The topic of school discipline, school safety and the so-called school to prison pipeline continues to heat up. We will be reporting more regularly on these issues over the next year, as more and more voices push for change.

In the meantime, here’s an overview of some of the events of the past week and the coming week.

NEW BILLS & WILLFUL DEFIANCE

On Tuesday of this week a cluster of new bills will have their first hearings in the state capital. All are aimed at at reforming some part of what education advocates call a crisis in school discipline. AB 549 would push for more school counselors and better defined roles for school police, and SB 744 would help fix some of the more pressing problems with “community day schools” that, at present, often lead students to drop out, rather than helping students toward graduation.

But perhaps the most important of the new bills is AB420, which would greatly curtail the use of the dangerously vague catch-all category of “willful defiance” as the sole reason for suspending or expelling a student.

We’ll have more on the willful defiance issue as time goes along. But for now what you need to know is that it is defined as, “disrupting school activities or otherwise willfully defying the valid authority of school staff,” and that, according to a new report by the California Department of Education, 53 percent of all school suspensions this past year had this kitchen sink category as the primary cause.

A NEW NATIONAL REPORT AND A “SELECT” COMMITTEE MEETS

Last week, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a first-of-its-kind new report analyzing the data from more than 26,000 American middle schools, and found that one out of every nine secondary school students was suspended at least once during the year—and that the majority of suspensions were for minor infractions of school rules—things like disrupting class, tardiness, and dress code violations. The suspensions were rarely for serious, violent or criminal behavior.

The report also found that racial disparities in the use of school discipline are so great, and have grown so dramatically since the 1970s, that the matter has become a civil rights issue—especially for African American students who now face an astonishing 24.3% risk of being suspended—that’s a one in four likelihood.

When gender and disability are thrown into the mix, things get worse: According to the report, 36% of all Black male students with disabilities in middle and high schools, were suspended at least once in 2009-2010—more than one in three.

The UCLA study warned that the findings should be of “serious concern” given that new research shows being suspended even once in ninth grade means “a 32% risk for dropping out” before graduation.

“There is something terribly wrong,” wrote Daniel Losen, report author and director of The Center for Civil Rights Remedies, “when, despite very effective alternatives, so many middle and high schools quickly punish and exclude students of color, students with disabilities and English Learners. We know these schools can change because, in many large districts, we found many low-suspending schools where suspension is still a measure of last resort.”

All these points and more were discussed in Sacramento this past Friday morning as testimony was presented at the Select Committee on Delinquency Prevention and Youth Development, chaired by Assemblymember Roger Dickinson (D).

The special hearing, called: Beyond Newtown – Promoting Safe, Supportive, and Healthy Schools, heard some affecting testimony from all over California.

Yet, not surprisingly, our own LAUSD was front and center more than any other district.

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE AT LA UNIFIED

The UCLA report found that LAUSD had 54 schools out of its 215 secondary schools that suspended at least one segment of its student body (African American males, let’s say) more than 25%, and 13 schools that suspended one group or segment more than 50%. The report designated these high suspension campuses as “hot spots.”

Nationally, LA Unified ranked as 4th in the nation, when it came to these “hot spot” schools.

That’s the bad news. However, like many districts, LAUSD is a very mixed bag when it comes to school suspensions. This means there is also good news—namely the fact that the district ranked first in the nation when it came to low suspending schools (81 schools) that “suspended no group over 10%.”

Here’s a break out of the LAUSD part of the UCLA Civil Rights Project report

THE MIRACLE OF GARFIELD HIGH

Of all the low-suspending LAUSD schools, the one with the most dramatic story of change is James A. Garfield High School, which is located in an unincorporated area of East Los Angeles. Garfield draws from some of LA’s most impoverished communities, as a consequence, it has traditionally dealt with a host of social problems that often lead to discipline issues, including gangs, drugs, and the family dysfunction that often accompanies poverty.

Thus it was nothing out of the ordinary that, in the 2008/2009 school year, Garfield instituted 683 suspensions and one expulsion.

But in January 2009 Garfield got a brand new principal named Jose Huerta, who was part of a new reorganization plan for the desperately troubled school. Among other changes he and his team instituted, Huerta decided that he was going to take suspensions and expulsions entirely “off the table.”

It was a radical promise but, amazingly, Huerta made good on it. At the end of the 2010/2011 school year, Garfield had suspended one kid, and expelled zero kids. The next year, it was the same, suspended 1, expelled none.

Thus far for the 2012/2013 school year there have been no suspensions.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about Garfield in the coming weeks—as we think you’ll find its transformation to be an important and instructive story.

AND IN OTHER NEWS

That’s all for now. Tomorrow some interesting LA Sheriff’s department news, plus news about a proposed LA Unified Board resolution—-and more soon on LA County Probation.

So stay tuned.

THE SECRET TO FIXING SCHOOL DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS: CHANGE THE ADULTS

Journalist Jane Stevens has a remarkable website that only experts seem to know about but that deserves a very wide readership among those who care about…well….kids, and certainly those who care about education. It’s called Aces Too High, and it’s about the affect that adverse childhood experiences-–AKA “ACE” AKA childhood trauma—have on education, and school discipline issues, and, of course, the way and the reasons why kids intersect with the juvenile justice system.

In this article by Stevens, titled “The secret to fixing school discipline problems? Change the behavior of adults,” she explains—probably better than I’ve yet seen it done elsewhere—-the affect of zero tolerance discipline policies, and the profoundly positive changes that occur in schools and school districts, when the adults running things figure out that suspensions and expulsions aren’t good solutions to anything.

Here’s a large explanatory clip:

A sea change is coursing slowly but resolutely through this nation’s K-12 education system. More than 23,000 schools out of 132,000 nationwide have or are discarding a highly punitive approach to school discipline in favor of supportive, compassionate, and solution-oriented methods. Those that take the slow-but-steady road can see a 20% to 40% drop in suspensions in their first year of transformation. A few — where the principal, all teachers and staff embrace an immediate overhaul — experience higher rates, as much as an 85% drop in suspensions and a 40% drop in expulsions. Bullying, truancy, and tardiness are waning. Graduation rates, test scores and grades are trending up.

