On Monday, California lawmakers saw their pay cut by 18 percent. Instead of earning $116,208 a year, they will drop to $95,291.

It was a move that our dear legislators did everything they could to keep from occurring, including pleading with State Attorney General Jerry Brown to declare the cut illegal. (He wisely and correctly declined to do so.)

This brings us to this past Tuesday when the LAUSD board threatened cuts closer to home. The board told the LA’s public school teachers that either 5000 more jobs would be slashed from the district payrolls in the next two years, OR the teachers could take a more than 11 percent drop in pay.

It hardly needs to be said that, if LA’s teachers take the proposed wage hit, they will NOT be grossing $95 grand as their remaining take home.

On the Huffington Post, impassioned Venice High English teacher Dennis Danziger takes a look at the brand new unholy choice of LAUSD cuts from a perspective other than purely fiscal: He sees the cuts as a civil rights issue.

Here, in part, is what he writes:

I stood in a crowd of four or five hundred red-shirted fellow teachers outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters near downtown LA late this afternoon. Inside the LAUSD Board was debating, and would later vote on a budget plan which called for a 12% teacher pay cut; plus they’d consider tossing in a few furlough dates just for good measure. All totaled, the package, if approved, would amount to just under a 15% pay cut.

There goes cable TV. Christmas gifts to everyone on my list. The photographer at my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Hand sanitizer. July, August and September rent. Abbot Kinney pizza. The 3,000 mile oil change. Bully sticks for my dogs Leo and Soni. And the land line.

[SNIP]

More disappointing than imagining my shrinking paycheck was the Board’s lone alternative to the proposed pay cuts. In lieu of a pay cut we teachers could vote to have 5,000 LAUSD employees, including 1,400 of our fellow teachers, canned. Kind of a Sophie’s Choice move by the Board. Your money or your colleagues’ jobs. You choose.

This year the LAUSD booted 2,000 teachers off its payroll, and the English classes I teach at Venice HS jumped from 27 students per class in 2008 to 37 students per class this year. Another round of teacher cuts and my classes will be so packed they’ll be in violation of city fire codes. Oh well.

We few hundred protesters milled around in the cold shouting the same old lame union chants: “Enough is enough. Enough is enough.” And the old reliable United Teachers of Los Angeles chant, “U-T-L-A! U-T-L-A!”

Someone with a microphone shouted, “Louder, so they can hear you upstairs!”

Maybe if the 48,000 UTLA members who stayed away from our demonstration had showed up, the people upstairs would have heard our voices. Would have thought twice before threatening our livelihoods, trashing our profession, before threatening to turn a second-rate school district into little more than storage units, holding facilities for the poor. Because that’s what the LAUSD is fast becoming.

Check out the LAUSD website and you’ll learn that over 90% of its students are non-white and the vast majority of them are poor.

So I don’t take the Board’s proposed pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs personally. It’s not that the Board hates teachers. Heck, I figure they could care less about us one way or the other.

This is a civil rights issue. What the Board is doing, if they impose these cuts, is making sure that LA’s poor and working class children don’t stand much of a chance when it comes time to compete for college slots. When it comes time for these kids to enter the workforce.

What the Board will insure if they pass these cuts is that the status quo will prevail. They’ll make sure the tech schools and the military fill their quotas. Make sure there’s another generation of cheap labor. Bus boys, car wash attendants, people who can answer phones, vacuum office floors, deliver pizzas, rake leaves, change diapers, stock shelves and check the oil…..

Read the rest here.

Unemployment in California is at 12.2 percent and expected to go higher when the new figures come out this month. Newly minted college graduates are having trouble getting jobs. Teachers and other laid off professionals are having trouble.

So how bad is the job market for those applicants who, when they fill out an employment application, have to check the YES box next to the question that asks if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony?

Even in good economic times, studies have indicated that 65 percent of all American employers say they won’t hire felons.

This leaves California in general, and LA in particular with a problem. In our state, 130,00 adults are paroled from prison every year. More than a third of them will come to Los Angeles, which is already home to the largest parole population in the U.S. The majority of those parolees will need jobs.

