion: meaningful change will happen, not by endless waiting for the politicians to act, but by working people relying on themselves and acting collectively.
The ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) in the Longview, Washington area, for example, has announced that it will put up a fight to resist the union-busting maneuvers of EGT Development, which is reneging on a previous agreement to use ILWU workers. The union has put out a “Call to Action,” appealing to all working people to come to their aid in order to stop EGT Development from loading grain without the ILWU workers. The union leaders rightfully argue that the EGT effort to shift the work away from the ILWU workers is an attack on all working people, because the ILWU is one of the strongest unions in the country, it has engaged in job actions in support of working people throughout the country and the world, and there was a previous agreement that these were ILWU jobs.
Meanwhile in California the battle lines are forming around a different issue: competing ballot measures that would increase the state’s revenue by raising taxes.
After public education suffered debilitating cuts during the past 5 years, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) has valiantly stood up and proposed a measure that would raise taxes on people making more than $1 million by 3 percent and those making more than $2 million by 5 percent. The money raised would be earmarked for public education and vital social services, and there would be no expiration date on this tax increase, if it passes.
Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal stands on the other side of the class divide. He is supporting a measure that would increase taxes on people who make more than $250,000 by 1 percent and those making over $500,000 by 2 percent. But he has also included an increase in the sales tax by one-half cent, and the entire tax package includes an expiration date of 2016. The money has not been earmarked for public education or vital social services.
While Brown’s proposal might seem to have a progressive component by raising taxes on the wealthy, he in fact is doing everything he can to protect the rich. The California Democratic Party, of which Jerry Brown is a leading member, has gone on record favoring raising taxes on everyone but the richest 1 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2010). But Brown is also well aware of strong public sentiment (over 60 percent) in favor of raising taxes on the rich and equally strong public opposition to additional cuts to education. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Brown conceded that an increase in the sales tax was not popular, but he included it because “I thought we ought to have a balanced program.” (December 16, 2011).
With a stubborn budget deficit and polls wildly favoring increased taxes on the rich, Brown was compelled to propose increasing their taxes. But his tax proposal represents the most minimal concession to popular sentiment. If it passes, the wealthy would suffer a miniscule increase in their taxes, but only temporarily because of the expiration date packed into the proposal. The increase in the sales tax — the most insidious part of Brown’s proposal — is fundamentally regressive, meaning that it would constitute a heavier burden on the poorest members of society and the lightest burden on the wealthiest.
Brown’s description of his tax measure as “a balanced program” is surely disingenuous. Between 1978 and 2008 the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians grew 81 percent while the income of the bottom 20 percent dropped by 11.5 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2011). A “balanced program” would have raised taxes on the wealthiest by 81 percent and lowered taxes on the bottom 20 percent by 11.5 percent. But Brown’s sentiments clearly lie with the top 1 percent, not the bottom 99 percent, let alone the bottom 20 percent.
These competing tax measures, in the most rudimentary respect, represent the emergence of class struggle politics, and the people of California will be forced to take sides. In fact, some have already taken a stand. Because of the unpopularity of the sales tax and the mild increase in taxes on the wealthy, Jerry Brown has hoped to draw in the support of working people by putting pressure on top state union officials to reject the CFT initiative and support Brown’s counter proposal. The statewide Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials have bowed to the pressure. Whether some of the SEIU locals might rebel and refuse to follow has yet to be seen. After all, the rank and file are the ones who lose their jobs when there are budget deficits and cuts are made, and it is not clear that Brown’s proposal will protect any of them.
Meanwhile students and teachers in California are organizing massive actions in the spring to demand full funding for public education and social services by taxing the rich. On March 1 they are planning actions on campuses across the state, where each campus will define its own event. Then on March 5 all will converge on Sacramento to occupy the State Capitol. They are rejecting the long-discredited approach of hoping that politicians will throw them a few crumbs, since this policy has seemed to produce just the opposite of its intended effect: year after year public education and social service budgets have been slashed. Teachers have been laid off, class size has risen, university tuition has skyrocketed, state workers have been laid off and social services have been gutted. The San Francisco Labor Council and UPTE (University Professional and Technical Employees) have already endorsed these events with a strong resolution, and various union locals are in the process of doing the same. The San Francisco Labor Council and those organizing for March 1 and 5 have also endorsed CFT’s tax on millionaires.
The sides are being drawn: the 1 percent with its opulent reservoir of wealth is on one side, and the 99 percent — the vast majority of the population — is on the other. Whereas the 1 percent derives its power from money, the 99 percent will derive power from their overwhelming numbers. In organizing massive demonstrations to insist on the implementation of a different set of priorities, the 99 percent will be exercising independent political action, they will be relying on themselves and acting collectively, and they will be taking a first step in the direction of shifting the balance of power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. And in the process they will be insisting that society function as a true democracy: in the interests of the majority.
[http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/11/the-working-class-begins-to-fight-back/]
Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association.
Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). They can be contacted atsanfrancisco@workerscompass.org.
---
After decades of losing ground and feeling helpless, working people are beginning to fight back. This development has emerged in part because the Occupy Wall Street movement has thrown a national spotlight on the growing inequalities in wealth and the mainstream politicians who have enabled this trend to continue for decades. The Occupy Wall Street movement drew the obvious conclusion: meaningful change will happen, not by endless waiting for the politicians to act, but by working people relying on themselves and acting collectively.
The ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) in the Longview, Washington area, for example, has announced that it will put up a fight to resist the union-busting maneuvers of EGT Development, which is reneging on a previous agreement to use ILWU workers. The union has put out a “Call to Action,” appealing to all working people to come to their aid in order to stop EGT Development from loading grain without the ILWU workers. The union leaders rightfully argue that the EGT effort to shift the work away from the ILWU workers is an attack on all working people, because the ILWU is one of the strongest unions in the country, it has engaged in job actions in support of working people throughout the country and the world, and there was a previous agreement that these were ILWU jobs.
Meanwhile in California the battle lines are forming around a different issue: competing ballot measures that would increase the state’s revenue by raising taxes.
After public education suffered debilitating cuts during the past 5 years, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) has valiantly stood up and proposed a measure that would raise taxes on people making more than $1 million by 3 percent and those making more than $2 million by 5 percent. The money raised would be earmarked for public education and vital social services, and there would be no expiration date on this tax increase, if it passes.
Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal stands on the other side of the class divide. He is supporting a measure that would increase taxes on people who make more than $250,000 by 1 percent and those making over $500,000 by 2 percent. But he has also included an increase in the sales tax by one-half cent, and the entire tax package includes an expiration date of 2016. The money has not been earmarked for public education or vital social services.
While Brown’s proposal might seem to have a progressive component by raising taxes on the wealthy, he in fact is doing everything he can to protect the rich. The California Democratic Party, of which Jerry Brown is a leading member, has gone on record favoring raising taxes on everyone but the richest 1 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2010). But Brown is also well aware of strong public sentiment (over 60 percent) in favor of raising taxes on the rich and equally strong public opposition to additional cuts to education. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Brown conceded that an increase in the sales tax was not popular, but he included it because “I thought we ought to have a balanced program.” (December 16, 2011).
With a stubborn budget deficit and polls wildly favoring increased taxes on the rich, Brown was compelled to propose increasing their taxes. But his tax proposal represents the most minimal concession to popular sentiment. If it passes, the wealthy would suffer a miniscule increase in their taxes, but only temporarily because of the expiration date packed into the proposal. The increase in the sales tax — the most insidious part of Brown’s proposal — is fundamentally regressive, meaning that it would constitute a heavier burden on the poorest members of society and the lightest burden on the wealthiest.
Brown’s description of his tax measure as “a balanced program” is surely disingenuous. Between 1978 and 2008 the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians grew 81 percent while the income of the bottom 20 percent dropped by 11.5 percent (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2011). A “balanced program” would have raised taxes on the wealthiest by 81 percent and lowered taxes on the bottom 20 percent by 11.5 percent. But Brown’s sentiments clearly lie with the top 1 percent, not the bottom 99 percent, let alone the bottom 20 percent.
These competing tax measures, in the most rudimentary respect, represent the emergence of class struggle politics, and the people of California will be forced to take sides. In fact, some have already taken a stand. Because of the unpopularity of the sales tax and the mild increase in taxes on the wealthy, Jerry Brown has hoped to draw in the support of working people by putting pressure on top state union officials to reject the CFT initiative and support Brown’s counter proposal. The statewide Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials have bowed to the pressure. Whether some of the SEIU locals might rebel and refuse to follow has yet to be seen. After all, the rank and file are the ones who lose their jobs when there are budget deficits and cuts are made, and it is not clear that Brown’s proposal will protect any of them.