The formula is simple, really: Instead of waiting for kids to behave badly and then punishing them, schools are creating environments in which kids can succeed. “We have to be much more thoughtful about how we teach our kids to behave, and how our staff behaves in those environments that we create,” says Mike Hanson, superintendent of Fresno (CA) Unified School District, which began a district-wide overhaul of all of its 92 schools in 2008.

This isn’t a single program or a short-term trend or a five-year plan that will disappear as soon as the funding runs out. Where it’s taken hold, it’s a don’t-look-back, got-the-bit-in-the-teeth, I-can’t-belieeeeeve-we-used-to-do-it-the-old-way type of shift.

The secret to success doesn’t involve the kids so much as it does the adults: Focus on altering the behavior of teachers and administrators, and, almost like magic, the kids stop fighting and acting out in class. They’re more interested in school, they’re happier and feel safer.

Then Stevens gets into the really good stuff… about the effect of trauma on kids’ behavior, and…well, just read it.

“You can’t punish a behavior out of a kid,” says Jen Caldwell, a social worker at El Dorado Elementary School in San Francisco, CA. “The old-school model of discipline comes from people who think kids intentionally behave badly.”

Joseph Arruda, learning director at Reedley High School in Reedley, CA, shakes his head: “Suspending, expelling….that’s the old way.”

Exactly.

TAVIS SMILEY’S NEW SPECIAL ON ZERO TOLERANCE IN SCHOOLS & HOW IT SLAMMED HIM EMOTIONALLY

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Radio and PBS host Tavis Smiley has new PBS special that focuses on some of the same school-to-prison-pipeline topics that Stevens talks about above.

WLA’s own Matt Fleischer interviewed Smiley for FishbowlLA about the special titled Education Under Arrest, and Smiley talked about how the filming got to him emotionally:

….We spoke to Smiley last week, and he said this topic had left him emotionally drained in a way he had never experienced before in his more than two decades in the media.

“This is one of the most emotional pieces of work I’ve really done,” he tells FishbowlLA. “This has never happened before, but I had to stop camera at one point because I started crying. We had to take a break. I couldn’t keep it together.”

Smiley says it was the story of Kenyatta and Kennisha–sisters from New Orleans who were expelled from their charter high school for fighting after one was jumped and the other attempted to come to her rescue–that left him particularly raw.

“Both girls end up penalized because there is no gray area for adults to make decisions about these issues. They were both almost perfect 4.0 students. To see these two girls, as bright and full of life as can be, treated in a punitive and pejorative way, I had to stop camera because I started crying.”

“Bad things do happen to good people. I understand that. But I couldn’t wrap my head around why the adults in this situation couldn’t have figured out a better way to handle it.”

The special aired Tuesday night, and it’s terrific. It will re-air on PBS-OC on Sunday. Or you can watch it online here.

Matt talks more extensively to Tavis Smiley here.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF GREAT PBS SPECIALS ON EDUCATION….”180 DAYS”

ED Week’s Ross Brenneman has a rundown on yet one more excellent show dealing with this new wave in education. Here’s a clip:

At Washington Metropolitan High School, in the District of Columbia, many students struggle to keep going. The alternative school for at-risk youth features a litany of the toughest problems schools have to cope with: Chronic absenteeism, dropouts, violence, teenage pregnancy, suspension, tight budgets, and an ongoing challenge to meet adequate yearly progress.

In an ambitious project, a film crew went into D.C. Met for the entirety of the 2011-12 school year to give a broad picture of what a school in dire straits faces. The result, “180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School,” debuts tonight at 9 p.m. ET on PBS, with the other half showing tomorrow night.

“180 Days” gives a sweeping view of the climate inside alternative urban schools, starting with the school’s principal, Tanishia Minor, and moving out from there. The crew went into the high school every single day, and if the four-hour finished product seems expansive, it ultimately focuses on the difficulty of keeping a school together, let alone making it academically proficient.

“In these parts, we know these kids are walking in with these deficits, and every second counts,” Minor says.

The climate almost demands failure. When a student gets a great scholarship to college, they put the good news on the sign in front of the school….

As with Tavis Smiley, the producers of this show also came away changed by the experience of making the documentary:

“It was completely transformative. I think it changed all of our views on education,” said coordinating producer Alexis Aggrey, after the screening. “I think it made us feel, after we shot it and going through all the footage, we just feel like this piece was going to be bigger than what we expected it to be, and I think it lends a voice to this conversation that wouldn’t have normally been captured.”

It aired in LA Tuesday night, check listings here for future airings.

Photo: still shot from broadcast of Tavis Smiley special, “Education Under Arrest”

EDITOR’S NOTE: LA’s primaries are (thankfully) over, with most of the major races headed for the May runoffs. So, as a palate cleanser, here’s a cluster of stories on the linked topics of juvenile justice, school reform—and what strategies in these arenas really work:

(NOTE # 2: More stories On LA County Probation and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, coming soon>)

ONE COUNTY’S “SECOND CHANCE” JUVENILE JUSTICE PROGRAM IS ABOUT TO BECOME THE MODEL FOR THE STATE OF GEORGIA

Rhonda Cook for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports. Here’s a clip:

Quantavius Poole was a school brawler, a drug dealer, and he was facing five years in juvenile detention.

Now, at 17, he is a sous chef for a caterer. He hopes to enlist in the National Guard so he can pay his way through a military college. He wants to enter the Air Force.

The program that may have saved Poole, called Second Chance, is a blueprint for legislation to overhaul Georgia’s juvenile justice system. It’s credited with steeply reducing juvenile offenses in Clayton County, and its supporters believe a statewide program could save Georgia hundreds of thousands of dollars per offender.

The goal is to divert offenders who are not violent or could be saved into community-based programs instead of locking them up. Even some who commit more serious crimes could see less time locked up…

The Chief Judge for Clayton County’s juvenile court, Steve Teske, told the AJC that Second Chance has helped dramatically reduce juvenile crime in the county since it started in 2003. That year, 4,774 Clayton teenagers were accused of crimes; last year the total was only 1,936. At the same time, the program gets kids back in school and, in so doing, has increased the region’s graduation rates.

As you’ll see in the video above, Judge Teske is a colorful and extremely intelligent juvenile justice reformer who wears bow ties, is a prodigious storyteller with a flare for the dramatic, and is someone you’ll be hearing a lot more from in the next year, we promise.

