Sound off about summer school

In about 19 days, the nation's second largest school district will shut its doors and put 700,000 kids between the ages of 5 and 18 out on our streets. If you think your park programs, your food courts, and your Apple store camps are crowded now, wait until next month.

Many of LAUSD's students are among the state's most challenged learners, and they need the instruction, structure, and consistency summer school provides. Other kids just need a place to be and something to do for a few hours a days.

California also has the fourth-highest rate of unemployment in the U.S., and parents looking for work or forced to make do with a smaller monthly income won't be spending money on fancy - or maybe even modestly priced - summer camps. Now more than ever this city needs to provide free services to its children and families.

What's even harder to understand is that district is the midst of multi-billion-dollar building frenzy - the largest construction project in the West. Despite draconian budget cuts and the pink slips sent to thousands of LAUSD teachers this spring, construction of new schools continues unabated. In Downtown L.A. alone there are a dozen new schools, including the soon-to-open high school for the arts and the 2,500-student mega-plex Roybal Learning Center. These new campuses are inviting, innovative works of architecture - and as soon as they're open, they'll be mothballed about 25% of the year.

 

Somehow the numbers and priorities need to be re-calculated to put the students' needs first.

Angelenos, are we really ready to give up on 700,000 of our kids so easily? Is this truly the best we can do?

By the way, if you want to sound off about summer school, KPCC would like to hear from you. 

To Protect and, whatever, don't bother us

Nothing says "we don't care" like a lame website, and the LAPD has one of the lamest. The first thing you'll see if you visit is that crime is down. Their website is my only evidence of this. I find no corroboration in the daily paper or on the news, but then I can't find information about anything I see or hear about in the paper or on the news. Plus, as anyone who has watched The Wire knows, cops jack stats. As anyone who has read the current LA Weekly knows, Bill Bratton is the statistics jacker-in-chief.

There must be some kind of chicanery behind Chief Bratton and Mayor Villaraigosa's assertions that crime is down to its 1956 levels, and Friday night, I had a strong feeling I was witnessing the latest round of "book cooking." Black and whites were everywhere, cruising the Los Feliz Art Walk, shining their spots, barking on the mike - "Stay on the sidewalk!" - and generally acting like extras on Southland.

Why hasn't that show been cancelled yet? I need to do a quick riff on Southland, which I looked forward to with anticipation. I love cop shows, from Dragnet and Adam 12 to Police Woman to NYPD Blue and beyond. But Southland's a non-starter. It's super-TV-ish. It doesn't know where it falls on the police meta-narrative continuum, and it is so basic, it feels contrived.

My beefs include the ridiculous: even in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles (which I learned from the LAPD website is 468 square miles, not the 500 the Southland website rounds up to) cops do not cover a beat from South Central to Echo Park to the Hollywood Hills, and furthermore, they don't give tickets in West Hollywood for two reasons - a) cops don't give tickets except during organized sweeps, like New Year's Eve or last Friday night, when they haul out the portable paddy wagons and b) WeHo is outside of the LAPD's jurisdiction. That prime territory belongs to the LA County Sheriff. (I get it: the extra 32 square miles in Southland's LA must include WeHo.)

On the larger scale, I am not interested in the characters. They are all so conventionally flawed with good hearts underneath. The first season of The Shield inured me against rookies who have their "faith shaken," as the episode recap states, and actually get to kill a person their first day on the job. The dialog feels ripped from a ride-along . After five seasons of The Wire, I know enough about "natural police" to know there aren't any in Southland.

Which brings us back to the website and its lameness.
As I said, I know there was a crackdown taking place this weekend - I saw it in full force, everywhere I went, all evening.
There's nothing about that in the paper or on the local news. There's nothing about it on the LAPD website.

Instead there's info about swine flu, the 2010 U.S. census, and earthquake preparedness (which is over now - it's May, not April - and the irony is, we actually had an earthquake on May 1. Wasn't that lucky).
You may not have thought these topics were within the purview of the LAPD. You would have been wrong. I guess since crime has dropped so dramatically and resources are tight, the LAPD is branching out.

Maybe resources aren't as tight as we've been told: the LAPD is hiring. Starting pay is $56,522 a year, all the coffee you can drink, and the chance to murder someone your very first day! Oops, that's only only on TV.

If you're into TV, you can watch LAPD tv online. There are numerous "talking head" speeches from the Chief, and a couple of unintelligible silent videos. Don't miss this one:
Titled "15 year old girl attacked," this 16-second security camera video is probably somehow related to the attempted rape of a young girl outside King Middle School. Since there is absolutely no audio, no date, no information, and no captioning, you'll have to trust my sleuthing.

I was beginning to think I'd stumbled on to the website for Mayberry R.F.D., when, oh, wait, here at the BOTTOM of the page, there's a Most Wanted list, a Most Wanted Gang Members list, and information about various rewards. Wouldn't you think this info would go near the TOP of the page - maybe before the outdated story about earthquake preparedness and the non-story about H1N1?

Suffice it to say that the LAPD has no Twitter feed, no official Facebook presence, and no "breaking news" on their site or in their blog. If you want to know what's happening in your neighborhood, please just figure it for yourself. Chances are you'll find nothing in the paper, nothing on the news, nothing online.

Maybe you can talk to a cop next time you're eating at Palermo's (they're closed on Tuesdays). And when he or she tells you they've got it under control, you can breath a sigh of relief, pat yourself on the back for being so friendly to a person in uniform, and keep telling yourself, crime is down, it's down, it's down. If you ever doubt that for a moment, revisit the website. You will see the statistics. No news. No information. No details. Just the facts.