Meanwhile students and teachers in California are organizing massive actions in the spring to demand full funding for public education and social services by taxing the rich. On March 1 they are planning actions on campuses across the state, where each campus will define its own event. Then on March 5 all will converge on Sacramento to occupy the State Capitol. They are rejecting the long-discredited approach of hoping that politicians will throw them a few crumbs, since this policy has seemed to produce just the opposite of its intended effect: year after year public education and social service budgets have been slashed. Teachers have been laid off, class size has risen, university tuition has skyrocketed, state workers have been laid off and social services have been gutted. The San Francisco Labor Council and UPTE (University Professional and Technical Employees) have already endorsed these events with a strong resolution, and various union locals are in the process of doing the same. The San Francisco Labor Council and those organizing for March 1 and 5 have also endorsed CFT’s tax on millionaires.
The sides are being drawn: the 1 percent with its opulent reservoir of wealth is on one side, and the 99 percent — the vast majority of the population — is on the other. Whereas the 1 percent derives its power from money, the 99 percent will derive power from their overwhelming numbers. In organizing massive demonstrations to insist on the implementation of a different set of priorities, the 99 percent will be exercising independent political action, they will be relying on themselves and acting collectively, and they will be taking a first step in the direction of shifting the balance of power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. And in the process they will be insisting that society function as a true democracy: in the interests of the majority.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
2012-01-10 "California community colleges approve overhaul" by Nanette Asimov from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/10/BAH41MN1JJ.DTL]
(01-10) 11:10 PST SACRAMENTO -- - Over the objections of angry college students and worried faculty members, California community college leaders voted Monday to support a systemwide overhaul that could end many free classes for older adults and squeeze out students who fail to move quickly through the system.
The 22 recommendations approved by the college system's Board of Governors are intended to address a devilish problem: Essential classes are in critically short supply and thousands of students are turned away from classes they need because of the state's economic crisis.
Board member Peter MacDougall, chairman of the Student Success Task Force that drew up the recommendations over the last year, said colleges can no longer afford to put out the welcome mat they have offered for generations.
"As wonderful as having open admission is, if it's a false promise, it fails," he said.
Under the new plan, all students will be expected to set up an education plan to move quickly toward an associate's degree or vocational certificate. If they linger too long or take too many classes unrelated to their goal, they lose registration priority. Others poor enough to quality for a fee waiver would lose that benefit after 110 credits, well beyond the 60 credits needed to transfer.
These changes, including a shift in key decision-making from the 112 campuses to the state chancellor's office, won't be automatic. Legislation is required for several of the proposals.
But Monday's vote, unanimous with two abstentions, was a significant step toward implementing them.
"This is the most significant issue that's come before the board," said Board of Governors President Scott Himmelstein.
Supporters include the Community College League of California and other groups that say the recommendations will focus more attention on students who fall through the cracks.
Scott Lay, president of the league, said it was "unconscionable" that higher education has been cut $2 billion this fiscal year. "But it's more unconscionable that we have a 20-point achievement gap between white and black students. We cannot ignore this any longer," he said.
Dozens of opponents addressed the board, fearful that students who don't fall within the scope of the recommendations will be shut out.
Many said that 110 credits isn't enough time for some students, especially those who have had troubled childhoods, are single parents or former offenders.
"These recommendations are discriminatory," said Paul Munoz, who works with needy students at Ventura Community College.
Ed Murray, an instructor at City College of San Francisco, where many opponents were from, urged the board to oppose the recommendations.
"Don't cut out the poorest of our society. Where are they going to go if they can't go to community college? To prison?" Murray asked.
Several of the speakers oversee programs for older adults, which offer free classes from memoir writing to music appreciation.
The recommendations direct colleges to spend their dollars first on students with academic or vocational goals. Only then should scarce resources be spent on free enrichment classes.
Chancellor Jack Scott told the audience that he has nothing against older adults. "I happen to be one of them," said the white-haired former state senator.
Scott also addressed those who criticized the rationing of education, an expression he has used himself.
"We're already rationing education," he said. "We're just doing it haphazardly."
Abstaining from the vote were board member Natalie Berg, also a City College of San Francisco trustee, and Danny Hawkins.
As the board members voted, students stood, interrupting with "Mike check!" the Occupy movement's signature statement. They paused only long enough to allow the board to finish voting, then shouted:
"We'll be back! We shut down the Port of Oakland - twice - and we're coming for you!"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/10/BAH41MN1JJ.DTL]
(01-10) 11:10 PST SACRAMENTO -- - Over the objections of angry college students and worried faculty members, California community college leaders voted Monday to support a systemwide overhaul that could end many free classes for older adults and squeeze out students who fail to move quickly through the system.
The 22 recommendations approved by the college system's Board of Governors are intended to address a devilish problem: Essential classes are in critically short supply and thousands of students are turned away from classes they need because of the state's economic crisis.
Board member Peter MacDougall, chairman of the Student Success Task Force that drew up the recommendations over the last year, said colleges can no longer afford to put out the welcome mat they have offered for generations.
"As wonderful as having open admission is, if it's a false promise, it fails," he said.
Under the new plan, all students will be expected to set up an education plan to move quickly toward an associate's degree or vocational certificate. If they linger too long or take too many classes unrelated to their goal, they lose registration priority. Others poor enough to quality for a fee waiver would lose that benefit after 110 credits, well beyond the 60 credits needed to transfer.
These changes, including a shift in key decision-making from the 112 campuses to the state chancellor's office, won't be automatic. Legislation is required for several of the proposals.
But Monday's vote, unanimous with two abstentions, was a significant step toward implementing them.
"This is the most significant issue that's come before the board," said Board of Governors President Scott Himmelstein.
Supporters include the Community College League of California and other groups that say the recommendations will focus more attention on students who fall through the cracks.
Scott Lay, president of the league, said it was "unconscionable" that higher education has been cut $2 billion this fiscal year. "But it's more unconscionable that we have a 20-point achievement gap between white and black students. We cannot ignore this any longer," he said.
Dozens of opponents addressed the board, fearful that students who don't fall within the scope of the recommendations will be shut out.
Many said that 110 credits isn't enough time for some students, especially those who have had troubled childhoods, are single parents or former offenders.
"These recommendations are discriminatory," said Paul Munoz, who works with needy students at Ventura Community College.
Ed Murray, an instructor at City College of San Francisco, where many opponents were from, urged the board to oppose the recommendations.
"Don't cut out the poorest of our society. Where are they going to go if they can't go to community college? To prison?" Murray asked.
Several of the speakers oversee programs for older adults, which offer free classes from memoir writing to music appreciation.
The recommendations direct colleges to spend their dollars first on students with academic or vocational goals. Only then should scarce resources be spent on free enrichment classes.
Chancellor Jack Scott told the audience that he has nothing against older adults. "I happen to be one of them," said the white-haired former state senator.
Scott also addressed those who criticized the rationing of education, an expression he has used himself.
"We're already rationing education," he said. "We're just doing it haphazardly."
Abstaining from the vote were board member Natalie Berg, also a City College of San Francisco trustee, and Danny Hawkins.
As the board members voted, students stood, interrupting with "Mike check!" the Occupy movement's signature statement. They paused only long enough to allow the board to finish voting, then shouted:
"We'll be back! We shut down the Port of Oakland - twice - and we're coming for you!"
Monday, January 9, 2012
2012-01-09 "California community college board endorses sweeping reforms"
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/california-community-colleges-endorse-sweeping-reforms.html]
The governing board of California’s community colleges on Monday approved reforms intended to streamline the path to graduation and transfer for thousands of students.
The California Community Colleges Board of Governors endorsed the policies at a meeting in Sacramento that featured more than three hours of public comment, including vigorous opposition from many students who argued that the plan would penalize low-income and other disadvantaged students.
The reforms were suggested by a statewide task force that met for a year to consider how to improve outcomes for more than 2.6 million community college students at a time of dwindling state support.
The package will now be sent to the Legislature for review. It was unclear when the proposals would be enacted, since many require amending existing education codes.
The thrust of the reforms represents a seismic shift in community colleges’ traditional role as open to all comers and would move to ration access to classes and would push students to meet their academic goals through incentives.