The Wall Street Journal reports that in this market, people with with 20-year old misdemeanor conviction records are running into trouble, and acting to get their records expunged.

But with felonies, people are pretty much out of luck.

I spoke to a young man just last night, an 18-year-old former gang member who is trying to set his life right. He’s a smart and personable guy. But he has a juvenile felony conviction. He told me me that he’s been looking for a job since this summer. He’s tried everywhere he can think of. All the chains like Target and Home Depot, MacDonalds, mom and pop stores. . But, thus far, no one has been even willing to interview him.

I worry that he will resort to less-than-legal means just to pay his bills.

It is no accident that California has the highest recidivism rate in the nation.

Rachel Mayrow of NPR’s California Report has an excellent story about the problem and what a few compassionate employers are doing to help out.

Goodwill Industries, is one of those places that is stepping up. And they’re not the only ones.

Tri-Ced Recycling, the state’s largest non-profit recycling company, is committed to helping people with such barriers to employment.

It isn’t enough, but it is a beginning.

I tried to ignore this story yesterday, I really did. But find that I can’t do it.

According to the London Times, Bernie Madoff has hired a “top prison consultant” (who knew that such people existed) to “help him find the the best possible jail” in which to do his 150 years.

Aside from our irritation that Madoff has access to any funds at all with which he can hire such a person, it is even more vexing that Madoff and his lawyers believe that, once they determine “the best possible” prison (It’s prison, people, not jail), that they will be able to influence the choice of facilities.

Due to Madoff’s lengthy sentence, he is prohibited from being sent to any of the Club Fed-type places that house such other high profile law breakers as Martha Stewart and other first time, non-violent white collar inmates.

This little bit of news was, according to the Times, a bit of a shock to Mr. Madoff and his “consultant”—Herb Hoelter, of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, whose previous clients include the jailed Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and the financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. .

“He was incredibly disappointed. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. I don’t think that was ever an issue,” Mr Hoelter told The Times. “But it’s patently unfair to cast him as a symbol of all evil.”

Federal convicts are assigned to minimum, low, medium, high-security prison, or even the sole Supermax facility, by the US Bureau of Prisons using a score-card known as Form BP-337 to calculate an inmate’s “Security Point Total”. A first-time non-violent white-collar criminal convicted in a US federal court would normally qualify for incarceration at a minimum-security “prison camp” with easygoing rules and no perimeter fence. But the length of Mr Madoff’s jail term means that he has no hope at all of going to one of them.

Bummer.

Or as some of his soon to be colleagues would say, if you don’t want to do the time, dearest Bernie, don’t do the crime.

According to AOL’s Daily Finance, Southeby’s Taubman….

…. spent his nine and a half months at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, getting medical care on the government dime. Taubman’s book, Threshold Resistance, contains some prison advice Madoff may find useful, such as making friends, keeping a pleasant demeanor, and bringing reading material.

Madoff, however, may need some slightly different advice.

A sentence above 30 years usually places an inmate in a high-security category, meaning that Madoff would be assigned to a prison housing violent offenders including murderers and rapists. Ed Bales, of Federal Prison Consultants, which is not involved in the case, said that Madoff was likely to be held in isolation, known as “the hole”, at least at first.

Yeah, well, that’s what happens to most people who draw big, bad sentences. Consultant or no consultant, in the end his location will be up to the discretion of Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Look. I honestly don’t mean to sound vengeful. It is merely that I do not believe that the guy who robbed thousands of people of their life savings merits special treatment simply because he’s rich and….you know….white.

We put eighteen-year-olds with no priors in level four maximum security prisons if their crimes are deemed to be gang related. Bernie Madoff is no more vulnerable or valuable than they are.
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Photo by Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/eyevine

The now familiar tango continues in the California state capitol in which the governor threatens hideous actions if the lawmakers don’t get their collective acts together and come up with a viable budget by a certain deadline, the lawmakers miss the deadline, and the governor re-calibrates his threat.

One of the worst of Arnold’s previous threats is, I believe, about to be yanked off the table, and that is the proposed closing of 220 of California’s 279 state parks.

While the parks’ hours may be shortened to save money, the threatened closures will not happen for the following three reasons:

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1. The Park Closures Aren’t Legal.

