2011-03-11 "L.A. Teachers Use Privatization Fight to Build Community Power" by Noah Lippe-Klein, Sherlett Hendy
[http://www.labornotes.org/2011/02/la-teachers-use-privatization-fight-build-community-power]
When the Los Angeles school district announced that Dorsey High School was subject to takeover by a corporate charter company, the Dorsey community was ready to fight.
Immediately, a team of teachers, students, and parents distributed 5,000 flyers—starting at our school’s enormously well-attended Friday football game and spreading out into the community that weekend. “This is about your child’s future,” said the flyer, inviting people to a “major community meeting” to “help us come up with our fightback strategy.”
Dorsey teachers were ready to fight to save our school because we had already spent several years building our union chapter and community organizing through Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC), an influential rank-and-file caucus in the 40,000-member United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).
BRICK BY BRICK -
Located in South LA, Dorsey crowds 1,700 students into a school built to serve 1,000. Fifty-six percent are African-American and 44 percent Latino, and most are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
Until four years ago the union chapter was inactive: meetings rarely took place and the chapter had no genuine relationship with parents and community members. We decided we needed to get organized.
Sherlett Hendy is a PE teacher, varsity basketball coach, and lead teacher in one of Dorsey’s Small Learning Communities. A Dorsey alumnus and lifelong community resident, she has served as a mentor to hundreds of students over the years and formed long-term relationships with parents and community members.
Noah Lippe-Klein is a history teacher who had been doing community organizing with a parent/student/teacher organization called Coalition for Educational Justice and had contributed to building PEAC.
We knew we had to replace the union chair, but we wanted to do it by building a new leadership layer in the chapter, one with a social justice vision of getting teachers and parents organized.
We sought out potential leaders who believed in the vision and who had roots in the community and the school—a new leadership core that was majority African-American and Latino.
Through lots of meetings at coffee shops and at our homes, we built a consensus for what a bottom-up, activist union chapter should look like.
We won the chapter chair election, formed a steering committee, and asked its members to build relationships with parents, work on teaching conditions and improving instruction, and draw connections between our school site issues and the union’s district-wide and statewide actions.
We formed strong relationships with parents and community, leading to a coalition called Dorsey Family United. DFU led a campaign for better funding at Dorsey, aimed at improvements such as smaller class sizes, more counseling staff, and maintenance of bathrooms.
We supported a student-run chapter of the Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) on campus, which joined the struggle against district-wide cuts. We supported the successful fight against privatization at one of our feeder elementary schools. We fought proudly against budget cuts and layoffs—PEAC initiated and UTLA sponsored civil disobedience to protest layoffs of teachers and counselors.
Over these months, the teachers learned to trust their allies’ ability to lead. Students and parents responded to this trust by taking their own initiatives.
For example, after last November’s announcement that Dorsey was on the bid list, CEJ student leaders met with the principal to think through ways to inform every student what it would mean to be given away to a charter company. They created a student-led information campaign including student-made buttons and a Facebook page.
TURNING OUT
Our past four years of grassroots organizing, community building, and leadership development is paying off now that Dorsey is on the list for potential private takeover.
Our community forum this January drew 250 parents, students, teachers, administrators, and alumni to address the privatization threat facing Dorsey and three other area schools. The impressive turnout came from hundreds of phone calls by teachers to parents.
At the forum, we followed a presentation with break-out sessions—one for each targeted school—where attendees could start envisioning actions. The break-out groups were then incorporated into school site organizing committees at each school.
The committee at Dorsey involves 40-50 people who meet every Thursday after school in the Dorsey library. It also includes various Saturday or evening meetings for working parents. The committee is now envisioning the kind of school we want Dorsey to be, after which we will write a plan to submit to the district within the competitive bidding process.
The committee will organize for a strong—if non-binding—community vote supporting its plan. To prevent the school board from giving Dorsey to a charter company, we will use local media, gain the support of longtime civil rights organizations in the community, and prepare for a powerful and massive mobilization. We are campaigning jointly with the other three affected schools in our area.
