LHS Alumni Association's Spring Dance tomorrow

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 30th, is the date for the Alumni Association's Spring Dance at Maggie's Pub in Santa Fe Springs.

This is a fundraiser that happens to also be affordable.  It's an opportunity to visit with old friends and meet other alumni and just relax for a while.   There is a buffet style dinner that's included and there's music as well.  Come by and visit, eat, trade stories and dance- or any combination of these things.

Check the side bar, and for more details, see Alumni page. A main contact would be Mike Ibarra.

Former Dodger Pitcher Bobby Castillo, LHS alum, at Alhambra for meet and greet on Saturday.

Bobby Castillo, the former Dodger pitcher and a Lincoln High alumnus, will be in Alhambra tomorrow afternoon according to the announcement sent out from KABC AM-790 radio, the Dodgers L.A. network station.  DETAILS: http://kabc.com/Article.asp?id=2156746&spid=11456 that also appears in the current edition of the Alhambra News.

The announcement mentions that Bobby was credited with teaching Fernando Valenzuela how to throw a screwball, a pitch that Valenzuela relied on for much of his career success.

Time and Place: Alhambra Courtyard on Saturday, April 16, from 12:00 noon-3:00 PM

Stop by if you have a chance and visit with Bobby.

Mayor Villaraigosa's State of City speech- Was he talking about Los Angeles?

The State of the City speech for 2011, the 6th one delivered by the mayor of Los Angeles, Antoinio Villaraigosa, and the accompanying delivery style by the mayor is what you'd might expect to hear with all thing in order, a very rosy picture. 

He did not really explain just where the money is going to come from to pay for all the things he described when you have to notice now that the libraries are closed 2 days a week and the LAPD has put a hold on new academy classes until the money situation is settled. 

The mayor is responsible for the city and that interest into LAUSD's area is not anything that's in the city's charter, but that's just a small detail for the mayor, too small to really pay attention to.    Maybe the real issues that a mayor's actual responsibility touches just is not interesting enough.   If you followed what the mayor has done over the years, the story calling him "The 11% Mayor" for all the time spent on real city business is appropriate.   

Since that story came out Antonio's not produced much improvement, hiring Austin Beutner to the be "Job Czar" and head up over a dozen city departments.  Usually each department has a separate person to run it.  DWP was one of Buetner's departments until the recent appointment of a "permanent" general manager.

But the Mayor is never one to let taking credit slip by without attaching his name to it.  And here, you have to really wonder about the "deal" he's talking about with the city employee unions.  There's got to be a lot of Council members wondering how the mayor is going to make his predictions happen when they've been working off and on for the last year to balance the budget.

Well, at least the speech sounded good.  There is one thing I am very sure of, and it's not the accuracy all that was mentioned in the speech. I know that the mayor had somebody write it for him.  The whole thing was too slick.   I really wonder how many of the city council members have begun to doubt Antonio's abilities.  Maybe that's the wrong question since that's probably happened a long time ago.  They now should wonder what is his game plan, since it's not re-election this as his last term.

You can bet on the regular things here, that "friends" will be the ones to get contracts, other deals and the benefit of the money from whatever projects and programs that public tax money supports. Whether it will be spent wisely for something measurably productive is yet another question.   Count me in as one of the doubters of the whole group.  With Wesson, Huiizar, Cardenas and Council President Garcetti each fined for violations of ethic rules and the mayor getting a fine for "ticket gate" with all the free tickets received, how can you have faith in them.  And I forgot that Alarcon's still facing a trial along with his wife for lying on voting documents about where he really lived.

By the way, don't worry that any of them will actually feel any pinch from paying the fines since they have diferent funds that come from the same ones that got them into trouble and these sources will provide the money to pay fines.  So in the end, there's no shame and no pain.   And these are the leaders that continue to be elected and re-elected to office, a real crime that voters had all in the palms of their hands to change.  An especially dismal picture when you see these people win elections with roughly less than 10 per cent of the city's registered voters choosing them as way less than 20% of the registered voters show up at the polls.

I still wonder how Antonio came to see the city as he described in the speech.

Alumni Meeting for April this Saturday at LHS.Tickets for April 30 dance on sale.

The Alumni Association meeting witll be at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, April 16, 2011 at LHS in the Cafeteria. 
There's lots to cover and the Alumni Spring Dance will be two weeks later at the same place as the fall dance, Maggie's Pub in Santa Fe Springs.

See the link in the sidebar.  Tickets are available at $35 each.  You can get tickets at this meeting as well.

Mayor Villaraigosa gives the 2011"State of City" speech today at 5pm.

Look for Mayor Villaraigosa to give the annual “State of the City” speech today, Wednesday, at 5pm.
The 2011 “State of the City Speech” that Mayor Villaraigosa presents each April will be different this time around from what the reports are in the L.A. Daily News and other news sources.

"Villaraigosa to focus on education in his State of the City address-The mayor's emphasis on struggling schools comes as city officials are wrestling with a deficit of at least $350 million and trying to retain services even after deep budget cuts."
maeve.reston@latimes.com
howard.blume@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-of-city-20110413,0,1123266.story

The Mayor has long sought to involve himself in the operations of the LAUSD even though it is outside the jurisdiction of Los Angeles City government. The Board of Education is in charge of running the district. The Mayor directed lots of his attention into getting involved where no other mayor or recent or old memory has ventured. Some wonder why so much attention goes there while the mayor’s personal attention to city business has been demonstrated to be low or worse.