For one thing, Robert Garcia of the City Project says it isn’t legal to close the parks—and he said as much in a detailed letter citing plenty of case law that he sent this week to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the rest of the big five, namely Senate President pro tempore Darrell Steinberg, Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee.

Since Garcia is arguably the smartest environmental justice lawyer in the state, I tend to believe him on such things, the five would be wise to believe him too. (Since otherwise he’ll sue their sorry butts and likely win. Here’s a link to the letter.)
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2. If We Close the Parks, the Feds will Take Them Over

Well, not all the parks. But as of Wednesday, National Park Service Regional Director Jonathan Jarvis said that if Schwarzenegger goes ahead with the closures he threatened last month, that the Feds are legally empowered to seize the state parks that are located on Federal land, which include the Big Sur area, Point Magu, and four of California’s other big parks. To make things worse, we will lose millions in federal grants. And….by all accounts, Jarvis is willing to make good on the threat.

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3. Closing the Parks Was Always a Stupid idea, Fiscally Speaking.

Exactly a month ago, advocates pointed out that the revenue generated by visitors to the various state parks, exceeds their cost. But no one seemed to be listening.

Then in early June, Sacramento State University released a study that verified the fact that the cost/benefit ratio does not favor shuttering the parks at all. In other words, closing the parks would ultimately result in losing money, not gaining it.

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Certainly, the legislature and governor have demonstrated repeatedly that logic is not always their strong suit. But this logic is inescapable.

For the last month, reports have been drifting in that various states have been trimming their troubled budgets by cutting prisoners food—both in quantity and quality. For instance, Georgia cut inmates food from three meals down to two.

And, in Alabama, a federal judge ordered the Morgan County sheriff locked up in his own jail for contempt for failing to adequately feed his inmates.

Yet, while they were reported locally, the cuts have flown mostly under the national media radar.

Yesterday, however, the NY Times ran an editorial pointing to the budget cuts that are being made at the expense of those who have no power over even the food they eat:

With budgets tight, states and local governments have been looking at prisons — and prison food — as a place to save money. Three days a week, Georgia now serves inmates only two meals. And across the country, there have been increasing reports of substandard food. This is inhumane. Adequate meals should be a nonnegotiable part of a civilized penal system. It is also bad policy. Researchers have found a connection between poor food quality and discipline problems and violence. Alabama allows sheriffs to keep food money they do not spend, and the sheriff reportedly pocketed more than $200,000 over three years.

Prisoners’ rights advocates say they are receiving an increasing number of complaints from inmates nationwide who report being served spoiled or inedible food or inadequate portions. Earlier this year, a riot at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas caused heavy damage to a prison building. Inmates said it was prompted in part by poor food.

Cutbacks in food could violate inmates’ constitutional rights, notes Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, if they create a substantial risk of serious harm — a particular concern for inmates with diabetes and other illnesses.

In California I have received reports of inmates being fed food that is stale and past the marked sell-by date. (Last month, for instance, I got a call from an inmate at Ironwood state prison who told me that prisoners were staging a hunger strike because the were twice served a packaged food meal that had a sell-by date of 2007.)

Hey, maybe as alternative to underfeeding prisoners, we could cut inmate healthcare.

Oh, no, wait. In California, we’ve already cut inmate health care past the boundaries of Constitutionality.

Ooops. My bad.

God forbid that we should address budget shortfalls by quickly instituting some smart sentencing reforms in order to cut the number of people we lock up every year.

Nah, let’s just cut the portions of food we dole out.

After that, maybe we can cut education again.

GO, LAKERS!!! (Okay. Now down to business.)

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EUNA LEE AND LAURA LING: AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AS PAWNS?

The disturbing story of the two California-based television reporters, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, has just taken an extremely worrisome turn as the two were sentenced Monday by a North Korean high court to 12 years of hard labor . Lee and Ling, who work for Al-Gore’s Current TV, were arrested by North Korea on March 17.

In case you have not been following this story as it has unfolded, here are additional details and background—plus political implications— from the LA Times and the New York Times…..and the Guardian.