Even if our plan prevails at the school board, we recognize that neither Dorsey nor the school district has the resources necessary for the visionary school we want. Yet the anti-privatization struggle provides a much-needed opportunity for community engagement and empowerment.
New leaders are emerging every day who are committed to the fight to improve Dorsey and who connect our fight to a much larger agenda for quality public education.

2011-03-05 "Puzzling GOP tax caucus" by Marisa Lagos and Wyatt Buchanan from "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F03%2F05%2FBASQ1I2M6L.DTL]
There's been a lot of speculation around the Capitol over exactly what motivated the 30 Republican lawmakers to form a new "taxpayers caucus" last month. The group is dedicated to fighting Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to put taxes on a June ballot unless there's an accompanying ballot measure that would let voters choose to lower taxes by the same amount.
Every one of those legislators had already signed the Grover Norquist "taxpayer protection pledge" where they promised to "oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes." So why did they need another, new pledge?
Even some Republicans - none of whom would speak for the record - expressed bafflement.
Among the theories floating around Sacramento:
-- That taxpayer caucus co-chair Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), was making a play for the minority leader role, or just trying to raise his own profile for future political ambitions.
-- That Strickland and other Republicans close to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association were doing it to provide cover for that group, which took some heat for its position that even letting voters decide on taxes would violate the original no-tax pledge. (Those in this camp point out that the new caucus and the association share a political consultant.)
But as we mentioned above, there's also been consternation among Republicans in the Capitol. Some GOPers told us that many of the new lawmakers who signed the pledge later regretted it, saying they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. (The members who didn't sign the new pledge, including leaders in both houses, have been getting a ton of heat from far-right groups, including influential Southern California radio personalities John and Ken, from KFI (640).) We couldn't reach Strickland on Friday, but last week he told us that the group is simply dedicated to "letting voters decide."
"We said, 'Let's give voters the option, so long as there is an equal or larger tax deduction before them.' We believe that cutting taxes is a way to stimulate the economy," he said. "I'm confident the people of California will vote for a tax cut - it will put more money in people's pockets, and stimulate the economy."
Brown, who has offered to "dispense" Republicans from their original Grover Norquist pledge, touched on the subject Friday in comments to reporters. He said they "didn't take a pledge to deny the people the right to vote," and called opposition to letting voters weigh in "undemocratic."
And the laughs just keep coming: Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, spoke to a packed luncheon crowd at the Sacramento Press Club this week, outlining his bill to unincorporate the troubled city of Vernon in Los Angeles County. But before he got to describing some of the reasons for his action - including pay rates for city retirees that drew gasps from the audience - he started with some jokes aimed at journalists.
"Thank you for inviting me to the press club lunch," Perez said to open his remarks. "It's nice to see all of you holding your knives out in the open for a change."
Maybe he's just getting warmed up for his roast in Sacramento on May 31.
We're not sure it's obscene, but ... Whatever happens within the Legislature, you can bet that if Brown's tax proposal gets on a June ballot, the California Republican Party will be campaigning against it.
The governor's plan was christened by his office as the "Public Safety and Public Education Act of 2011."
California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring called the title "obscenely misleading" and offered suggestions for what he called "more accurate alternative ballot titles."
-- The "We didn't mean it when we called them 'temporary' " Tax Increase Act
-- The "We think it's easier to get more money from you than reform pensions" Act
-- The "Not enough of our tax base has fled to Texas yet" Act
Something tells us the governor's office is not going to be receptive.
And finally: Brown drew laughter from reporters Friday as he was answering questions after his announcement that the Bay Area Council is supporting his budget plan. Asked if he had read a certain Wall Street Journal story, the governor replied, "I don't read the Wall Street Journal so I don't know. If it doesn't appear in the Bee or The Chronicle, I don't know."