Among the 22 recommendations are requiring all colleges to use a single assessment for English and math skills and prioritizing registration and fee waivers for students who have concrete goals, such as a degree, certificate or transfer to a four-year college.
Course offerings and schedules would be aligned to students' needs, including focusing on basic skills and classes needed to transfer. In addition, the community colleges chancellor would assume more authority to implement reforms over the state’s 72 community college districts and 112 colleges.
Campuses would also be required to publish a scorecard, detailing their performance in such areas as completion rates.
Much criticism centered on actions that would narrow the historic mission of community colleges as outlined more than 50 years ago in the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, and many of those who spoke to the board said the plan did not address how to fund wider student support services, such as counseling.
Many argued for more public discussion and review.
“Faculty is very concerned and feel that the pace of the proceedings and implementation does not reflect the buy-in needed for full support,” said Jonathan Lightman, executive director of the Faculty Assn. of California Community Colleges.
Others, however, urged board members to seize the opportunity to confront serious systemic issues, including persistent achievement gaps.
“I do believe this is the greatest opportunity this system has ever had to close the achievement gaps that exist in California’s community colleges,” said Eloy Oakley, superintendent and president of Long Beach City College.
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/california-community-colleges-endorse-sweeping-reforms.html]
The governing board of California’s community colleges on Monday approved reforms intended to streamline the path to graduation and transfer for thousands of students.
The California Community Colleges Board of Governors endorsed the policies at a meeting in Sacramento that featured more than three hours of public comment, including vigorous opposition from many students who argued that the plan would penalize low-income and other disadvantaged students.
The reforms were suggested by a statewide task force that met for a year to consider how to improve outcomes for more than 2.6 million community college students at a time of dwindling state support.
The package will now be sent to the Legislature for review. It was unclear when the proposals would be enacted, since many require amending existing education codes.
The thrust of the reforms represents a seismic shift in community colleges’ traditional role as open to all comers and would move to ration access to classes and would push students to meet their academic goals through incentives.
Among the 22 recommendations are requiring all colleges to use a single assessment for English and math skills and prioritizing registration and fee waivers for students who have concrete goals, such as a degree, certificate or transfer to a four-year college.
Course offerings and schedules would be aligned to students' needs, including focusing on basic skills and classes needed to transfer. In addition, the community colleges chancellor would assume more authority to implement reforms over the state’s 72 community college districts and 112 colleges.
Campuses would also be required to publish a scorecard, detailing their performance in such areas as completion rates.
Much criticism centered on actions that would narrow the historic mission of community colleges as outlined more than 50 years ago in the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, and many of those who spoke to the board said the plan did not address how to fund wider student support services, such as counseling.
Many argued for more public discussion and review.
“Faculty is very concerned and feel that the pace of the proceedings and implementation does not reflect the buy-in needed for full support,” said Jonathan Lightman, executive director of the Faculty Assn. of California Community Colleges.
Others, however, urged board members to seize the opportunity to confront serious systemic issues, including persistent achievement gaps.
“I do believe this is the greatest opportunity this system has ever had to close the achievement gaps that exist in California’s community colleges,” said Eloy Oakley, superintendent and president of Long Beach City College.
2012-01-09 "Tax plan would generate billions less than thought, analyst says"
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/01/gov-jerry-brown-tax-plan.html]
Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure could bring in billions less than what the governor is counting on, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan state legislative analyst.
Brown, who hopes to put a measure before voters to temporarily increase levies on upper earners and hike the state sales tax, says his initiative would generate nearly $6.9 billion annually over the next five years to help close the state’s budget deficit. But the Legislative Analyst's Office says the plan would bring in only $4.8 billion in the 2012-13 budget year and about $5.5 billion in following years.
The wide discrepancy is the latest split over numbers between the administration and the Legislative Analyst's Office. Last November, the Legislative Analyst's Office released a revised estimate for the state’s current budget picture. Less than a month later, Brown’s department of finance came back with estimates that were $1.5 billion higher than the Legislative Analyst's Office numbers.
In its analysis Monday, the Legislative Analyst's Office said that predicting just how much Brown’s tax measure would bring in is difficult because it is dependent on income taxes from upper earners. That money varies wildly from year to year.
“Their capital income is highly volatile from one year to the next,” the analysis states. “For example, the current mental health tax on income over $1 million generated about $734 million in 2009‑10 but has raised as much as $1.6 billion in previous years. Given this volatility, estimates of the revenues to be raised by this initiative will change between now and the November 2012 election.”
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/01/gov-jerry-brown-tax-plan.html]
Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure could bring in billions less than what the governor is counting on, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan state legislative analyst.
Brown, who hopes to put a measure before voters to temporarily increase levies on upper earners and hike the state sales tax, says his initiative would generate nearly $6.9 billion annually over the next five years to help close the state’s budget deficit. But the Legislative Analyst's Office says the plan would bring in only $4.8 billion in the 2012-13 budget year and about $5.5 billion in following years.
The wide discrepancy is the latest split over numbers between the administration and the Legislative Analyst's Office. Last November, the Legislative Analyst's Office released a revised estimate for the state’s current budget picture. Less than a month later, Brown’s department of finance came back with estimates that were $1.5 billion higher than the Legislative Analyst's Office numbers.
In its analysis Monday, the Legislative Analyst's Office said that predicting just how much Brown’s tax measure would bring in is difficult because it is dependent on income taxes from upper earners. That money varies wildly from year to year.
“Their capital income is highly volatile from one year to the next,” the analysis states. “For example, the current mental health tax on income over $1 million generated about $734 million in 2009‑10 but has raised as much as $1.6 billion in previous years. Given this volatility, estimates of the revenues to be raised by this initiative will change between now and the November 2012 election.”
Monday, December 26, 2011
2011-12-26 "Pot clubs turning to delivery; With feds threatening storefronts, couriers become alternatives" by David Downs from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2011/12/25/BAKS1MEJGS.DTL]
Medithrive, a cannabis dispensary in San Francisco's Mission District that was forced to close last month, has re-emerged as a delivery-only service, part of a growing trend in California's billion-dollar medical marijuana industry that's recently come under attack by federal authorities.
Threats of property forfeiture, fines, lawsuits and raids this winter have made brick-and-mortar locations less enticing to pot entrepreneurs. Hundreds of storefronts have closed amid the new federal crackdown. Delivery services remain, offering a lower-profile, albeit more dangerous, alternative.
"It just makes sense. When you have a storefront, you're on the map. You don't have those issues with a delivery service. No one's going to know about it," said William Panzer, an Oakland defense attorney who represents Northstone Organics, a delivery service based in Ukiah (Mendocino County).
California has struggled with cannabis distribution since voters in 1996 gave qualified patients a medical defense for breaking state marijuana laws. Then in 2003, state Sen. Mark Leno's SB420 granted patients the right to collectively cultivate and distribute marijuana.
Under those laws, San Francisco created a dispensary licensing process in 2005 that led to an estimated 24 clubs and one delivery-only service. There are thought to be several hundred thousand Californians with a doctor's recommendation for marijuana.
Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego chose the opposite path and tried to ban shops with limited success. But the storefront enforcement climate led to the proliferation of fly-by-night mobile services.
Indeed, the number of storefront dispensaries and mobile operators are inversely correlated, Los Angeles Assistant City Attorney Asha Greenberg said.
Federal action -
On Oct. 7, four U.S. attorneys declared a crackdown on the medical marijuana industry, alleging profiteering and exports to other states. Hundreds of warning letters went out to dispensary landlords across the state.
More than two-thirds of San Diego storefront dispensaries closed within weeks, watchers said. Dozens closed in Sacramento County. At least three San Francisco clubs have closed, and one in Oakland moved.
Jack Gillund, spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Northern District, said his office would not comment on storefront pot clubs being replaced by delivery services.
Medithrive's return as a delivery service echoes the behavior of operators in Southern California. San Diego has about 100 delivery listings. Orange County has 50 and Los Angeles about 100, according to data from leading dispensary locator WeedMaps.com.
"My sense is they're switching out of brick-and-mortars, or just going to the black market," said Justin Hartfield, WeedMaps founder.
"It's like water," Greenberg said. "You close off one pathway, and it morphs and goes in another direction."
Some patients prefer delivery. Medithrive declined to comment, but it is busy.
Calls to the service often go directly to voice mail because of high volume. The company also has an online menu as well as smart-phone apps that feature strains such as Dream Queen for $40 for an eighth of an ounce - about a week's supply for an average patient.