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MEDDLING WITH CALIFORNIA’S UNIVERSITIES

So let me get this straight. California’s governance seems to have hit a condition of staggering mismanagement. The state legislature cannot bring itself to to pass a workable budget. So the lawmakers’ is to try to pass a Constitutional amendment that gives them control over the UC system.

What are these people smoking?!

Former Sacramento Bee editorial page editor, Peter Schrag, explains why this is a truly terrible idea, in this morning’s LA Times

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GANGS, INJUNCTIONS AND SPROUTS OF HOPE

An interesting story by the LA Times’ Scott Gold about a traditionally crime-plagued area of South LA policed by the LAPD’s Newton division, that is starting to feel moments of optimism due to the slow but steady drop in crime.

There’s actually much more to the storyy including some thoughts on the city’s newest and biggest-ever gang injunction that covers a 13.7-square-mile area of the city and targets six gangs—a tool that can be used for good or ill, depending upon how its enforced.

Gold reports that the LAPD and the City Attorney’s offices say that, unlike the past, the intention is to use this injunction carefully and precisely and with regard to the needs and concerns of the community.

“There is a line between prosecution and oppression,” said Bruce Riordan, the city attorney’s director of anti-gang operations. “We’ve evolved.”

Anyone “served” with the injunction will receive papers spelling out how he can be removed from it. Gang members will not be targeted while they attend intervention or prevention programs, and some can avoid jail time if they can prove they’ve held a job for 90 days.

Officers are being instructed to use discretion. The message, said Riordan: “Don’t arrest everyone because you can. Arrest them because it’s the right thing to do.”

The LAPD is even enlisting civic activists — people who have criticized the police in the past — to convince a wary public that the injunction will improve the quality of life.

“It’s all about respect,” said Capt. Mark Olvera, who oversees Newton and is widely credited with helping to implement a more sophisticated and responsive style of policing there. “That dignity you give them is going to pay you back in the long run.”

May it be so.

In any case, the story is worth reading.

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THE ONGOING HEARTBREAK OF A DEATH IN BELL GARDENS

My very smart former student, Lysee Mitri, has written a heartbreaking story for Neon Tommy about the death of a 17-year-old named Michael Cardenas that remains unsolved, and the affect his death is still having on his family and community.

The story is an informative, engaging and very saddening look at a young man’s murder….and it is very much worth your time.

HOMEBOY POETS TODAY!

At 3 p.m. today, the UCLA School of Public Affairs’ Department of Social Welfare will present a poetry reading by three of the best poets of from the ongoing writing program at Homeboy Industries—Agustin Lizama, Robert Juarez and Hector Verdugo—whose work is published in the Homeboy Review. The reading will be at UCLA’s Moore Hall, room 100, 457 Portola Plaza and will be moderated by my fantastically talented novelist pal (and the founder of Homeboy Press) Leslie Schwartz.

If you’re anywhere around, just go. I’m stuck in front of the computer finishing a manuscript or I would assuredly be there. (I will, however, have a report on it later.)

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A PORTRAIT OF THE BRITTLE CLASS IN AMERICA

A truly wonderful—and harrowing—Marketplace and American Radioworks series called Hard Times in Middletown, was broadcast on KPCC last night. The series visits ordinary Americans in Muncie, Indiana, and takes a look at how very hard things have become for decent people who are falling through the economic floorboards. Stephen Smith and Laurie Stern have done it right. They have spent nearly a year checking in on five different families. The result is an hour-long program that is an example of fine reporting and fine storytelling that paints an entirely human portrait of what is going on with many of our fellow Americans.

Here’s the opening of Smith and Stern’s rundown on their program: “For almost a century, Muncie, Indiana has been known as “Middletown,” the quintessential American community. But now, as the rust-belt city grapples with deepening recession, many residents are losing their hold on the middle class. Think of them as the brittle class, just one fragile rung above poverty on the economic ladder….”

The podcast may be accessed here.

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GROUP OF LAUSD TEACHERS ON DAY 6 OF HUNGER STRIKE

Santee High School teacher Jose Del Barrio is one of those on Day 6 of the hunger strike that is being staged by dozens of dedicated LAUSD teachers in order to draw attention to what they believe is a budget mis-allocation as Ray Cortines and other district honchos try to figure out how to spend the drastically thinning district dollars.