Rich Pedroncelli / AP
Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), chairs the newly formed GOP taxpayers caucus in Sacramento.

2011-03-04 "Teacher Layoff Plans in Los Angeles Pose Broad Implications" by JENNIFER MEDINA from "New York Times" newspaper
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/us/05layoffs.html?scp=1&sq=teacher layoff plans&st=cse]
LOS ANGELES — Last year, when the school district here handed out thousands of layoff notices, Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Central stood to lose half of its roughly 150 teachers. Now, with the district planning to lay off as many as 4,500 teachers under what school leaders call a doomsday budget, the school could have been even worse off.
But under a court ruling, not a single teacher at the school would be let go. Instead, Gompers and 44 other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be exempt from any layoffs at all.
The ruling, which ratified a settlement agreed to by plaintiffs and the school district, is being appealed by the teachers’ union. And even as it plays out in a state where schools are facing the prospect of devastating layoffs, it could have implications for districts across the country facing similar cuts. The lawsuit has the support of, among others, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who once worked for the teachers’ union here.
Last spring, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups sued the school district on behalf of parents, saying that their children’s right to an education, guaranteed in the State Constitution, would be violated by the layoffs. Like most districts in the country, Los Angeles has long had an agreement with the union that layoffs are based primarily on seniority, so that the most recently hired teachers are the first to go. That left schools like Gompers, already saddled with high teacher turnover, the most vulnerable.
Lawyers for the parents argued that the layoffs would disproportionately affect poor, black and Latino students, who are more likely to attend schools that are difficult to staff and have a high proportion of inexperienced teachers.
If the ruling is upheld for the seemingly inevitable layoffs this summer, Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, will be among the first to dismiss teachers using criteria other than seniority.
“It’s simply crazy to say that we have to do this based on when people were hired,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview. He has spent considerable effort attacking the union’s policies in recent months and said that the lawsuit was just one of many steps he hopes will overhaul the way hiring and firing is done in the city’s schools.
“This is really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “But we have to start somewhere. We haven’t had any other kind of real change, and this clearly opens the door to more.”
But Julie Washington, the vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said that the ruling was “gutting seniority” and that the new layoff process would wreak havoc in the city’s schools. In the last several months, Ms. Washington has received dozens of calls from union leaders in other parts of the country who worry that they could soon be fighting similar lawsuits.
“You could have a senior teacher who is a nine-year veteran and has spent thousands of hours training and getting better here lose her job,” Ms. Washington said. “All of that is just disregarded with one swoop.”
In essence, the ruling put the rights of students above the job protections that teacher unions widely consider sacrosanct.
“These students deserve the best of what we have promised them,” said Catherine Lhamon, a lawyer with Public Counsel and one of the lead lawyers in the case. “If you have students who are going to see 17 different teachers in a year because so much is churning, they are not getting that. This puts districts on notice that they cannot do that, no matter what the budget circumstances are.”
With districts in California likely to issue as many as 30,000 layoff notices to teachers in the next two weeks — state law sets a March 15 deadline for the notices to go out — and school systems across the country facing huge budget cuts, the battle here will be closely watched. And parents and advocates in other cities could file similar lawsuits.
But the case also points to a split among the advocates who are pushing for the changes. Many political and school leaders say that seniority-based layoffs are antiquated and should be abolished entirely. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have crusaded against so-called “last in, first out” policies for years. For them, the court ruling is Los Angeles does not go far enough.
In many ways, some advocates see the battle between politicians and unions leaders as a distraction. More important, they say, is the fact that after years of budget cuts the students who have the greatest need for stability in school have become the least likely to have it.
“It is really cynical for the political vultures to make this about a victory against the unions,” said Michelle Fine, a professor at the City University of New York who testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the case. “This is really just about how we distribute the pain. The remedy itself is very sad.”