“There is a better way,” Teske says, “and it does work.”

TAVIS SMILEY SPECIAL: “EDUCATION UNDER ARREST”

Radio and TV host Tavis Smiley has a new PBS special coming up at the end of the month (March 26, PBS) in which he looks at the connection between the juvenile justice system and the dropout rate among American teenagers—as well as promising efforts by educators, law enforcement professionals, judges, youth advocates and the at-risk teens themselves to end what has become known as “the school-to-prison pipeline.”

In the course of his report, Smiley takes the show on the road, looking at programs and policies in Washington State, Louisiana, Missouri and California, to see what strategies are working well, and what policies are spectacularly unproductive. (I don’t know if “Second Chance” is featured in Smiley’s program, but it’s exactly the kind of successful “evidence based” program that’s proven to work.)

“This notion of zero tolerance is that everything requires extreme action,” says one expert in the series. “And it doesn’t”

In any case, mark your calendars and tune in.

ADVOCATES WORRY THAT MORE COPS IN SCHOOLS WILL MEAN MORE KIDS IN THE JUVIE JUSTICE SYSTEM: BUT SOME SAY TRAINING COPS IS THE ANSWER

Susan Ferris, the excellent reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, has the story about tension that is occurring between the struggle to keep schools safe—while, at the same time, making sure that those same schools are emotionally healthy and non-destructive environments for the kids who attend them.

Here’s an explanatory clip:

….the push for more cops or other armed security personnel in schools is running headlong into another movement that’s been quietly growing in states as diverse as Mississippi, New York, Utah, Texas and California.

It’s a push to get police out of schools, or at least to end their involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.

Civil-rights groups and juvenile court judges — and even some officials within the Obama administration — argue that because the ranks of police began growing in schools in the late 1990s, the criminal justice system’s involvement in student discipline has gotten entirely out of hand in some communities. That has put students, especially ethnic minorities, on a path to failure, they say — the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

In Los Angeles, for example, scores of students, most Latino or black and many just 11 or 12 years old, have been ticketed by school officers for minor infractions often categorized as disturbing the peace. In Austin, Texas, a 12-year-old was forced to court for spraying on perfume in class. In DeSoto County, Miss. officers and a school district were sued after a bus surveillance video — seen in part by a reporter — revealed officers unjustifiably arresting black students, the suit alleged, and threatening others with a “a bullet between the eyes.”

Optimists — Education Secretary Arne Duncan among them — say cops in schools are not an either/or proposition: careful training, they say, will ensure that school police deployed in the wake of Newtown protect, rather than intimidate, students.

But many civil-rights advocates are worried. They say plenty of cities and states are only beginning to come to grips with allegations that schools, and school-based police, have unjustifiably sent students into the criminal-justice system.

As it happens, Ferris used Clayton County, Georgia’s Judge Teske [see above} for her story, and here’s what she found:

Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske, of Clayton County, Ga., is not against police in schools, but firmly believes that a school-to-prison pipeline exists.

When Teske took the bench in 1999 in his Atlanta suburb, which is 66 percent black, one-third of the cases in his court were kids referred from schools. By 2004, he said, 92 percent of the 1,400 cases in his court came from schools, mostly for alleged disruption and disorderly conduct.

Lt. Francisco Romero, Clayton’s school resource officer at the time, told the Center for Public Integrity that he was disturbed to discover that one year he arrested more people — students — than any other officer in Clayton.

Fed up, Teske called together school and police leaders and hammered out a protocol requiring counseling and clear warnings before students were sent to court. Teske credits the protocol with improving relationships between students and police, and driving down juvenile felonies by 51 percent and increasing graduation rates by 24 percent.

“If police are placed on campus without written protocols defining their role, the results will be disastrous — just as removing existing police from campus can have unintended consequences,” Teske wrote in the publication Youth Today after the Newtown killings.

Los Angeles Judge Michael Nash also weighed in on the topic:

Michael Nash, presiding juvenile court judge in Los Angeles County, said in an interview that it’s hard to argue against placing police in schools — if they stay out of discipline matters.

As president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Nash sent a strongly worded letter to the Obama administration on Jan. 15, responding to the administration’s call for ideas on school safety.

“Research shows that aggressive security measures produce alienation and mistrust among students, which, in turn, can disrupt the learning environment,” the letter said. “Such restrictive environments may actually lead to violence, thus jeopardizing, instead of promoting, school safety.”

A student’s odds of dropping out of high school quadruple with a first-time court appearance, Nash wrote. Last summer, the judges’ council began a national campaign “to support school engagement and reduce school expulsion.” Putting more armed personnel into schools, Nash said, could prove “counterproductive” to this effort.

Read on to see what the Obama administration plans to do regarding all of the above, which will, of course, affect LAUSD, the nation’s second largest school system.

THE CALLING OF DELIGHT: AN INTERVIEW WITH FATHER GREG BOYLE

And, just because it’s entirely cool to listen to, here’s a link to a purely wonderful interview with Father Greg Boyle (of Homeboy Industries), by Krista Tippett, host of American Public Media’s fine show on faith, called “On Being.”

UNLIKELY NEW BFFs UNITE OVER PUSH FOR BETTER REENTRY PROGRAMS & NO NEW JAILS IN CA REALIGNMENT

No labor union in California has been more obstructive when it comes to criminal justice reform than the CCPOA—the prison guards’ union.

And few foundations have been more progressive and reform minded on the topic of criminal justice and prison and parole policy than the Rosenberg foundation.

That’s why it’s very cheering to see the prez of the CCPOA, Mike Jimanez, and the prez of Rosenberg Timothy Silard collaborating on a push for reform as evidenced in this Sacramento Bee Op Ed written jointly by the two men..

May it be a sign of things to come

Here’s a clip:

In polls and with their votes, Californians are sending a strong message that they are ready for the state to move in a new direction when it comes to public safety.

With realignment, local law enforcement has an unrivaled opportunity to lead us in this new direction, but the jury is still out on whether local officials will take up this challenge by adopting strategies that will make neighborhoods safer while maximizing scarce resources.