I met DelBarrio when I was covering the actions of Santee’s dreadful then principal a year or two ago and was struck by his intelligence and dedication.

Yesterday on Twitter he wrote first:

Soooooo Hungry!

Then three hours later:

Hunger has gone away now, but headaches are back. I will try and teach tomorrow, but I am not sure if I can.

Today Jose is sipping water by the half-gallon and has posted an open letter from the fasting group that LAist has printed in its entirety. Here is one of the ‘graphs:

We urge you to spend whatever stimulus money is needed to stop any classsize increases and rescind all layoff notices to teachers. Beyond that,we urge you to abandon the impossible task of saving our schools by cutting our classrooms and we urge you to lead us in the struggle to findnew sources of funds so that our children are among the last to suffer under this economic crisis and not among the first.

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THE VISUAL IRONIES OF LAUSD CENTRAL AREA HIGH SCHOOL #9

In Sunday’s LA times, Christopher Hawthorne, the Times’ architecture critic, wrote a very complete, very thoughtful, very smart and ultimately rather devastating review/contemplation/analytical essay about the design of the district’s controversial design monster, the eventual performing arts school that is now still known as Central Los Angeles Area High School #9. Just to remind you in case you’ve forgotten, the school, originally budgeted at $87 million to build, has come in with a final price tag of $232 million.

Here are the story’s last three ‘graphs. But, I promise, the whole thing is worth the read.

…For the most part, the district treated architecture not as a means of helping carve out humane classroom spaces under severe budget pressure but instead as a kind of extra or frill.

That led directly to the process that created the arts high school. Having failed to infuse most of its new campuses with innovative design of any sort, the LAUSD and its patrons moved to add capital-A architecture to the one on Grand Avenue. Cost overruns and other missteps then ratcheted up the price of the school to levels that have become politically embarrassing for district leadership.

But many of these conflicts and controversies were fated from the start — or at least from the moment that the district, having skimped on serious architecture in its other new schools, decided in this case to gorge on it.

(And in yet another life-is-strange moment, the architect who designed the building that we see looming above the 101 Freeway is, in all serious, named Wolf D. Prix. Yes, the Viennese architect is very gifted, and no it isn’t his fault that his name calls to mind the fact that he and his design wolfed down a gargantuan amount of money that our district couldn’t afford to have…um…wolfed. Also, at the risk of sounding protectionist, explain to me again why the district hired a Viennese firm to design this school—even if they do have an LA office?)

QUESTION: And while we’re on the subject of over-the-top school construction: If the state is busily stealing borrowing money from every dedicated education fund it can find, why in the world can’t LAUSD similarly borrow from the construction bond money fund it is using to build schools that simply won’t matter if we don’t have an adequate number of teachers assigned to the damned things? Just curious?

Just remember, District Monstrosity #9 was originally budgeted at $87 million to build, and came in, instead, at $232 million. Meanwhile the district just canceled all of its summer school and is slashing and burning other crucial programs with reckless abandon—all in order to deal with its $273-million deficit next year.

I leave you to contemplate those numbers, all in a row, for a minute… …and then tell me what you think can and should be done.

Is it me? Or does Arnold Schwarzenegger sound really vengeful? I get the feeling that, after last week’s vote, if he had the necessary Old Testament power, he would smite us all.

The LA Times reported that just before the governor delivered his blood-drenched new budget proposal to California’s lawmakers, he said he will be giving voters what they want, having “heard the message of the people” …

If cornered he would no doubt say otherwise, but I don’t think Arnold means that in a nice way.

Here’s how the San Jose Mercury News reported the slaughterhouse to come:

Faced with a ballooning deficit and a clear signal that voters won’t pay more to fix it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a budget plan Tuesday that would eliminate welfare, drop 1 million poor children from health insurance, cut off new grants for college students and shut down 80 percent of state parks.

In a state that long has prided itself on its social safety net, it could well go down in history as the most drastic reduction in social programs ever. And billions in further cuts will be unveiled later this week.

The governor’s proposal to whack an additional $5.5 billion from state programs stunned even longtime Capitol-watchers with its blunt force. Ending cash assistance for 1.3 million impoverished state residents, for example, would make California the only state with no welfare program.