Warning of delivery dangers -
App photos also display Medithrive's shuttered Mission Street store - a high-end affair with flat-screen TV menus.
The Department of Justice's crackdown amounts to a dangerous form of theater, in that it does nothing to curtail supply or demand, said Lisa Gygax, a California dispensary attorney. People feel less safe buying cannabis from a random guy coming up to their house - but they will if options become limited, she said.
"Delivery is dangerous, it's extremely difficult to regulate, but they're extremely successful if there is no safe access," she said. "What else are patients going to do - go to the park?"
San Francisco has one delivery-only licensee, the Green Cross. It is delivery-only because it was pushed out of a storefront during the 2005 San Francisco licensing process, said General Manager Caren Woodson. The Green Cross is seeking a city permit for a storefront because it's the preferred business model, she said.
Risk of robbery -
Safety concerns for drivers are huge, Woodson said, and the service has been robbed once.
Unlicensed delivery services probably underreport robberies, Gygax said.
The conflict between California's medicinal marijuana supporters - including advocates and lawmakers - and federal authorities is expected to worsen. That is likely to bring an awkward social compromise: more delivered dope.
"We sort of predicted this," said Dale Gieringer, head of California's National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "I could see cars going around. I could see delivery trucks. It's sort of what one expected. ... I've seen a decline in delivery services in the last four or five years as dispensaries have proliferated. I suppose that will go in the other direction now."
Michael gathers receipts at the Green Cross, a licensed medical marijuana delivery company in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
Joe, Rigoberto and David package marijuana for delivery at the Green Cross offices, San Francisco's one delivery-only licensee. Several hundred thousand Californians are believed to have a doctor's recommendation to receive medical marijuana. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
Erick logs in orders coming in over the Internet at the Green Cross. Medical marijuana companies have online menus and smart-phone apps for deliveries. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2011/12/25/BAKS1MEJGS.DTL]
Medithrive, a cannabis dispensary in San Francisco's Mission District that was forced to close last month, has re-emerged as a delivery-only service, part of a growing trend in California's billion-dollar medical marijuana industry that's recently come under attack by federal authorities.
Threats of property forfeiture, fines, lawsuits and raids this winter have made brick-and-mortar locations less enticing to pot entrepreneurs. Hundreds of storefronts have closed amid the new federal crackdown. Delivery services remain, offering a lower-profile, albeit more dangerous, alternative.
"It just makes sense. When you have a storefront, you're on the map. You don't have those issues with a delivery service. No one's going to know about it," said William Panzer, an Oakland defense attorney who represents Northstone Organics, a delivery service based in Ukiah (Mendocino County).
California has struggled with cannabis distribution since voters in 1996 gave qualified patients a medical defense for breaking state marijuana laws. Then in 2003, state Sen. Mark Leno's SB420 granted patients the right to collectively cultivate and distribute marijuana.
Under those laws, San Francisco created a dispensary licensing process in 2005 that led to an estimated 24 clubs and one delivery-only service. There are thought to be several hundred thousand Californians with a doctor's recommendation for marijuana.
Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego chose the opposite path and tried to ban shops with limited success. But the storefront enforcement climate led to the proliferation of fly-by-night mobile services.
Indeed, the number of storefront dispensaries and mobile operators are inversely correlated, Los Angeles Assistant City Attorney Asha Greenberg said.
Federal action -
On Oct. 7, four U.S. attorneys declared a crackdown on the medical marijuana industry, alleging profiteering and exports to other states. Hundreds of warning letters went out to dispensary landlords across the state.
More than two-thirds of San Diego storefront dispensaries closed within weeks, watchers said. Dozens closed in Sacramento County. At least three San Francisco clubs have closed, and one in Oakland moved.
Jack Gillund, spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Northern District, said his office would not comment on storefront pot clubs being replaced by delivery services.
Medithrive's return as a delivery service echoes the behavior of operators in Southern California. San Diego has about 100 delivery listings. Orange County has 50 and Los Angeles about 100, according to data from leading dispensary locator WeedMaps.com.
"My sense is they're switching out of brick-and-mortars, or just going to the black market," said Justin Hartfield, WeedMaps founder.
"It's like water," Greenberg said. "You close off one pathway, and it morphs and goes in another direction."
Some patients prefer delivery. Medithrive declined to comment, but it is busy.
Calls to the service often go directly to voice mail because of high volume. The company also has an online menu as well as smart-phone apps that feature strains such as Dream Queen for $40 for an eighth of an ounce - about a week's supply for an average patient.
Warning of delivery dangers -
App photos also display Medithrive's shuttered Mission Street store - a high-end affair with flat-screen TV menus.
The Department of Justice's crackdown amounts to a dangerous form of theater, in that it does nothing to curtail supply or demand, said Lisa Gygax, a California dispensary attorney. People feel less safe buying cannabis from a random guy coming up to their house - but they will if options become limited, she said.
"Delivery is dangerous, it's extremely difficult to regulate, but they're extremely successful if there is no safe access," she said. "What else are patients going to do - go to the park?"
San Francisco has one delivery-only licensee, the Green Cross. It is delivery-only because it was pushed out of a storefront during the 2005 San Francisco licensing process, said General Manager Caren Woodson. The Green Cross is seeking a city permit for a storefront because it's the preferred business model, she said.
Risk of robbery -
Safety concerns for drivers are huge, Woodson said, and the service has been robbed once.
Unlicensed delivery services probably underreport robberies, Gygax said.
The conflict between California's medicinal marijuana supporters - including advocates and lawmakers - and federal authorities is expected to worsen. That is likely to bring an awkward social compromise: more delivered dope.
"We sort of predicted this," said Dale Gieringer, head of California's National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "I could see cars going around. I could see delivery trucks. It's sort of what one expected. ... I've seen a decline in delivery services in the last four or five years as dispensaries have proliferated. I suppose that will go in the other direction now."
Michael gathers receipts at the Green Cross, a licensed medical marijuana delivery company in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
Joe, Rigoberto and David package marijuana for delivery at the Green Cross offices, San Francisco's one delivery-only licensee. Several hundred thousand Californians are believed to have a doctor's recommendation to receive medical marijuana. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
Erick logs in orders coming in over the Internet at the Green Cross. Medical marijuana companies have online menus and smart-phone apps for deliveries. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
2011-12-26 "Business lobbyists succeed in Sacramento this year" by Laurel Rosenhall and Chase Davis from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-12-26/news/30558070_1_legislative-year-business-interests-lobbyists]
Business interests were the top bill-killers inside California's Capitol during Gov. Jerry Brown's first year back in office, as concerns about the state's weak economy cut into labor's newfound clout.
Legislative data show that business interests wielded strong influence despite a Capitol dominated by Democrats in the Legislature and governor's office. Business lobbyists defeated bills that would have cut tax breaks, required employers to give workers unpaid bereavement leave and prolonged the foreclosure process.
In the current economy, "all legislators are more sensitive to the argument that something would be a job killer or harmful for investment or expansion," said Dorothy Rothrock, a lobbyist for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which represents major businesses around the state. "That's made it easier for us to stop or amend bills to make them less hostile or burdensome."
Brown's current term has been good for labor unions, too. They successfully pushed bills that limit the state's ability to use private contractors, allow local governments to require union construction crews on public works projects and reduce the use of self-checkout lanes in grocery stores.
Business influence -
But in the tug-of-war between the Capitol's two power players, industry more than held its own. Business-related groups dominated the list of organizations with the most influence, according to a review of hundreds of bills.
The Sacramento Bee and California Watch examined the final analyses written by legislative staff for all 906 bills introduced this year that listed supporters and opponents. For each group whose stand was registered on at least 10 bills, the news organizations tallied the number of cases in which supporters' bills were signed by the governor and opponents' bills stalled or were vetoed. Either scenario counted as a "win" for that group.
While such a tally is imperfect - it does not assess all influence exerted under the dome - it captures the outcome of the legislative year for many who carry clout at the Capitol.
Interviews with dozens of key people confirmed a trend suggested by the numbers: The weak economy was a major factor as groups decided which bills to push and lawmakers made up their minds.
Angie Wei, a lobbyist for the California Labor Federation, said 2011 was better for workers "than under any year under Arnold Schwarzenegger." Even so, Wei said, the state's financial reality made her union less aggressive.
The labor group sponsored AB400, which would have required employers to provide paid sick days for their workers. But Wei said the union asked lawmakers to hold the bill in committee because "we didn't think it was the right time to do it."