The plan would most likely mean teacher layoffs in middle-class areas that are accustomed to having the same teachers come back year after year. So while Sonia Miller, the principal at Gompers, will have less turmoil this year, the churn will be passed on elsewhere.
“You cannot emphasize how hard it is to teach at a place like this, and to have teachers who want to be here walk out the door is devastating,” she said. “What I want is for my kids to have a fighting chance, and that’s all I really care about. This ruling will by no means make equal education across the board, but at least we will have a chance.”

2011-03-03 "Meanwhile, In Orange County: Hate Is at Home" by Lindsay William-Ross / LAist
[http://sfist.com/2011/03/03/meanwhile_in_orange_county_hate_is.php]
A video posted yesterday to YouTube shows footage from a February, 13th protest in Yorba Linda, held outside a fundraising event held by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), with a goal of aiding women's shelters, and fighting homelessness and hunger in the US. The protesters were there to speak out against "what they called the group’s agenda to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on American society," explains the Jewish Journal. "They were particularly upset with the event’s keynote speakers, New York cleric Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali, whom they said hold anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views."
The protest got underway mid-afternoon, following several days of grassroots organizing. While politicians in the OC attempted to stop the $25-a-plate event, or force them to choose a different speaker, people from all over Southern California, including Los Angeles, planned the protest. "In the afternoon, the event had the atmosphere of a July 4 picnic. Many brought lawn chairs and blankets, sang patriotic songs and tied red, white and blue bandanas on their dogs," said the OC Register.
A group of about 100 splintered off from the principal group of protesters, including some who carried signs that linked ICNA to Hamas and Hezbollah. ICNA's spokesperson said those people did not know the facts about the organization, adding "We have no links to any overseas organization. We absolutely denounce violence and terrorism."
However, notes the Register, "Malik Ali is a Bay Area Islamic activist who spoke at 'Israeli Apartheid Week' at UC Irvine in 2010. There he said he supports Hezbollah, which the CIA labels a terrorist group."
The message, though, as heard in the shouts of the protesters, was that the people at the event were terrorists, child molesters, and wife-beaters, who worship a fraudulent prophet, and, above all else, are not welcome in not only Yorba Linda, but also in America.
Among the protesters were Rabbi Dov Fischer of Young Israel of Orange County, Irvine Jewish activist Dee Sterling and U.S. Congressmen Ed Royce (R-CA), Gary Miller (R-CA), and Chapman University adjunct professor of law Karen Lugo, who said "This is not about hate [...] We are not hatemongers. The world Islamophobia is an effort to chill us. The Constitution was never meant to allow a tyranny of a minority."

2011-03-02 "15 armed men rob Fremont high-tech firm" by Henry K. Lee from "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/01/BAQ01I18SI.DTL&tsp=1]
Fifteen armed men staged a takeover robbery of a high-tech company in Fremont, tying up employees and escaping with computer components, police said.
The heist happened shortly before 8:40 a.m. Sunday at Unigen Corp. at 45388 Warm Springs Road. The robbers, all dressed in black and armed with handguns and automatic rifles, accosted six Unigen employees in the company's loading dock, police Sgt. Chris Mazzone said.
The men tied up the employees and locked them in a room before spending half an hour loading computer parts into a moving-company truck, Mazzone said.
The robbery was filmed by a Unigen surveillance camera, police said.
The heist is being investigated by police and the California Highway Patrol's cargo theft task force.
Unigen was founded in 1991 and develops advanced modular components and integrated circuitry, according to its website.

2011-03-02 "L.A. school board to close six charter schools caught cheating; Board members act to revoke the charter of the Crescendo organization despite an earlier recommendation to reauthorize its schools for another five years" by Howard Blume from "Los Angeles Times" newspaper
[http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0302-lausd-charters-20110302,0,1573991.story]
The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to shut down six charter schools that were accused of widespread cheating on last year's standardized tests, citing the malfeasance and an insufficient response to it.