It’s been more than a year since the state – prompted by a major corrections crisis and a directive from the U.S. Supreme Court to reduce prison overcrowding – instituted realignment. In doing so, the state finally acknowledged that simply putting more people in prison was not the answer to its public safety woes. In fact, the Legislature recognized that California must reduce prison overcrowding and invest its limited resources to support programs and practices proven to keep people safe.

The state also gave local law enforcement and county officials the power to solve a problem that has plagued California for decades – how to keep our communities safe by stopping the revolving door of recidivism. Unfortunately, so far, many counties seem to be choosing to replicate the decisions that left the state’s criminal justice system broken in the first place.

Today, more than half of California’s counties are investing funding they received from the state to build or expand their local jails. Only a few are making real investments in proven crime-fighting strategies, such as re-entry centers, supervised pretrial release, rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration – evidence-based practices that would lessen jail overcrowding and increase safety for California communities…..

THE HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES 5K IS THIS SATURDAY: WHERE YOU CAN….STAY IN SHAPE, HELP SAVE LIVES, GET A COOL T-SHIRT!

Honestly, this is a great event!. However, if you really, really don’t want to run, you can sponsor runners, or just donate to one of So Cal’s most important and life-saving organizations.

It’s on Saturday, December 15, from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. (runners check in at 6 a.m,), at Los Angeles State Historic Park

You can find the rest of the info here.

BEFORE THE NEW PRINCIPAL ARRIVED, GARFIELD HIGH HAD 100 SUSPENSIONS A YEAR. LAST YEAR THEY HAD ONE

When Principal Jose Heurta came to big, historically gang-troubled Garfield High School in 2010, his first move was to get rid of school suspensions.

Heurta mandated that, instead of tossing a misbehaving student out of school for a day or a week, thereby causing the student to fall even farther behind in his or her classwork, instead the staff would reach out to the kid and spend time with him or her.

Now So Cal Connected has done a terrific story on the exceptionally sane approach that is getting very heartening results. Brian Rooney reports with Karen Foshay producing.

Here’s a clip from the show’s transcript:

Last school year there were just over 700,000 suspensions throughout the California public schools. Kids sent home as punishment about one for every nine registered students. So you might be surprised to hear that at Garfield it was one. Just one suspension last year.

Rooney [to Huerta]: You came here mid-year and there were more than a hundred suspensions, and immediately you said, “No more suspensions?”

Huerta: Right. I talked to my team. And that’s off the table. I know what it’s about. These kids need to be in school. For us to help a kid, we need them in school.

Rooney: The vast majority of suspended students in California are Black and Latino. This school is 99 percent Latino.

[HUGE SNIP]

Rooney: Last year, Garfield’s academic performance score jumped 75 points. The graduation rate last spring was just over 79 percent, three points better than the state average, and eight points better than the entire Los Angeles Unified School District.

Huerta: There’s gotta be trust in there with the teachers, the parents, and the students that everybody’s on the same team, that everybody has the same focus, which is students’ achievement.

Go Principal Huerta! Go Garfield!

RESOLUTION PROPOSES HANDCUFFING LAUSD’S SUP’T DEASY WHEN IT COMES TO GETTING OUTSIDE FUNDING TO HELP THE BUDGET-STRAPPED DISTRICT. (THE HORROR!)

Samantha Ottman at the LASchoolReport has the story:

A controversial item on the LAUSD School Board agenda this week proposes drastically limiting Superintendent John Deasy’s ability to seek funding for the district by applying for public or private grants.

The resolution, initiated by School Board Members Richard Vladovic, Bennett Kayser, and Marguerite LaMotte, aims to give the school board veto power over grant applications made by the school superintendent in amounts over $750,000.

According to a source with knowledge about LAUSD grant applications, Supt. Deasy has been awarded about $120 million dollars for the district through grants so far.

Because of the split on the school board between union-backed board members and supporters of reform-minded Deasy, the effect would be to severely limit the district’s ability to attract foundation and federal money.

Really, LAUSD board? You’re really are going to be that power-grabby and control freaky?

This questionable resolution will come before the board on Tuesday.

(You can read it here on the board’s meeting agenda, at Item 35.)

LA IS NUMBER ONE!

While we await the final report by the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence-–the CCJV—which is due to be presented to the public on Sept. 28 (but could be delayed until Oct. 5), Sheriff Lee Baca has been attempting to get ahead of the story with a series of appearances, interviews and the like during which he has pronounced LASD’S jail violence problems as all but solved and the department’s force policies and practices as exemplary.

“All of the dynamics in the jail are fully understood, fully addressed and force is at an all time low,” Sheriff Baca told the LA County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

“We’re the best in the nation,” the sheriff continued, “and that includes Riker’s Island and Cook County, which others like to say are better models. But in fact they’re coming to us asking more about what we’re doing to improve the situation.”

Alrighty then.

It is probably relevant to mention here that, in the course of their investigations, commission staffers visited both Illinois’ Cook County’s jail system and New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, and consulted with both facilities’ directors and their staffs. In fact, two of the best known former heads of the NYC Department of Corrections—Marty Horn and Michael Jacobson—came to LA to testify before the jails commission about their own extensive collective experiences with corrections policy and what they observed about LA’s system. They were not particularly complimentary.

Ditto Matthew Cate, the head of the California Department of Corrections.

RADIO STRATEGIES

On Friday, the sheriff will appear on KPFK radio at 3 p.m. to talk with Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s show about the jails issue on The Hutchinson Report.

If the past is any guide, Hutchinson will discuss hard topics, but will not truly challenge the sheriff.

Or, as one LASD source said of the interview, “He’s going to the trenches and connecting with his community base.”

However, in contrast, neither the sheriff nor his spokesman Steve Whitmore were available to spend 15 minutes talking about the same issues with Warren Olney on Which Way LA? on Sept.10 on KCRW. (Warren is the most respectful of pros, but he does not let guests wriggle easily off hooks.)

And then, of course, there was Baca’s Op Ed in the LA Times last week in which he wrote:

When the American Civil Liberties Union first raised allegations of excessive force being used by deputies, I launched a full-scale investigation into each and every one. Because allegations and anecdotes are not the same as facts, it was important to discover what was true, and I think that when these investigations are completed, which I believe will be soon, the public will be surprised by the factual findings.