The business lobby wielded much of its influence through JobsPAC, a political action committee that collects millions from insurance, oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and other companies to make independent expenditures in key races.
Last year, the committee spent $9.2 million statewide, a portion of it supporting candidates thought to be business-friendly in four key state Senate districts: Republicans Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo and Anthony Cannella of Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Democrats Juan Vargas of San Diego and Lou Correa of Santa Ana (Orange County).
By session's end, Blakeslee and Cannella voted the California Chamber of Commerce's way on each of the 13 important business bills listed in the chamber's scorecard. Correa went the chamber's way 69 percent of the time, tops among Democrats.
Some groups that spend a lot on lobbying and political contributions show up on few bill analyses, making it hard to measure how much they win.
Private lobbying -
Interest groups typically are listed as supporters or opponents because they sent lawmakers letters stating their position. But nothing compels a group to write such letters. Some entities prefer to lobby by meeting privately with legislators, and legislative committees have different approaches to determine whom to list in their bill analyses.
But the findings broadly illustrate that business did better than might have been expected at the Capitol, where Democrats control both houses of the Legislature and, after several years under Schwarzenegger, now occupy the governor's office as well.
The political domination of Democrats means many Republican bills based on ideas generated by business interests did not proceed very far in the lawmaking process. Bills sponsored by labor groups were more likely to pass through the Democratic-controlled houses and make it to the governor's desk.
Yet even with a Democratic governor who received much of his campaign backing from labor unions, business interests still held sway - albeit mostly by playing defense. Labor lobbyists, meanwhile, said they were more selective than usual in advancing bills that would cost money and put lawmakers in an unpleasant political situation.
"The arguments business has made, that companies and job creators have made for years, are resonating more with Democratic legislators" given the state's financial situation, said Robert Callahan, a lobbyist for TechAmerica, a trade group that represents more than 1,000 technology companies.
TechAmerica succeeded on 11 of the 12 bills that it backed.
Two key victories, Callahan said, were defeating legislation that would have rolled back some tax credits. One, SB508, proposed including sunset dates in all new tax breaks so they would be phased out after a period of time. Another, SB364, sought to allow the state to charge a fine and take back the money from a tax incentive if a company laid off at least 10 percent of its employees in a year.
Labor unions supported both bills, arguing that the state should be more careful about handing out tax breaks, given its budget woes. TechAmerica and other business groups opposed them, saying the first bill painted all tax breaks with the same brush, and the second created too much uncertainty for employers. Brown vetoed both bills with short messages saying they were too broad.
The vetoes also stack up as wins for the California Taxpayers Association and California Chamber of Commerce, which joined TechAmerica in opposing both bills. The chamber had a good year, despite supporting Brown's Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, in last year's gubernatorial race. In the Legislature this year, chamber lobbyists fended off 25 of the 30 bills the group labeled "job killers." They persuaded Brown to veto four of the five that made it to his desk.
"From a political standpoint, when the economy goes down and business is what can bring you back, then people listen to business," said Marc Burgat, vice president of government relations for the California Chamber of Commerce.
One of the "job-killer" bills Brown vetoed was AB325, which would have required employers to offer up to three days of unpaid bereavement leave to workers who lose a loved one. The chamber made the case that California already requires several types of leave and that adding another would be a burden on employers who may be juggling requests from several workers. It also argued that the bill would have established broad rights for workers to sue, a view that was repeated in Brown's veto message.
After Brown finished considering the bills on his desk in mid-October, the chamber produced a 2 1/2-minute video praising the governor and touting the success of its lobbying campaign.
"As business grows, we employ more people, we pay more taxes and the general fund grows," Burgat said. "I think that message has resonated."
This story was produced as a collaboration between Laurel Rosenhall of the Sacramento Bee and Chase Davis of California Watch.
[http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-12-26/news/30558070_1_legislative-year-business-interests-lobbyists]
Business interests were the top bill-killers inside California's Capitol during Gov. Jerry Brown's first year back in office, as concerns about the state's weak economy cut into labor's newfound clout.
Legislative data show that business interests wielded strong influence despite a Capitol dominated by Democrats in the Legislature and governor's office. Business lobbyists defeated bills that would have cut tax breaks, required employers to give workers unpaid bereavement leave and prolonged the foreclosure process.
In the current economy, "all legislators are more sensitive to the argument that something would be a job killer or harmful for investment or expansion," said Dorothy Rothrock, a lobbyist for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which represents major businesses around the state. "That's made it easier for us to stop or amend bills to make them less hostile or burdensome."
Brown's current term has been good for labor unions, too. They successfully pushed bills that limit the state's ability to use private contractors, allow local governments to require union construction crews on public works projects and reduce the use of self-checkout lanes in grocery stores.
Business influence -
But in the tug-of-war between the Capitol's two power players, industry more than held its own. Business-related groups dominated the list of organizations with the most influence, according to a review of hundreds of bills.
The Sacramento Bee and California Watch examined the final analyses written by legislative staff for all 906 bills introduced this year that listed supporters and opponents. For each group whose stand was registered on at least 10 bills, the news organizations tallied the number of cases in which supporters' bills were signed by the governor and opponents' bills stalled or were vetoed. Either scenario counted as a "win" for that group.
While such a tally is imperfect - it does not assess all influence exerted under the dome - it captures the outcome of the legislative year for many who carry clout at the Capitol.
Interviews with dozens of key people confirmed a trend suggested by the numbers: The weak economy was a major factor as groups decided which bills to push and lawmakers made up their minds.
Angie Wei, a lobbyist for the California Labor Federation, said 2011 was better for workers "than under any year under Arnold Schwarzenegger." Even so, Wei said, the state's financial reality made her union less aggressive.
The labor group sponsored AB400, which would have required employers to provide paid sick days for their workers. But Wei said the union asked lawmakers to hold the bill in committee because "we didn't think it was the right time to do it."
The business lobby wielded much of its influence through JobsPAC, a political action committee that collects millions from insurance, oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and other companies to make independent expenditures in key races.
Last year, the committee spent $9.2 million statewide, a portion of it supporting candidates thought to be business-friendly in four key state Senate districts: Republicans Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo and Anthony Cannella of Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Democrats Juan Vargas of San Diego and Lou Correa of Santa Ana (Orange County).
By session's end, Blakeslee and Cannella voted the California Chamber of Commerce's way on each of the 13 important business bills listed in the chamber's scorecard. Correa went the chamber's way 69 percent of the time, tops among Democrats.
Some groups that spend a lot on lobbying and political contributions show up on few bill analyses, making it hard to measure how much they win.
Private lobbying -
Interest groups typically are listed as supporters or opponents because they sent lawmakers letters stating their position. But nothing compels a group to write such letters. Some entities prefer to lobby by meeting privately with legislators, and legislative committees have different approaches to determine whom to list in their bill analyses.
But the findings broadly illustrate that business did better than might have been expected at the Capitol, where Democrats control both houses of the Legislature and, after several years under Schwarzenegger, now occupy the governor's office as well.
The political domination of Democrats means many Republican bills based on ideas generated by business interests did not proceed very far in the lawmaking process. Bills sponsored by labor groups were more likely to pass through the Democratic-controlled houses and make it to the governor's desk.
Yet even with a Democratic governor who received much of his campaign backing from labor unions, business interests still held sway - albeit mostly by playing defense. Labor lobbyists, meanwhile, said they were more selective than usual in advancing bills that would cost money and put lawmakers in an unpleasant political situation.
"The arguments business has made, that companies and job creators have made for years, are resonating more with Democratic legislators" given the state's financial situation, said Robert Callahan, a lobbyist for TechAmerica, a trade group that represents more than 1,000 technology companies.
TechAmerica succeeded on 11 of the 12 bills that it backed.
Two key victories, Callahan said, were defeating legislation that would have rolled back some tax credits. One, SB508, proposed including sunset dates in all new tax breaks so they would be phased out after a period of time. Another, SB364, sought to allow the state to charge a fine and take back the money from a tax incentive if a company laid off at least 10 percent of its employees in a year.
Labor unions supported both bills, arguing that the state should be more careful about handing out tax breaks, given its budget woes. TechAmerica and other business groups opposed them, saying the first bill painted all tax breaks with the same brush, and the second created too much uncertainty for employers. Brown vetoed both bills with short messages saying they were too broad.
The vetoes also stack up as wins for the California Taxpayers Association and California Chamber of Commerce, which joined TechAmerica in opposing both bills. The chamber had a good year, despite supporting Brown's Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, in last year's gubernatorial race. In the Legislature this year, chamber lobbyists fended off 25 of the 30 bills the group labeled "job killers." They persuaded Brown to veto four of the five that made it to his desk.