“Every single first-world nation has a safety net program for children,” said Will Lightbourne, Santa Clara County’s social services director. “This would return us to the era of Dickens — you’d have to go back to the 19th century to find a comparable proposal.”

All this, and Arnold also proposes cutting all rehabilitative programs within the state’s prisons. Drug treatment, educational classes, anything that might help an inmate once he or she is paroled. Gone. Chopped. Vanished. (This in a state with a 70 percent recidivism rate.)

What to do?

Thoughts?

(SCROLL DOWN FOR THIS MORNING’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATE)

Stellar USC grad student, Emily Henry, was reporting at Santee Education Complex yesterday and found that it isn’t just the teacher’s union—UTLA— that intends to keep protesting teacher layoffs, there is a rising tide of student and parent anger that threatens to hit a boiling point.

Last Friday, there was already one student walk off and more are scheduled.

Here’s the opening of Emily’s report:

According to reports earlier today from Jose Lara, a teacher at Santee Education Complex, students are prepping for a walkout in the coming days. Teachers are also preparing for a hunger strike. However, in the last few hours Lara reports that Santee High School is “on lockdown” and that students from Manual Arts School and West Adams have walked out and are circling Santee in an act of solidarity.

Read the rest here. And then listen to the mini-podcast.

Santee high school is one of the mayor’s cluster of schools (which is a whole other conversation), and some of the mayor’s people came over to try to quiet things. As you will see from Emily’s report, they did not succeed.

Everyone with sense knows that the coming teacher cuts are bad. But parents and students at the district’s troubled urban schools like Santee feel that they are already operating too close to the edge, and that additional resources pulled away will create a calamitous deficit that cannot and should not be tolerated.

Originally 55 teacher layoff notices went out at Santee, which students said would have decimated the school’s math and science departments. Now that number has been cut in half. But it is still too many, students say.

The question is: as righteous as they are, can the protests and the walkouts really accomplish anything as ever more draconian cuts are promised? Students claim the stakes are too high to stop.

We will stay tuned. And we hope Emily Henry will help us do so!

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UPDATE: 8 A.M. Despite Lockdown threats four hundred or more students are gathering outside Santee this morning intending to march to the district headquarters. They are being told to go inside. They ain’t going. Teacher Jose Lara is Twittering @Josedelbarrio

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While we’re on the subject of whether these protests are effective, read an excellent column on the issue by Venice H.S. teacher, book author, former TV writer, Dennis Danziger, called “The Day My Union Died.”

Here’s how it opens:

As I cruise around L.A., his eyes follow me. He’s in my face when I stop for a coffee or pull up at an ATM. This blond, 30-something, smiling white dude on the ubiquitous billboards looks like he might have sold sub-prime mortgages and enjoyed it. In his hound’s-tooth suit and bow tie, I’m pretty sure he fights tax cuts for the rich, and above his head I read these words:

Hiring dropouts is just good business. Honestly who else would work that cheap?

Below his beaming face, I read:
High School Dropouts make 42% less money.

Stay in school.

But on May 15, 2009, I planned to do just the opposite…..

(Photo of May 18 Santee walkout by KTLA-TV)

You think the cuts to K-12 schools are bad? Wait until I tell you about adult education.

Thursday afternoon, Arnold Schwarzenegger presented the state legislature with his revised budget proposal. Education cuts are going to be far worse than he thought, he said.

Due to the global economic crisis, “our revenues are coming in way below projections…..For the first time since 1938, California faces a decline in personal income,” said the governor gravely.

As a consequence, Schwarzenegger proposes 6.4 billion cuts in public education funding—- and that’s if the ballot propositions pass on Tuesday. If they don’t, and additional $ 3 billion will be cut. In addition to K-12, programs for the CSUs and UCs will also be slashed. Cuts to community colleges will be among the deepest.

What he did not say directly in his press conference— and what has thus far flown under the press radar—is that one of the biggest percentage cuts of all will be to the state’s adult education programs, which in Los Angeles are administered by LAUSD.

Up until Thursday, California’s adult ed programs were facing 20 percent cuts.