But I have not waited for the results of that investigation to take action to improve the jails. After I heard about the excessive force allegations, one of my first steps was to meet with more than 100 inmates and listen to their concerns……

“I LAUNCHED A FULL INVESTIGATION INTO EACH AND EVERY ONE”

Um, yeah. About Baca’s “full-scale investigation” into the allegations made in the various ACLU reports.

Let’s see, in September 2011, in reply to what was then the newest ACLU report detailing abuse in the jails (not to mention a plethora of negative media reports and a widening investigation by the FBI) the Daily Breeze reported the following about the sheriff’s opinion of the allegations:

Baca held a news conference following the release of a scathing report by the American Civil Liberties Union that he and his top commanders are willfully indifferent to claims that deputies viciously assault inmates on a routine basis.

“That is a very false allegation,” Baca said. “There are no gangs in the Sheriff’s Department working custody.”

And in reaction to that same ACLU report, the sheriff told the LA Times this:

“If an investigation reveals excessive force, that employee is discharged. The LASD is never hesitant to discipline itself,” Baca said, defending his department. “Investigating the facts is what gets the truth, That is what we do.”

Then the year before, in reaction to the ACLU’s 2010 report detailing allegations of a culture of violence, abuse and intimidation by deputies in the jails, Steve Whitmore told the Daily News:

“We believe that is not true,” Whitmore said.

“But don’t believe us. Go to the Office of Independent Review. The deputy sheriffs do not have that culture. All the complaints we get are thoroughly investigated, not only by the Sheriff’s Department, but are overseen by the OIR.”

And so on.

There are gobs of similarly colorful denials and dismissals of the ACLU’s yearly findings by the sheriff and/or his spokesperson, where those came from.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THERE AREN’T IMPROVEMENTS

Let us also give credit where credit is due: Force is down the Men’s Central Jail and elsewhere in the county system. Plus the education based incarceration program that the sheriff is championing is truly an enlightened and important idea in incarceration policy.

In fact, the department will hold its next graduation for its jail-based “MERIT program—MERIT being short for “Maximizing Education, Reaching Individual Transformation”—this coming Thursday morning, September 20.

I hear they are very emotionally affecting occasions that mean a great deal to the inmates who take part. (Were I not in West Glacier, MT, I’d assuredly be there.)

But these essentially surface changes do not address the underlying culture of violence, abuse and us-versus-them mentality that the commissions’ investigators said infected the jails to a highly toxic degree and begin at very high levels in the department.

AND SO….WE WAIT FOR THE REPORT

Which brings us, again back to the commission and its looming report. If the CCJV follows the lead that has been set by the very bluntly stated findings of its investigators, presented on Sept. 7 (see WLA report), it will ask for some fairly large changes from the sheriff and his department—including some changes at the top.

If so, what will the sheriff do then? Will he thank everyone very much for their time and effort, and continue to say he’s got it all handled, that there’s nothing to see here, folks?

Regrettably, that is precisely what his performances this week and last would suggest.

But perhaps Lee Baca will surprise us. Perhaps he will genuinely become the transformational leader he has presented himself to be all these years.

As Jake said to Brett in the last line of The Sun Also Rises: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

(If you’d like to check out the sheriff’s conversation with the Supes, it begins on page 78 of the preliminary transcript of Tuesday’s meeting linked below.)

Preliminary Transcript – LA County Board of Supervisors' meeting 0 9-18-12

AND IN NON-LASD NEWS…..LA COUNTY PROBATION EXECUTIVE (AND FORMER STATE ASSEMBLYMAN), CARL WASHINGTON, ARRESTED FOR BANK FRAUD

We’ll be writing a lot more about LA County Probation this fall, but we cannot let this story pass about the arrest of Probation exec Carl Washington. It is covered well by Christina Villacort at the Daily News.

Here’s one small-but-startling clip from her story:

Washington is the 39th Probation employee arrested so far this year and he will not be the last, according to Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers.

About half of the previous arrests were for driving under the influence.

There was one for attempted murder, and several for fraud and drug-related charges, most of which were allegedly committed while off duty.

“That’s about one arrest a week,” said Powers, who began running the department in January. “Certainly, 39 is way beyond reasonable or expected.”

That number is expected to go even higher, as Probation and the county Chief Executive Office have launched a crackdown on workers compensation fraud in the department.

The arrest numbers are, of course, slack-jaw-making. But the crackdown by Probation Chief Powers is good news. It’s about freaking time.

PS: I wonder how many of those arrestees—past and future—have been working with kids in juvenile probation.

Earlier this week the Los Angeles Unified School District announced an interesting partnership with a national education reform organization called Future is Now Schools—or FIN—to create a group of “teacher-driven” academies within the LA school district.

The plan is for these new “hybrid learning” academies to be located in Silverlake, the Fairfax area and Venice, although no sites have, as yet, been firmly established. They are scheduled to open in time for the 2013-14 school year.

“I’m excited about the potential of this partnership to reinvigorate innovation in our school system,” Superintendent John Deasy said in a district-released statement. “We have the opportunity to make LAUSD a leader in collaborative education reform.”

While LAUSD’s partner— FIN—may not be a name familiar to most Los Angeles education watchers, its founder and board chair, Steve Barr, is very well known in LA as the founder of the influential Green Dot charter schools, which now runs 18 schools in the LA area.

THE BACK STORY

The emergence of Green Dot, which Barr began in 2000, is viewed by many as being greatly influential in stimulating—and at times forcing—reform in the Los Angeles public school landscape during a period when LAUSD’s disastrously failing inner city middle and high schools often made national news.

Back then, Barr pushed reform from outside the LAUSD tent, even going so far to engineer what the district viewed as a hostile takeover of Alain Leroy Locke High School by Green Dot in 2008. This was at a time when Watt’s-located Locke—with its 28 percent graduation rate and 90 percent of its students performing below basic or far below basic on standardized tests—was emblematic of the worst of the LAUSD’s institutional failures.

Now, four years later, a UCLA study showed the Locke schools to be “significantly outperforming their counterparts on a number of state test score measures, as well as in remaining in high school over time, and in taking and passing challenging courses.”

Barr left Green Dot in 2009, and formed the national organization Green Dot America, which morphed into FIN. Thus far, FIN is in collaboration on schools in both New York City and New Orleans, in New York especially, working closely with the teachers’ union.