"From a political standpoint, when the economy goes down and business is what can bring you back, then people listen to business," said Marc Burgat, vice president of government relations for the California Chamber of Commerce.
One of the "job-killer" bills Brown vetoed was AB325, which would have required employers to offer up to three days of unpaid bereavement leave to workers who lose a loved one. The chamber made the case that California already requires several types of leave and that adding another would be a burden on employers who may be juggling requests from several workers. It also argued that the bill would have established broad rights for workers to sue, a view that was repeated in Brown's veto message.
After Brown finished considering the bills on his desk in mid-October, the chamber produced a 2 1/2-minute video praising the governor and touting the success of its lobbying campaign.
"As business grows, we employ more people, we pay more taxes and the general fund grows," Burgat said. "I think that message has resonated."
This story was produced as a collaboration between Laurel Rosenhall of the Sacramento Bee and Chase Davis of California Watch.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
2011-12-25 "Teachers union sues Sacramento City schools over seniority rights in layoffs"
[http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/25/v-print/4144752/teachers-union-sues-sacramento.html]
The Sacramento City Unified School District is fighting a civil lawsuit filed by its teachers union over teacher seniority rights in rehiring after layoffs.
The Sacramento City Teachers Association's lawsuit comes months after the union fought the district's decision to utilize a seldom used provision in Education Code in order to not layoff teachers at six persistently low-performing schools.
The result of the civil lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court could have implications on a growing movement by some of the largest California districts. More and more districts are deviating from purely seniority-based layoffs and in the ensuing rehiring process.
"We just want to see everyone treated equally instead of some getting special treatment," said SCTA President Scott Smith. "Basically, we are saying the way in which they skipped teachers was incorrect."
Lawyers for Sacramento City Unified School District say the case, which was filed in November, should be dismissed because it is "utterly lacking in key details such as naming any teacher or counselor who was laid off and refused reemployment in violation of the Education Code," according to court filings.
California law requires that, in a time of budget-based layoffs, teachers with the least experience in a school district are the first to go.
There are, however, two exceptions under the law: districts can skip teachers to maintain or achieve equal protection under the law or in hard-to-staff areas, like special education, science, math and bilingual education.
In March, Sacramento City Unified voted not to lay off teachers at six of the district's persistently failing schools, which Superintendent Jonathan Raymond labeled Priority Schools.
The district argued that priority school teachers received special training that, under the Education Code, allowed for skipping those instructors during the layoff process.
When SCTA fought the district on that decision, it was brought before the Office of Administrative Hearings and an administrative law judge, who ruled in Sacramento City Unified's favor at five of the six priority schools for this school year.
SCTA's most recent civil suit challenges how the district filled vacancies at the priority schools.
"The priority school thing has been a vague concept from the beginning," Smith said. "The amount of training they received was minimal at best. Other schools had received the exact same training."
Teachers unions have argued that seniority-based layoffs eliminate favoritism and keep expertise in the classroom. Unions also say seniority-based rules keep districts from laying off veteran instructors to keep cheaper, younger teachers.
Education Trust-West Executive Director Arun Ramanathan said the "last-in, first-out" method of teacher layoffs violates basic principals of fairness and equality for students.
Ramanathan said Education Trust-West has studied how seniority-based layoffs disproportionately affect low-performing schools in poor neighborhoods. Studies have shown those schools tend to have higher turnover because they are staffed with the least experienced teachers.
Ramanathan praised Sacramento City for its efforts to mitigate turnover at its priority schools.
In September, the district praised gains in test scores at the priority schools – Oak Ridge, Father Keith B. Kenny Elementary, Jedediah Smith Elementary, Fern Bacon Basic Middle, Will C. Wood Middle and Hiram W. Johnson High. A seventh school – Rosa Parks Middle School – was added earlier this year.
Oak Ridge in Oak Park saw an 82-point jump in its Academic Performance Index score.
[http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/25/v-print/4144752/teachers-union-sues-sacramento.html]
The Sacramento City Unified School District is fighting a civil lawsuit filed by its teachers union over teacher seniority rights in rehiring after layoffs.
The Sacramento City Teachers Association's lawsuit comes months after the union fought the district's decision to utilize a seldom used provision in Education Code in order to not layoff teachers at six persistently low-performing schools.
The result of the civil lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court could have implications on a growing movement by some of the largest California districts. More and more districts are deviating from purely seniority-based layoffs and in the ensuing rehiring process.
"We just want to see everyone treated equally instead of some getting special treatment," said SCTA President Scott Smith. "Basically, we are saying the way in which they skipped teachers was incorrect."
Lawyers for Sacramento City Unified School District say the case, which was filed in November, should be dismissed because it is "utterly lacking in key details such as naming any teacher or counselor who was laid off and refused reemployment in violation of the Education Code," according to court filings.
California law requires that, in a time of budget-based layoffs, teachers with the least experience in a school district are the first to go.
There are, however, two exceptions under the law: districts can skip teachers to maintain or achieve equal protection under the law or in hard-to-staff areas, like special education, science, math and bilingual education.
In March, Sacramento City Unified voted not to lay off teachers at six of the district's persistently failing schools, which Superintendent Jonathan Raymond labeled Priority Schools.
The district argued that priority school teachers received special training that, under the Education Code, allowed for skipping those instructors during the layoff process.
When SCTA fought the district on that decision, it was brought before the Office of Administrative Hearings and an administrative law judge, who ruled in Sacramento City Unified's favor at five of the six priority schools for this school year.
SCTA's most recent civil suit challenges how the district filled vacancies at the priority schools.
"The priority school thing has been a vague concept from the beginning," Smith said. "The amount of training they received was minimal at best. Other schools had received the exact same training."
Teachers unions have argued that seniority-based layoffs eliminate favoritism and keep expertise in the classroom. Unions also say seniority-based rules keep districts from laying off veteran instructors to keep cheaper, younger teachers.
Education Trust-West Executive Director Arun Ramanathan said the "last-in, first-out" method of teacher layoffs violates basic principals of fairness and equality for students.
Ramanathan said Education Trust-West has studied how seniority-based layoffs disproportionately affect low-performing schools in poor neighborhoods. Studies have shown those schools tend to have higher turnover because they are staffed with the least experienced teachers.
Ramanathan praised Sacramento City for its efforts to mitigate turnover at its priority schools.
In September, the district praised gains in test scores at the priority schools – Oak Ridge, Father Keith B. Kenny Elementary, Jedediah Smith Elementary, Fern Bacon Basic Middle, Will C. Wood Middle and Hiram W. Johnson High. A seventh school – Rosa Parks Middle School – was added earlier this year.
Oak Ridge in Oak Park saw an 82-point jump in its Academic Performance Index score.
2011-12-25 "CA State community colleges set to ration classes in drive to privatize system" by Nanette Asimov from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/12/25/MN3U1MD0L6.DTL]
During World War II, there was food rationing. In 2012, California's community college leaders are poised to approve education rationing for thousands of students.
The proposal is controversial, with many students and educators critical of a shakeout that could end free courses offered for generations, including classes such as music appreciation and memoir writing. Also squeezed out would be students who linger at college for years, sampling one class after another.
The problem is as basic as a butter shortage. Essential classes are in critically short supply as the state's economic crisis lumbers on. Last year, 137,000 students couldn't get into at least one class they needed, including first-year English and math. And many who are entitled to financial aid never apply for it because there aren't enough counselors to help them navigate the complex process.
0% dropout rate
The result is a dropout rate of 60 percent among students who expect to transfer to a four-year university or earn a vocational certificate, according to a 2010 study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy in Sacramento.
Fixing the problem will require overhauling the vast community college system, according to a task force of 20 academics and college advocates who have wrestled with the issue for a year. Established by the Legislature in 2010, the Student Success Task Force wants campuses to do a better job of helping students reach academic goals, and it wants students to move more quickly and efficiently through school.
But it won't be done with more money. Lawmakers cut $502 million this year from the system's $5.9 billion budget, on top of hundreds of millions withheld since 2009.
Instead, the task force wants to change how colleges spend the money they already have. Or, as Chancellor Jack Scott plainly put it, "It's not joyful to have to ration."
The backbone of the panel's 22 recommendations is to focus community college resources on students seeking degrees or vocational certificates. All students should have an education plan and make steady progress on it. Those who don't would lose registration priority. Those who qualify for a tuition waiver - 47 percent of students - would lose it if they are unfocused and take too many random classes.
