The Lincoln High campus will be the site of an "Open House" event tomorrow, Thursday, April 16, 2009 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. From the LHS web site, "See great displays of student work, including exhibits, demonstrations, and more!" with a PDF file that gives a few more notes.
The school information is listed on the school's web site, but as with most postings, they are sparse on showing any expected details. That's an annoying part of the web "Calendar" feature, I find- and you can see what I mean by clicking the " News and Announcements" for more details on an item and you will get the the identical text in most cases, not very informative. I did see that the Debate team had a competition and LHS had students moving to higher steps in the competitions, but last names were left off on the click-thru page. Maybe it's in deference to security and privacy concerns. Just too "insider," in my opinion, to accomplish giving any real credit to the competitors, the "debators" (and that uncommon spelling may be too "insider," as well). http://www.lincolnhs.org/ Congratulations goes out to the Debate Team, duly earned in spite of it appearing untrumpeted as an achievement and lacking more details for following the nest competitions.
I noticed that there is a Professional Development Day coming this Saturday on campus for teachers. That's one of the puzzling things about LAUSD, well, "another" of the puzzling things about LAUSD. Supt. Cortines mentioned, actually he announced, there were reductions, some of the LAUSD budget-cutting steps taken to try to help the ongoing crisis. I thought it included some Professional Development spending and the elimination of "buy-back" days, but this activity appears to be outside of that expense-cutting action that he announced. Usually Professional Development time is included within the scheduled school time for a teacher, so it's not making any additional impact on costs, it's just shifting the activity for teachers from teaching students to being trained or informed in some additional way.
Saturday's Professional Development activity is getting another day's worth of hours at the teacher's particular pay rate, and that's what I thought had been cut. However, if it's a contract-required item, then I see it's not able to be eliminated. The school's audio "bulletin" announcement sounded like they were still trying to get more participation, which would be good to get while it's there. And there's meals included, always a big "plus" to get teachers involved when you wanted attendance at anything on campus. That's just an observation from seeing attendance improved when food is present.
The audio bulleting for April 14 also contained the announcement that the Field Trips to ELA Community College and L.A. City College was cancelled due to low numbers of Parent Permission slips returned for the Tuesday and Wednesday trips. The events were being rescheduled for next month and students were urged to get the papers in on time. That announcement was somewhat related to expectations that students have, and even just the act of touring the Communtiy Colleges doesn't grab their attention.
Expectations of attending college after high school seems to be held only by the LAUSD Board and not students or their families. In LAUSD, just staying in the system to graduate from high school is its own special kind of achievement, and an end in itself. Some interest in going to a college or post-high school training is stirred up at school but there's only so much you can do. If you don't have families pushing education as a valued commodity, then the uphill battle is waged on a steeper slope. Some may disagree with that observation and maybe a lot of the students have other activities conflicting with the time for the field trips, and maybe some are just focused on applying to four-year colleges and universities, not the two-year schools. I just don't know. I think my view is closer to what the situation actually is. You should note that the community colleges threshold for admission is the attainment of age 18.
Maybe Council Member Jose Huizar was wrong in taking steps to change curriculum to a mandatory college track for every student, something he takes credit for doing while he was on the LAUSD Board of Education. Changing values would have been a more useful endeavor instead. Monica Garcia, the Huizar-successor at the LAUSD, is concerned with reaching "100 percent" graduation rates for schools. Some people say that you should work on things in increments and move on as fast as those steps permit. Assuming a 100-percent graduation is going to happen just ignores a lot of realities for students, and even the ones who want to graduate run into personal situations, not the least of which is teen pregnancy for girls.
But all that wasn't in the bulletin, of course.
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