COMING INSIDE THE TENT

So what brought Barr’s focus back to LA, and drew him into a partnership with the district that had, in the past, often treated him as an antagonist?

When I spoke to Barr after the announcement, he told me that one of the factors was his warm relationship with district Superintendent John Deasy, whom he said, he views as one of the most innovation-friendly administrators he’s ever met.

But, most important to his decision, Barr said, was the fact that his daughter, Zofi age 6, was already at school age, with his son Jack, 4, rapidly zooming that direction.

“I’m committed to sending them to public school, and to an LAUSD public school,” he said. “Los Angeles should have the best public school system in America. That’s what I want for my kids. I want my kids to go through LAUSD from kindergarten through the 12th grade”

But right now LAUSD is far from the greatest. And, given the state’s economic woes, if it is to just stay even, it needs additional tax revenue.

So what to do?

“Here’s the thing,” Barr said, “If you want to change your school district the fastest, you ‘ve got to be able to knit some coalitions together, and you’ve got to work with the [teachers'] unions.”

When Barr began Green Dot, he discovered that UTLA—LA’s often obstructive teacher’s union—had little interest in speaking with him, much less partnering with with him. In fact, UTLA’s then president A.J. Duffy, lost few opportunities to make clear his disdain of Barr and his charter ideas.

So Barr says he began talking to the union members themselves and, over time, developed relationships with some of UTLA’s more progressive factions, the members of which wanted more innovative approaches to education and helped to vote in UTLA’s current president, Warren Fletcher.

According to Barr and Deasy, the LAUSD-FIN partnership schools will be teacher-centric with teachers and administrators making most of the significant organizational and curriculum decisions, while the district oversees the operation of the physical plant.

TARGETING THE LAUSD EX-PATS

Most of Green Dot’s original charters were in traditionally underserved, lower income neighborhoods in South LA, East LA, Watts and Inglewood, where many of the existing schools were underperforming in the extreme.

Read the rest of this entry »

LIFE-SKILLS PROGRAMS GREATLY REDUCE JUVIE ARREST RATES

Enrolling disadvantaged teens in life-skills programs may bring down juvenile arrests for violent crime by as much as 44%, according to a report released Friday by the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

The Crime Report has the story. Here’s a clip:

Researchers analyzed the impact of enrolling 2,740 disadvantaged seventh through 10th grade boys in Becoming A Man (BAM)—Sports Edition, a Chicago program which focuses on developing cognitive skills related to emotional regulation and other social behaviors. In addition to the reduction in violent-crime arrests, the study found an increase in schooling outcomes that could translate to a 10 to 23 percent increase in graduation rates among participants.

The report itself is worth reading. Here’s a clip:

Our findings show that program participation significantly increased school engagement and performance by 0.14 standard deviations during the program year and by 0.19 standard deviations in the follow-up year, impacts that imply future graduation rate increases of about 10 to 23 percent of the control group’s graduation rate. Program participation also reduced violent crime arrests by 44 percent (8 fewer arrests per 100 participants) and arrests in the ‘other’ (miscellaneous) category, which includes vandalism and weapons crime, by 36 percent (11.5 fewer arrests per 100 participants) during the program year. These findings are particularly noteworthy given the challenging settings in which the intervention took place. (In fact, our study is closer to what evaluation researchers would call an effectiveness trial of how a program would operate at scale than it is to the sort of smaller-scale efficacy trials carried out under ideal conditions by program developers and researchers.) The positive program effects provide the most rigorous, large-scale evidence to date that a social-cognitive skill intervention can improve both schooling and delinquency outcomes for disadvantaged youth.

THE SHERIFF’S MOUNTING LEGAL TROUBLES

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a long story over the weekend about LA County Sheriff Lee Baca’s expanding list of serious legal challenges, including the ACLU’s most recent lawsuits against the department (that WitnessLA reported here and here), the issues raised at the jails commission hearings, the 200 newly recalled department badges that had been passed out unwisely to civilians—and a lot more.

SF Gate’s Greg Risling has the detailed story. Here’s a clip:

“We could call for his resignation daily, but it’s not going to do any good,” said Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU Southern California legal director, who called for Baca to step down late last year. “If he stays on, he’s got to fix these problems. There are some glimmers of hope, but it’s far from what we’d like to see.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, a constant critic of the sheriff and a court-appointed monitor of jail conditions, sued Tuesday, alleging that inmates charged with assaulting deputies have been unable to get evidence that could help exonerate them.

At the core of the problems facing the department is how its deputies treat some of the estimated 15,000 inmates in county jails. The ACLU has filed another lawsuit accusing Baca and some other department officials of condoning violence against inmates.

Last year the civil rights group released a report that documented more than 70 cases of alleged abuse and other misconduct by deputies, many of which occurred at Men’s Central Jail. The FBI has launched its own investigation and asked for internal department records dealing with inmate abuse.

On July 6, Capt. Michael Bornman testified before a county commission looking into deputy abuse in the jails that the former head of the jail, Capt. Daniel Cruz, resisted efforts to investigate employees who were accused of excessive force. Bornman described a culture of brutality where Cruz allegedly joked about not hitting inmates in their face so marks wouldn’t be visible. Cruz has denied the accusations.

However, Bornman said his boss has been addressing and correcting the problems in the jails.

Baca, 70, who has said he’s to blame for deputy misconduct against inmates and wasn’t available for comment Friday, pointed out in a letter to the Los Angeles Times that some of the media coverage has been unfair.

“Criticism is necessary; so are all the facts,” Baca wrote to the paper’s editor on Friday regarding Bornman’s testimony. “I simply ask you to present both.”

You can read the rest of Baca’s letter to the LA Times here.

“BREAKING BAD” A GOOD REPRESENTATION OF DRUG INDUSTRY

AMC’s “Breaking Bad”, whose fifth (and final) season premiered Sunday, is actually a pretty accurate depiction of the meth business–from the drug production to the Mexican cartels.

The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe has the story. Here’s a clip:

…“Breaking Bad” is a chamber piece, relying on the shifting alliances and betrayals of the same handful of players. The show presents a challenge, for Gilligan and his writers, to configure and reconfigure, like playing an endless game of Scrabble using only the same eight letters.