"The more directed a student is, the more likely they are to complete their goals," Scott said. "This is pretty common sense."
Many agree, including Steve Ngo, a City College of San Francisco trustee who calls it a civil rights issue.
"If students are not even getting basic English and math, they'll be stuck in poverty," Ngo said. "These recommendations focus course offerings on student needs."
Some may be shut out
Yet many others - including students, instructors, administrators and Ngo's colleagues on the City College board - fear the proposals would harm students who fall outside the new priorities.
"The door will shut for everyone else except for the two-year transfer students," said Joe Fitzgerald, a City College student and editor of the campus paper, the Guardsman.
Fitzgerald has been at the college seven years, many of them spent learning to be a successful student, he said. Like many others, he sees community college as an academic refuge for students who can't or prefer not to barrel through school.
Rather than ration education, he and other critics say college leaders should join efforts to raise more revenue for education.
"California needs to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes," said John Rizzo, president of the City College Board of Trustees. "Oil (extraction) needs to be taxed like it is in every other state."
California's college system is the nation's largest, with 112 campuses and a mandate to admit "any student capable of benefiting from instruction," according to the state's Master Plan for Higher Education, established in 1960. Its main mission is to provide academic and vocational instruction "through the first two years of undergraduate education."
The plan also points to colleges' role in providing remedial classes, community service courses, workforce training and free, noncredit classes, including English as a Second Language.
Last spring, 203,500 students statewide took noncredit classes, and 1.5 million took classes for credit.
Fee waiver overhaul
Nearly half of students taking classes for credit are poor enough to qualify for a waiver of fees: $540 a semester for a full load of 15 credits, at $36 a credit. The price rises to $46 next summer.
The task force wants to rescind fee waivers after students accumulate 110 credits, well beyond the 60 required for transfer. At City College, for example, 12 percent of students with fee waivers had at least 110 credits last spring, or 1,917 students.
"You shouldn't be a professional student," said Scott, the state chancellor. "You're taking up space needed by first-time students."
But complaints that such a policy would unfairly punish low-income students led the panel to leave the ultimate decision on fee waivers up to individual campuses.
End free classes -
Task force members also want colleges to stop spending money on free enrichment classes. They don't mean those that teach job skills, English acquisition, or help students get a degree. Colleges spent $134 million on those last year, and they will continue.
They're talking about the kind of class that Norma Miller, 86, credits with saving her life.
"I was ready to just give up," said Miller, a retired teacher. She'd had a health scare. Three close friends died. She entered a period of decline in which she lost her sense of time and felt, as she put it, "a sense of desperation."
A doctor recommended that she get out in the world. The senior center offered bingo, but it wasn't her style. She tried concerts, lectures, even a therapy group. None seemed to help.
Then Miller found the Life Review class in the Older Adults Department at City College, taught by Shelley Glazer, an expert on aging. With a dozen others in her age group, Miller spent this fall reflecting on her life, learning to write about it and considering the future.
"I actually sat down and did some writing," Miller said. "I actually did it! It was shocking to me. I'm learning to get up and allow myself to think about something other than myself.
"If I lost this class, I don't know what I'd do."
Community colleges spent $102 million on such classes last year - the same amount the state cut from colleges' budget this month.
"I was a college president for 21 years," said Peter MacDougall, chairman of the task force. "I'd have older adults come in and say, 'This astronomy course is wonderful!' I never had the feeling we were denying access to other students. I'm sorry to say that that's not the place we're in today."
Centralize testing -
At first the task force recommended changing state law to prevent colleges from spending public funds on such classes. But a public outcry led the panel to soften that stance. Now it directs colleges to verify that funds are spent only on classes that "advance student education plans" and says the law should only change "if necessary."
The panel also recommends strengthening the power of the state chancellor and implementing centralized testing. The community college system's Board of Governors will vote on the ideas at its meeting Jan. 9 and 10.
Get involved -
Read the Student Success Task Force recommendations at sfg.ly/uvRQRz.
The Community College system's Board of Governors will vote on the recommendations at its meeting Jan. 9 and 10 in Room 4203 of the state Capitol, 10th Street and Capitol Mall, Sacramento.
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/12/25/MN3U1MD0L6.DTL]
During World War II, there was food rationing. In 2012, California's community college leaders are poised to approve education rationing for thousands of students.
The proposal is controversial, with many students and educators critical of a shakeout that could end free courses offered for generations, including classes such as music appreciation and memoir writing. Also squeezed out would be students who linger at college for years, sampling one class after another.
The problem is as basic as a butter shortage. Essential classes are in critically short supply as the state's economic crisis lumbers on. Last year, 137,000 students couldn't get into at least one class they needed, including first-year English and math. And many who are entitled to financial aid never apply for it because there aren't enough counselors to help them navigate the complex process.
0% dropout rate
The result is a dropout rate of 60 percent among students who expect to transfer to a four-year university or earn a vocational certificate, according to a 2010 study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy in Sacramento.
Fixing the problem will require overhauling the vast community college system, according to a task force of 20 academics and college advocates who have wrestled with the issue for a year. Established by the Legislature in 2010, the Student Success Task Force wants campuses to do a better job of helping students reach academic goals, and it wants students to move more quickly and efficiently through school.
But it won't be done with more money. Lawmakers cut $502 million this year from the system's $5.9 billion budget, on top of hundreds of millions withheld since 2009.
Instead, the task force wants to change how colleges spend the money they already have. Or, as Chancellor Jack Scott plainly put it, "It's not joyful to have to ration."
The backbone of the panel's 22 recommendations is to focus community college resources on students seeking degrees or vocational certificates. All students should have an education plan and make steady progress on it. Those who don't would lose registration priority. Those who qualify for a tuition waiver - 47 percent of students - would lose it if they are unfocused and take too many random classes.
"The more directed a student is, the more likely they are to complete their goals," Scott said. "This is pretty common sense."
Many agree, including Steve Ngo, a City College of San Francisco trustee who calls it a civil rights issue.
"If students are not even getting basic English and math, they'll be stuck in poverty," Ngo said. "These recommendations focus course offerings on student needs."
Some may be shut out
Yet many others - including students, instructors, administrators and Ngo's colleagues on the City College board - fear the proposals would harm students who fall outside the new priorities.
"The door will shut for everyone else except for the two-year transfer students," said Joe Fitzgerald, a City College student and editor of the campus paper, the Guardsman.
Fitzgerald has been at the college seven years, many of them spent learning to be a successful student, he said. Like many others, he sees community college as an academic refuge for students who can't or prefer not to barrel through school.
Rather than ration education, he and other critics say college leaders should join efforts to raise more revenue for education.
"California needs to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes," said John Rizzo, president of the City College Board of Trustees. "Oil (extraction) needs to be taxed like it is in every other state."
California's college system is the nation's largest, with 112 campuses and a mandate to admit "any student capable of benefiting from instruction," according to the state's Master Plan for Higher Education, established in 1960. Its main mission is to provide academic and vocational instruction "through the first two years of undergraduate education."
The plan also points to colleges' role in providing remedial classes, community service courses, workforce training and free, noncredit classes, including English as a Second Language.
Last spring, 203,500 students statewide took noncredit classes, and 1.5 million took classes for credit.
Fee waiver overhaul
Nearly half of students taking classes for credit are poor enough to qualify for a waiver of fees: $540 a semester for a full load of 15 credits, at $36 a credit. The price rises to $46 next summer.
The task force wants to rescind fee waivers after students accumulate 110 credits, well beyond the 60 required for transfer. At City College, for example, 12 percent of students with fee waivers had at least 110 credits last spring, or 1,917 students.
"You shouldn't be a professional student," said Scott, the state chancellor. "You're taking up space needed by first-time students."
But complaints that such a policy would unfairly punish low-income students led the panel to leave the ultimate decision on fee waivers up to individual campuses.
End free classes -
Task force members also want colleges to stop spending money on free enrichment classes. They don't mean those that teach job skills, English acquisition, or help students get a degree. Colleges spent $134 million on those last year, and they will continue.
They're talking about the kind of class that Norma Miller, 86, credits with saving her life.
"I was ready to just give up," said Miller, a retired teacher. She'd had a health scare. Three close friends died. She entered a period of decline in which she lost her sense of time and felt, as she put it, "a sense of desperation."