The board took the initiative to revoke the charter of the Crescendo organization despite an earlier recommendation by the district to reauthorize its schools for another five years. District staff had said they believed that the charter board had taken adequate steps to deal with the scandal.
But on Tuesday, a day after The Times detailed Crescendo's problems, incoming Supt. John Deasy recommended an investigation by the Inspector General of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Pending those results, a one-year renewal could be considered, Deasy said.
Crescendo founder/executive director John Allen allegedly ordered principals and teachers to prepare students for last year's exams with the actual test questions. Several teachers at the schools alerted the district about the cheating.
Allen, who initially denied wrongdoing when confronted, was demoted, according to district documents and interviews. Principals received 10-day suspensions.
A contingent from Crescendo declined to comment after the board vote.
"This charter school is thumbing their nose at the district and thumbing their nose at the rules," said board member Tamar Galatzan, who called on her colleagues to revoke the charter. Crescendo should not have "another year to do what they were supposed to do in the first place."
Before the vote, two Crescendo principals defended the organization's overall record and its approach to instruction. Two parents also praised Crescendo.
"Whatever was in the past or whatever is going on, we should give them a second chance," said Alfredo Guillen, who has two sons there.
But board member Richard Vladovic said the parents' trust had been betrayed with a hurtful message: "We don't have faith in our children. We have to cheat for them."
At Tuesday's meeting, only two Crescendo schools were up for the standard charter renewal process. The board's action applies to all six campuses, which are in South Los Angeles, Gardena and Hawthorne.
Crescendo schools will be allowed to remain open during the months-long shut-down process required by state law.
The board move was unusual — it has rarely revoked a charter for wrongdoing or academic performance.
The vote was 6 to 1, with Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte dissenting. She said she was concerned about the welfare of the school's students and cited the charters' apparent academic success.
But school board President Monica Garcia said the cheating made it hard to tell whether the schools were as successful as believed. The state invalidated the 2010 test results, which were nonetheless cited by district staff as evidence of the schools' academic success.
The Crescendo charter had a pair of unlikely defenders, the head of the teachers union and the California Charter Schools Assn., which has called for strict accountability for charter schools. Charters are publicly funded and independently run.
Union President A.J. Duffy wanted the schools to stay open in the interests of students and teachers, who recently voted to join United Teachers Los Angeles. He said teachers had courageously risked their jobs to report cheating. He also said anyone involved in cheating should be disciplined and perhaps even fired.
The charter association supported a short-term charter renewal to give the school time to prove itself. Crescendo joined the charter association as the cheating allegations were emerging.
Association director Jed Wallace said he lacked enough information to pass judgment. Nor would he say that cheating per se should be a cause for dismissal or a charter revocation.
In other related actions, the school board approved, without discussion, allowing El Camino Real High School to become a charter. The Woodland Hills campus has long been considered an academic powerhouse.
The board also voted unanimously to shut down Cornerstone Prep School in Florence, because of poor academic performance.
And, board members also agreed not to renew the charter of Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists, also in Florence, over management issues and a financial conflict of interest among its operators. LaMotte abstained, citing the school's high test scores.
The school's operators said they would appeal the non-renewal to the L.A. County Office of Education, which also can authorize charter schools.

Sovereign Hoopa Nation

2011-03 "Recovery and Restoration–Tribal Education Department Applies for Grant for Hupa Language; California Law Passes Ground-breaking Language Credentialing Process" by Kay Heitkamp from "Two Rivers Tribune" newspaper
[http://www.tworiverstribune.com/2011/03/recovery-and-restoration-tribal-education-department-applies-for-grant-for-hupa-language/]
Hoopa Valley Tribal Grant Writer, Norma McAdams, took the lead in applying for the Administration for Native American (ANA) Language Preservation and Maintenance Grant submitted the first week of March, 2011. Hoopa Tribal Education Director, Greg Masten, helped facilitate and move the process along.