So it’s somewhat surprising that in depicting the mechanics of the meth business, “Breaking Bad” is so notably realistic. I spent the past six months interviewing drug traffickers and D.E.A. agents for an article about the business side of a Mexican drug cartel, and, having been an ardent fan of “Breaking Bad,” I was startled by how much the show gets right. On one level, the show is a parable about the impossibility of running a mom-and-pop business in a world of rapacious multinational conglomerates. In this sense, it shares a basic template with Oliver Stone’s lurid “Savages”—or, for that matter, with “You’ve Got Mail.” The difference in the case of Walter White, the show’s protagonist, is that Pop ends up waging bloody war on the conglomerate. And winning.

Photo by WitnessLA

The Los Angeles Unified School Board will vote on Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, on whether or not to cut nearly all funding from LA’s adult education program that serves 300,000 people with classes that, in many cases, make crucial differences in lives.

Adult ed teachers and students demonstrated at school sites all last week, but it is unclear if anyone is listening. The district is so budget strapped that board members are looking everywhere for cuts, and eyes have landed on adult ed.

Sunday’s Daily News ran a good story by Barbara Jones about the various sides of this important education issue.

Here’s a clip:

High-school dropouts can go there to earn a GED or diploma. Veterans, laid-off workers and young adults with vocational aspirations can learn a trade. Immigrant parents can acquire basic English and math skills so they can help their kids with homework.

At nearly three dozen adult education and occupational centers operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, nearly 300,000 students are enrolled in low-cost programs designed to help them better their lives.

Their fate now lies in the hands of the school board, which is set to vote Tuesday on a budget that would cut the program and divert most of the $200 million in state money earmarked for adult education to ease the district’s $557 million deficit.

While LAUSD leaders say they desperately need the money to fund core programs at K-12 campuses, adult education advocates say the program is essential to building an academic support system for LAUSD parents and training a skilled workforce for Southern California.

“Los Angeles Unified is the perfect storm,” said Chris Nelson, president of the 3,000-member California Council for Adult Education. “Ending all services for 300,000 students will have a huge impact — not only on the students, but on the community.”

There is no easy solution to the quandary facing the school district, which is wrestling with how to balance the $6 billion budget for 2012-13.

For the last five years, the cash-strapped state government has provided the district with just part of the money it is supposed to receive and has extended IOUs for the rest. This year, for instance, Los Angeles Unified got just $3,338 of the $6,506 it had been promised to educate each student, according to district officials.

[SNIP]

Kathrin Middleton of dropped out of high school more than 30 years ago to help raise her siblings. She kept her lack of education a secret until her own daughter entered kindergarten — a milestone that prompted the Encino homemaker to enroll in a diploma program at Rinaldi Adult Center in Granada Hills.

“I was living life in a box, a life filled with shame and limited by fear,” Middleton said. “I didn’t want that for my daughter. I wanted her to be brave and courageous, so I faced my demons.”

A dropout from Granada Hills Charter, Ashley Mu oz thought she’d closed the door on her future until a friend encouraged her to get her high-school equivalency certificate at Rinaldi.

“It gave me a second chance,” Mu oz said. “I’ve got my confidence back and I’m ready to face the world.”

There are countless success stories like these among the 10,500 students at Rinaldi, a satellite of the Kennedy-San Fernando Community Adult School.

Principal Kathy Javaheri said there’s a misperception that adult centers teach nonessential subjects like handicrafts or foreign language for travelers.

In reality, they’re designed to help students earning their GED or high school diploma, which helps LAUSD fulfill its goal of boosting its graduation rate. There are also basic English and math classes for parents of K-12 students so they can acquire the skills to help with homework and participate in their children’s education.

“We’re part of the fabric of LAUSD,” said Javaheri, who has been with the adult ed program for more than 30 years. “Taking away adult ed would be tearing away that fabric….”

I spoke to four Adult Ed teachers on Sunday afternoon, and they were not feeling optimistic about Tuesday’s meeting.

We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Photo by Andy Holzman, Daily News Staff, of students in class at the West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills

Raging Against the LA Times Book Section cuts, an upbeat story about helping Foster Car kids get to college, a seemingly unnecessary court decision, a weird move by the City Attorney….and more.

RAGING AGAINST THE CUTS: TOM LUTZ CALLS THE LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW “FREELANCER” LAYOFFS FOR WHAT THEY ARE

It literature is important to you at all. Read this, damn it! Here’s a clip:

The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last week that it was as dedicated as ever to book coverage — “we have not changed our commitment,” said Vice President of Communications Nancy Sullivan. Sullivan was speaking to Publishers Weekly’s Wendy Werris, explaining that a new round of layoffs in the section and the cutting loose of the book section’s freelancers was not to be taken as a sign of what it clearly was: a further contraction of the section’s purview.

“Freelancers” in this case means not just those of us who have written the occasional review for the Times over the years but the new class of non-employees, the many people who used to be on staff and were laid off before being rehired as freelancers, like Susan Salter Reynolds; book columnists Reynolds, Richard Rayner, and Sonja Bolle were among those let go. Reynolds is a prime example of the new class of the gradually dis-employed: she has been writing succinct, insightful reviews for the Times for the last 23 years, usually three pieces a week, although often adding a fourth or even fifth in the form of a more in-depth review or feature (she is a woman who clearly does not sleep). For the first 21 of those years she was a staff writer, but for the last two she’s been a freelancer. The difference was a deep cut in pay, the loss of health insurance and a retirement plan, and the outsourcing of her office to her own house. The workload remained the same.

BREAKING THE CURSE OF FOSTER CARE TO HELP KIDS IN THE “SYSTEM” GET TO COLLEGE

This story by Martha Groves of the LA Times will both break your heart and give you hope. Here’s how it opens:

For foster children, the prospect of ever completing college is remote: 24% of the general population will someday wear a university cap and gown, but fewer than 3% of all foster children ever earn a degree.

But a privately funded pilot program at UCLA hopes to improve the odds.

The First Star UCLA Bruin Guardian Scholars Summer Academy is a 5 1/2-week program that sponsors and fundraisers hope will one day develop into a year-round boarding school for college-bound foster children in Los Angeles County.