That 20 percent was bad enough to touch off a noisy protest by several hundred very worried grown-up students who showed up with lots of hand-painted placards at LAUSD’s Beaudry Street headquarters on Thursday, a little after lunchtime.

But that was before Arnold’s budget announcement came.

Now, Ed Morris, the Assistant Superintendent for LAUSD’s Adult Education program, told me, the word is that adult ed is scheduled to be cut by a total of 50 percent.

Fifty percent!? Really? I said. It seemed unbelievable.

“Really,” said Morris grimly. Ed Morris should know, since he’s the guy who oversees all of the county’s adult programs.

Yes, I know we have all been talking a lot about teacher layoffs and other education cuts.

But let me tell you why the slashing of adult education is an issue you should care about.

First a little context.

According to a forecast released Thursday about 54,000 jobs will be lost in Los Angeles County in 2009 (nearly as many as lost in 2008).

The outlook for 2010 is expected to be only slightly better, with 34,000 jobs lost.

In light of all the layoffs, there is one LA business that is booming; Yep, you guessed it. Adult education—which offers a wide array of job training and skills classes at public schools all over LA County.

Fees for courses range from $20 to slightly over $100, for certain kinds of higher level certification programs. So it is job training that is affordable for those who have lost their regular paychecks—making adult ed the best game in town when it comes to retraining and/or rebooting one’s skills iso as to get back in the labor force.

For this reason, places like the East LA Skills Center have seen a huge jump in attendance—as have adult ed schools statewide.

There is a 400 person waiting list for Skills Center’s solar panel installation training class alone, Ed Morris told me. (By the way, this is the class that is being done in partnership with Homeboy Industries.)

And there are dauntingly large waiting lists for many of the school’s other most popular programs—like the the classes in medical billing, and fiber optic cable installation (which trains people to climb telephone poles in order to string up the phone company’s snazzy new fiber optic cables).

“There’s a really big waiting list for that one,” said Morris—mainly because Verizon will take nearly all the installers that LAUSD can graduate.

And it’s not just blue collar workers taking the courses. “We’ve got real estate agents and people from Countrywide mortgage trying to get into our construction training programs.”

In fact, last year 1.2 million California adults took classes. In addition to job training, they took them to complete coursework for their high school diplomas, to learn to speak English, or to bring their basic reading and math skills up to par—all things that are necessary for a functioning, work-ready population. Adult education also offers programs for seniors, which will likely be first on the chopping block.

Four hundred thousand of those Adult Ed students took their classes last year in Los Angeles.

“While the economy is collapsing and people are being tossed out of jobs, we’ve seen adult ed classes become more important than ever,” said Ernest Kettenring, the chair of UTLA’s Adult Ed Committee. “When people lose their jobs, they often need something that will help them get back on the horse.”

Both Kettenring and Morris said that one of the reasons these programs are getting some of the deepest slashes is that, unlike other imperiled line items, adult ed has no politically organized constituency (Read: money and lobbyists).

Both men also spoke long and passionately about the fact that providing a way for lower income parents to get better educated (and thus employed) is an essential element in helping their kids have a better shot at educational success.

And did I mention that adult ed is one of the programs most likely to keep a recent parolee from returning to lock-up? No? Well, consider it mentioned.

Given that Schwarzenegger is so desperate to lower prison costs that he is proposing the release of a grand total of 43,000 state prisoners to federal authorities, and to the various counties for jailing—you’d think somebody up there in budget land would be able to connect the dots regarding the collateral benefits of adult ed.

But so far they haven’t.

Bottom line: Yes, we understand that California’s in a world of fiscal hurt. But cutting FIFTY percent out of the adult education budget defines the term penny wise and pound foolish.

Don’t do it, Arnold.

And the rest of us must not let it happen.

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PS: in general going to be a lively day at the old school district headquarters today. Although, on Tuesday, a judge stopped today’s planned one day teacher strike, there are plots afoot for “civil disobedience” at 10 a.m. at the Beaudry Street headquarters—at least so says the UTLA union website. Plus there are to be pre-school picketings at all school locations.

NOTE: Everyone is to wear black. (Sounds fetching!)