“We also had a lot of technical support from the ANA people. That’s part of the process – you can ask for their input,” said Masten. “Multiple conference calls with ANA evaluators helped advise us if there were areas of the grant application that needed strengthening. Others who gave us their input included Hoopa Museum Curator, Salish Jackson, Danny Ammon and Melodie George who teach at Hoopa High School, and Jackie Martin who teaches at Hoopa Elementary School.
The ANA grant funds up to $300,000 for a three-year program. The Hoopa Tribal Education Department applied for the full amount. The grant is the only one the Education Department has applied for specifically for language preservation.
Hupa is the only surviving California Athabaskan language and is nearing the brink of extinction. There are fewer than five first-language speakers – all honored elders. Among them are Verdena Chase, Bill Carpenter Jr., and Sonny Pratt.
If funded, the ANA grant will support collecting, organizing, and analyzing data to determine the current status of the tribe’s language. It also would cover planning and implementing different learning models such as immersion, intergenerational, or master/apprentice formats, and the training and credentialing of teachers.
Support would also be provided for developing, printing and distributing teaching materials, as well as planning, designing, and implementing Hupa language curriculums in schools and education projects to enhance the Hoopa Valley community’s language preservation goals.
Funding would help with recording and documenting oral testimony and old tapes to create resources for future generations.
“Part of what the grant seeks to do is to continue to work with the last fluent speakers and document the process,” said Masten. “We need to gather information, pull it together, and more clearly define the Hupa language. The big challenge is that it never was a written language.”
During the process of applying for the grant, McAdams and Masten met with the schools’ language teachers and Jackson at the museum, and also received input from the community during a public meeting held on Feb. 23 in the Hoopa Tribal Council Chambers.
The director said what the tribe has today is the work of dedicated people who tried to put the language into written format.
“It’s never been completed – it’s always been a work in progress,” Masten said. “There’s a lot of intricacies in the Hupa language – it’s one of the most complex of all Athabaskan languages.”
Jackson confirmed this. Verbs form the base of the Hupa language, rather than nouns. Jackson has been working almost every day with Hoopa tribal elder, Verdena Chase, to document the 64 ways every single verb can be used.
“Documentation is part of the grant. So much more has to be done in this area,” said Masten.
Another grant objective is to help teachers becoming fluent in Hupa and obtain their language teaching credentials. They will be the bridge to the next generation of students who will then continue the process.
“This is all part of a comprehensive language program,” said Masten. “We take for granted all of the rich resources we do have – elders, the body of work that’s already been done, the ongoing documentation of oral histories. It’s very rare what we have here in Hoopa.”
Hoopa Valley High School currently has a four-year Hupa language program. Grant support could help create a program in which older students would start working with the upcoming generation, even children at the pre-schools.
“We’re trying to create an intergenerational linkage, a continuum. We have a lot of good things on hand – video tapes, language camps, dictionaries, videos,” said Masten. “One of my goals is to take all these existing materials and put it into a language program, not just for the sake of having a language program, but to help the language flourish.”
The over-arching goal of the grant is for the language to become a living language.
“We’re only getting so far with the pieces we have,” the director said. “We need to take that next giant step, which is to get Hupa to where it’s a working, living language in our daily lives in the community and into our homes.”
One thing the grant would support is hiring a language coordinator, someone to spearhead the entire project and provide direction. That individual would be in charge of project activities, such as holding a language summit of Native speakers. A coordinator could also develop a technology program to digitize old tapes and recordings using modern software. Masten noted there’s so much that needs to be upgraded before it’s lost forever.
Masten has participated in several meetings geared to the language credentialing process. AB544, a ground-breaking California law passed in 2010, acknowledges that tribes know best who should be teaching their Native language in the schools. Tribes can now develop the criteria for language curriculums based on their own unique customs and traditions.