A doctor recommended that she get out in the world. The senior center offered bingo, but it wasn't her style. She tried concerts, lectures, even a therapy group. None seemed to help.
Then Miller found the Life Review class in the Older Adults Department at City College, taught by Shelley Glazer, an expert on aging. With a dozen others in her age group, Miller spent this fall reflecting on her life, learning to write about it and considering the future.
"I actually sat down and did some writing," Miller said. "I actually did it! It was shocking to me. I'm learning to get up and allow myself to think about something other than myself.
"If I lost this class, I don't know what I'd do."
Community colleges spent $102 million on such classes last year - the same amount the state cut from colleges' budget this month.
"I was a college president for 21 years," said Peter MacDougall, chairman of the task force. "I'd have older adults come in and say, 'This astronomy course is wonderful!' I never had the feeling we were denying access to other students. I'm sorry to say that that's not the place we're in today."
Centralize testing -
At first the task force recommended changing state law to prevent colleges from spending public funds on such classes. But a public outcry led the panel to soften that stance. Now it directs colleges to verify that funds are spent only on classes that "advance student education plans" and says the law should only change "if necessary."
The panel also recommends strengthening the power of the state chancellor and implementing centralized testing. The community college system's Board of Governors will vote on the ideas at its meeting Jan. 9 and 10.
Get involved -
Read the Student Success Task Force recommendations at sfg.ly/uvRQRz.
The Community College system's Board of Governors will vote on the recommendations at its meeting Jan. 9 and 10 in Room 4203 of the state Capitol, 10th Street and Capitol Mall, Sacramento.
Friday, December 23, 2011
2011-12-23 "Charter schools group urges closure of four Sacramento-area campuses" by Diana Lambertand Phillip Reese from "Sacramento Bee" newspaper
[http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/23/4141606/charter-schools-group-urges-closure.html]
A list of 10 schools the California Charter Schools Association would like to see closed – including four in the Sacramento area – has caused an uproar within the charter school movement.
CCSA officials say closing low-performing schools demonstrates that charters are willing to be held accountable. The schools on the list do not meet the minimum criteria the organization has established for academic achievement, said Jed Wallace, president of CCSA.
"We thought it necessary for the well-being of the students attending the schools, as well as for the charter school movement," Wallace said of the recommendation.
But other charter school proponents say the association's criteria are flawed and that it is overstepping its authority.
"We already have laws on how this is supposed to work in California," said Eric Premack, president of the Charter School Development Center. "For a third-party group like CCSA to try to rewrite the law and impose their own standards is illegal or extra legal."
The issue has caught the attention of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who applauded the list and the leadership of CCSA. "This is an important conversation for California to have, and one that we need to have across the country," he said in a prepared statement.
The association is asking the schools' authorizers – usually school districts or county offices of education – not to renew their charters.
The local schools on the list include the California Aerospace Academy in McClellan, Antelope View Charter in Antelope, West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter in West Sacramento and Yuba County Career Preparatory Charter in Marysville.
But do these schools deserve to be closed?
All four of the local schools rank near the bottom in performance on standardized tests compared to schools with similar demographics, according to a Bee review of state data.
At the California Aerospace Academy last year, fewer than 10 of the 137 students scored proficient or better on any STAR math test last year – from basic seventh-grade general math to 11th-grade geometry.
None of the 62 eighth- and ninth-graders who took algebra I at West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter scored at the proficient or advanced levels.
Only two of 31 10th-graders who took the STAR world history exam at Antelope View Charter scored at the proficient level. And no seventh-graders at Yuba County Career Prep passed any STAR test – English or math.
But there are some bright spots. Antelope View Charter's eighth graders posted respectable English and life science test scores, eclipsing or nearing the statewide average for proficiency. The 11th-graders at the California Aerospace school did well on their U.S. history test, also collectively beating the statewide average.
The West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter School's website boasts an 83-point API gain last year and says the school has met all the criteria in the California Education Code to be reauthorized.
"We can assure you that CCSA has no legal authority to close down a charter school, and their organization is overstepping its boundaries by showing non-support to its paying members who turn to them for support," said a letter to parents on the West Sacramento Early College Prep website.
Wallace said the CCSA is just doing its job. "We see ourselves as a professional members organization like the American Medical Association," he said. As such, the CCSA would set professional standards and sanction charters that don't meet them.
But the boards of the school districts and county offices of education that authorized the charters will make the final decision about whether to approve charters when they come up for renewal.
"Obviously, we are going to take a hard look at their application for renewal when it comes up in the early part of 2012," said Dave Westin, a school board member at Washington Unified – the authorizer for the West Sacramento charter.
The CCSA criteria say schools must have either an Academic Performance Index of at least 700 in the most recent year, have a three-year cumulative API growth of at least 50 points or have exceeded the performance expected of a California school with a similar student population. It looks at schools that have been in existence for four years or more.
"They want to get rid of charter schools that don't score well, so they look better compared to public schools," Premack said.
Wallace agrees that the CCSA wants to improve charter scores. "The central tenant of the charter school movement is that charters can generate higher levels of academic success," Wallace said. "In order to keep the momentum, we have to show that our schools are successful."
[http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/23/4141606/charter-schools-group-urges-closure.html]
A list of 10 schools the California Charter Schools Association would like to see closed – including four in the Sacramento area – has caused an uproar within the charter school movement.
CCSA officials say closing low-performing schools demonstrates that charters are willing to be held accountable. The schools on the list do not meet the minimum criteria the organization has established for academic achievement, said Jed Wallace, president of CCSA.
"We thought it necessary for the well-being of the students attending the schools, as well as for the charter school movement," Wallace said of the recommendation.
But other charter school proponents say the association's criteria are flawed and that it is overstepping its authority.
"We already have laws on how this is supposed to work in California," said Eric Premack, president of the Charter School Development Center. "For a third-party group like CCSA to try to rewrite the law and impose their own standards is illegal or extra legal."
The issue has caught the attention of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who applauded the list and the leadership of CCSA. "This is an important conversation for California to have, and one that we need to have across the country," he said in a prepared statement.
The association is asking the schools' authorizers – usually school districts or county offices of education – not to renew their charters.
The local schools on the list include the California Aerospace Academy in McClellan, Antelope View Charter in Antelope, West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter in West Sacramento and Yuba County Career Preparatory Charter in Marysville.
But do these schools deserve to be closed?
All four of the local schools rank near the bottom in performance on standardized tests compared to schools with similar demographics, according to a Bee review of state data.
At the California Aerospace Academy last year, fewer than 10 of the 137 students scored proficient or better on any STAR math test last year – from basic seventh-grade general math to 11th-grade geometry.
None of the 62 eighth- and ninth-graders who took algebra I at West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter scored at the proficient or advanced levels.
Only two of 31 10th-graders who took the STAR world history exam at Antelope View Charter scored at the proficient level. And no seventh-graders at Yuba County Career Prep passed any STAR test – English or math.
But there are some bright spots. Antelope View Charter's eighth graders posted respectable English and life science test scores, eclipsing or nearing the statewide average for proficiency. The 11th-graders at the California Aerospace school did well on their U.S. history test, also collectively beating the statewide average.
The West Sacramento Early College Prep Charter School's website boasts an 83-point API gain last year and says the school has met all the criteria in the California Education Code to be reauthorized.
"We can assure you that CCSA has no legal authority to close down a charter school, and their organization is overstepping its boundaries by showing non-support to its paying members who turn to them for support," said a letter to parents on the West Sacramento Early College Prep website.
Wallace said the CCSA is just doing its job. "We see ourselves as a professional members organization like the American Medical Association," he said. As such, the CCSA would set professional standards and sanction charters that don't meet them.
But the boards of the school districts and county offices of education that authorized the charters will make the final decision about whether to approve charters when they come up for renewal.
"Obviously, we are going to take a hard look at their application for renewal when it comes up in the early part of 2012," said Dave Westin, a school board member at Washington Unified – the authorizer for the West Sacramento charter.
The CCSA criteria say schools must have either an Academic Performance Index of at least 700 in the most recent year, have a three-year cumulative API growth of at least 50 points or have exceeded the performance expected of a California school with a similar student population. It looks at schools that have been in existence for four years or more.
"They want to get rid of charter schools that don't score well, so they look better compared to public schools," Premack said.
Wallace agrees that the CCSA wants to improve charter scores. "The central tenant of the charter school movement is that charters can generate higher levels of academic success," Wallace said. "In order to keep the momentum, we have to show that our schools are successful."
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