Ultimately the mayor obtained “partnerships” to operate 10 schools that were low performing and so far, no one has reported that this has been a failure. A large segment of the faculty at Roosevelt High were not happy with the way the educational process was being handled by the mayor’s group a few years ago, but that has either been resolved or they have accepted what’s there.

To get back to the speech, the mayor is abandoning puttying more pressing issues into the forefront of the topic. The budget problems don’t do much to show the mayor being at the top of his job, so he will move to the education area, something that really is not the pressing issue for the city administration, but when you consider how severely distressed the city’s finances are now and will continue to be for years, the education area might make the mayor look good, satisfying his ego, and that’s part of the needs for this mayor all along.

The main motivation I expect here that puts “Education” into the spotlight is that it is a distraction from what bad news the budget issues bring us. There has been poor performance by the mayor and city council in handling taxpayer money since Day One.

There is one thing that most don’t notice that’s changed from the first ones made by Villaraigosa, and that’s the style of delivery. In the first one and maybe the second one, too, Villaraigosa appeared to use the Martin Luther King, Jr. “I have a dream…” style that you associate with some greatness of purpose. Unfortunately, there’s been no greatness with this mayor.

Maybe the mayor’s former delivery was made with the idea that these speeches would be part of future videos that all would refer to in L.A. history. Well, that’s not happening, so Antonio’s just using his regular style in making these speeches, finally abandoning the notion that he would ever be a great or even competent orator or that the content would be somehow worthwhile.

For a while in recent years, the mayor’s spoken words as heard in the news, were interrupted by “uh’s” and “ah’s” that gave the impression of either some underlying health problem his mental processes, or, simply a lack of preparedness on his part for the subject discussed.

Well, I don’t expect any great surprises as I have come to see most politicians, especially this one, use these moments to set up things for themselves, skipping the possibility that they would admit blame but usually finding some other reason for things turning out so poorly. He used “dreams” a lot in his themes. What I think will be his “dream” here will be some attempt at leaving his mark on the education system. The marks that he left elsewhere were of little use to the residents and businesses of Los Angeles.

Fundraiser Spaghetti Dinner Today at Lincoln Park for 4th of July Fireworks Show

Here's a last minute notice for a fundraiser to go to the 4th of July Fireworks show at Lincoln Park for July 2011.  It's a Spaghetti Dinner with tickets priced at $5 each, and this still is a bargain item that includes garlic bread, salad, and beverage. Sponsored by the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce and the City Dept. of Recreation and Parks.

This is all happening on:
Saturday, April 9th,
from 3pm to 6pm at the Lincoln Park facility, 3501 N. Valley Blvd., Los Angeles.
- where there's lots of free parking, as well.

I don't have details on where contributions can be made for any of you who would like to help out but will post as I learn more on this.  Fireworks displays are one of the things that have a general appeal to the community.  It takes little effort to watch, a real spectator event, and these can be seen on a more widespread way from a distance, that a lot of other events can't match.

These are professionally presented for a safe and enjoyable experience that avoids the risks that people still take with "safe and sane" types of fireworks, and the other totally illegal and hazardous types you always see and hear around 4th of July.  

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This is one of the ways that these events can happen when the public works to support community events.  The City funding of all things is severely diminshed based on a lot of things that I won't go into any detail now, but you know there's lots of blame to go around at City Hall- and the CMs still can find money for pet projects, usually from "discretionary funds" of each CM.

For many events now, there has to be real partnerships put together to raise money to cover events, and if they are important, there should be support to make them happen.

LAUSD teachers get pink slips, even one of the better performers.

Aside from the city government's budget problems, the LAUSD has it's own continuing combination of woes involving budget and personnel. It looks like there is not enough money to keep the current teacher level at the present level after September, so "pink slips" were sent out as a prerequisite to layoffs of teachers.

The other part of the problem for the District is that performance of students still is lagging behind what's needed. Overall, this makes the District's education programs very much of appealing target for takeover by partnerships/charters and whatever other form of non-District operation that is being created.

Focusing on the pink slips story in the L.A. Times, "Singled-out L.A. Unified teacher shares skills with colleagues"- http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-broadous-teachers-20110403,0,4961288.story By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011.  This is a teacher who has be able to improve student performance so well, that he's been consulted for assistance in improving other teachers' skills. The problem for Mr. Miguel Aguilar, an elementary teacher, is that he received a pink slip to make him subject to layoff. It's not a certainty, but he's still within the group that may find itself unemployed despite superior performance.

The "seniority" list is at work for deciding who goes, as it is in most other union-represented businesses. Performance is not the deciding factor, although a recent court decision appears to allow the District to take into account other factors in retaining teachers where there is overall low seniority within its roster which would leave a particular school without experienced teachers and many subs. The negative impact on the learning potential of students who have had their school cleaned out of such teachers by seniority-based layoffs is what makes the difference. This generally would not apply to schools where the number of the teachers laid off may be less intense.

Mr. Aguilar has 8 years of seniority and is still not high enough on the list to be "safe" which should make the teaching profession one that will have few takers in the current state of the economy. When you have experienced, credentialled teachers out of work, it's not not very enticing a career area for most looking for even a semblance of stability.

In the past, the LAUSD has cut down on the projected job losses and this is always a possibility here. Yet, when that happens and money is found to ward off the layoffs, it can cause doubt on the union's part as to the District really being forthcoming in what they present as the budget condition. We will have to wait and see what happens.