The director said there’s a need to incorporate more culture and Native languages into public schools, and that to move forward, schools need to begin with tribal values, ideologies, and methodologies, with the tribe’s sustainability in mind.
“Our focus should be on the tribal concept of the purpose of education, which is transferring knowledge from generation to generation – capturing what’s gone on before and incorporating that with what’s ahead,” said Masten. “That’s sustainability. We are a tribal nation, and we have to look at what it takes to sustain a nation. Language is a core component.”

2011-03 "Petition Circulating to Repeal Hoopa Tribe’s Marijuana Cultivation Suppression Ordinance; Tribal Member Collecting Signatures for Ballot" by Kay Heitkamp from "Two Rivers Tribune" newspaper
[http://www.tworiverstribune.com/2011/03/petition-circulating-to-repeal-hoopa-tribes-marijuana-cultivation-suppression-ordinance/]
A petition is circulating to gather signatures from members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe to conduct a referendum election to repeal Title 34, the Marijuana Cultivation Suppression Ordinance passed in November, 1999.
Hoopa Tribal member, Arthur P. Jones Sr. began circulating the petition on March 7 with a goal of petitioning the Hoopa Valley Election Board to put the issue out to vote.
A state-wide voter initiative, the California Compassionate Use Act (Prop 215), was passed in 1996 to allow patients with a valid doctor’s recommendation to possess and cultivate marijuana for personal medicinal use. The law exempts patients and their defined caregivers who possess or cultivate marijuana recommended by a physician from criminal laws which otherwise prohibit possession or cultivation of marijuana. It also safeguards physicians who recommend use of marijuana for medical treatment from being punished or denied any right or privilege.
Under federal law, growing, possession, or distribution of marijuana is still a crime. According to federal law, there is no such thing as medical marijuana. However, there are signs across the nation that federal enforcement of these laws may be weakening in states that have passed compassionate use laws. In October, 2009, in an effort to focus the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) resources on serious drug traffickers, the DOJ released new federal guidelines that instructed federal officials not to go after marijuana users or suppliers who comply with their states’ medical marijuana laws.
Hoopa’s Title 34 ordinance asserts that the Compassionate Act of 1996 lacks standards to implement its goals. The ordinance also states that the open and notorious cultivation of marijuana on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, under the guise of permissive use as described in Prop 215, endangers the general welfare, health, and safety of residents living on the reservation.
The tribal ordinance expressly forbids cultivation of marijuana or possession of any live marijuana plant. Violators can be fined, subject to criminal prosecution, or excluded from living on the Hoopa Valley Reservation. The Hoopa Valley Tribal Court can also issue orders to seize and destroy marijuana plants cultivated in violation of the ordinance.
Proponents seeking to repeal Hoopa’s Title 34 Ordinance cite the fact that California is a Public Law 280 state and that because the state has, through Prop 215, decriminalized the possession and growth of marijuana for medical purposes, the Hoopa Valley Reservation should be governed by state law rather than the tribal ordinance.
PL 280 is a federal law that transferred federal law enforcement jurisdiction to state governments in six states, including California. State law enforcement agencies can take tribal members to state courts for prosecution in criminal cases arising within reservation boundaries.
Jones estimates that there a sufficient number of tribal members living on the Hoopa Valley Reservation who would benefit from being able to grow small amounts of marijuana for their own medical use as prescribed by their physician to make it worth the effort of petitioning the Hoopa Valley Tribe to repeal Title 34.
The goal of Jones is to gather at least 500 signatures to present to the Hoopa Valley Tribal Council to request a referendum election. Contact him at (530) 784-7552 for more information or to sign the petition. Whenever possible, Jones will try to accommodate individuals without a means of transportation by driving to their homes so they can sign the petition.
“We’re a Public Law 280 state. If the state says we’re allowed to grow marijuana for our own medical use, then that’s the law that should apply,” said Jones. “We’re not trying to make up a law. We’re just trying to abide by state law. We need to take this back to the people.”