On Friday, 14-year-old Thalia and 23 other foster youth celebrated their “graduation” from the program’s first session.

The incoming ninth-grader brushed up on math, wrote poetry, learned to meditate and visited Disneyland, Universal Studios and a Nickelodeon TV set. In the bargain, Thalia and the other participants each got a laptop computer, a flip cam — and four University of California college credits.

“This program took me to another place,” Thalia said….

Read the rest here.

SO WHAT REALLY IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN HOT WEATHER AND VIOLENCE?

Wired Magazine takes a look at what science has to say about rising temperatures and rising crime stats and how one may or may not affect the other.

A HIGHLY POLITICAL (AND POSSIBLY ILLEGAL) MOVE BY CITY ATTORNEY CARMEN TRUTANICH?

The LA Times’ Jack Leonard reports on Carmen Trutanich’s $2 million check caper and DA Steve Cooley’s reaction.

DEAD PEOPLE CAN’T BE SUED FOR PUNITIVE DAMAGES

Okay, this probably doesn’t rise to the level of a Must Read. Rather it is an interesting oddity that the Iowa Supreme Court got dragooned into having to render a ruling on this seemingly obvious issue. The Des Moines Register has the story. Here’s how it opens:

The Iowa Supreme Court Friday affirmed a long-standing prohibition on winning punitive damages from dead people and issued a two-month suspension to a Des Moines lawyer with a track record of mishandling clients’ money.

In the case of Estate of Johnny Vajgrt vs. Bill Ernst, justices ruled 6-1 to affirm a Marshall County court ruling that blocked Ernst from obtaining more than $2,300 from the estate of Vajgrt.

The case involved a 2005 incident where Vajgrt sought and received permission from Ernst, a neighbor, to enter onto Ernst’s land and remove a fallen tree near the confluence of Burnett Creek and the Iowa River. Vajgrt removed both the tree, which he feared would serve as a dam and cause flooding on his land, and roughly 40 other live trees on Ernst’s property.

Vajgrt died in 2008, nearly five months before Ernst sued to recover damages for the diminished value of his property. A district court judge awarded $57.50 per tree but refused to grant punitive damages because Vajgrt had died….

Read the rest here.

A week before Easter there was a horrific car crash on a residential street in La Habra, California. The wreck was bad enough that it was in the news in Orange and LA Counties for a couple of days running.

Stories such as this one are the staples of local news coverage, and often lead the nightly broadcast. Yet, in most cases, they are mentioned in broad strokes by somber-faced TV reporters, then they pretty much vanish.

As it happens though, my brother Phil and his wife, who live in Orange County, were quite close to several of the people involved in the La Habra crash, and so felt impelled to write a humanizing story-behind-the story for some of the OC news outlets.

When the news is personal to you, you want to slow the vanishing.

You’ll find the story below.

PAUL ROMERO: DOING (ALMOST) EVERYTHING RIGHT

by Phil Fremon

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant,” wrote Joan Didion in dealing with the loss of her husband.

When Paul Romero and his longtime girlfriend, Destiny Mendoza, plus Paul’s sister, Rochelle Romero, and Rochelle’s boyfriend, Jimmy Gonzales, left home Saturday night, April 16th, to celebrate Jimmy’s 21st birthday, they had no inkling that a catastrophic change was a few hours ahead of them. The foursome tried to do everything right. They agreed to make sure they had a safe ride home from Duffy’s, a local pub located on Imperial Highway, where they would be celebrating. Duffy’s is only 1.3 miles away from the La Habra apartment building where both couples lived. The plan was to text Paul and Rochelle’s younger sister Rosalyn for a ride home when everybody was ready to call it a night.

However, just before the foursome was about to send a text message for a ride home, David Huizar, Jr., and his wife, Delora Bravo, neighbors from their same apartment complex, arrived at Duffy’s on the way home from a party that they had attended elsewhere. Wishing to save their sister the trouble of leaving home to pick them up, the group caught a ride with David and Delora instead.

---

I met Paul Romero eighteen years ago when I came home from work one evening to find a seven-year-old Paul on the doorstep of my Fullerton home. His family had moved next door a few days earlier. With no preamble, the boy asked in a clear voice, wearing the enormous smile that I would come to know was nearly always on his face, “Do you have any jobs for me to do so that I can earn some money?” I dutifully found a large planter in the backyard that needed tending. The “tending” went on for several days until I came home to find my young peach tree chopped down to a stump, a victim of Paul’s enthusiasm to really clean the planter. I did not have the heart to tell the proud boy of my horror at finding my peach tree gone. I wish I could laugh with him now about that long ago day, but I will never get the chance.

Despite the loss of the fruit tree, the relationship continued. Paul was ten when, in January 1996, he and his six-year-old sister, Rochelle, and nine-year-old sister, Roxanne, as close to her brother as a twin, witnessed with fascination as I carried my new bride in full wedding regalia across the threshold of my 1950’s three-bedroom L-shaped house that faced theirs. As the years passed, one or more of the three Romeros would burst in our front door nearly every day to show us something they had made in school, request help with some homework assignment, make crafts or just come over to visit. My wife quickly became as attached to the kids as I was and often tutored Paul in whatever school subject was giving him trouble.

---

The six young men and women walked out of Duffy’s about half past midnight and piled into the late-model black double-cab Chevy Colorado pickup truck. Sixty-seconds later, everything changed.

For reasons that may never be known, David began driving so fast that it terrified the others. Rochelle and Destiny remember screaming at David, “Slow down! We have Children!” David lost control of the truck just a half mile up Walnut. Upon hearing the screech of tires and a loud boom, startled residents rushed from their houses to help. When paramedics arrived a few minutes later, they found the truck’s cab wrapped around a roadside tree.

---

In the summer of 2001 we took Paul, then 15, and Roxanne, 14, to our family cabin in Glacier Park, Montana, where they had a string of brand-new experiences: they rode horses, white-water rafted, canoed down a river, chased mountain goats and hung out with my 80-year-old mother, Liz, who happily fussed over them as if they were her own grandchildren. In 2006 we shared his joy when Paul and Destiny brought a beautiful baby girl into the world, whom they named Emery. Similarly, we were excited for him when he found a job as a salesman with Mullahey Chevrolet in Fullerton in February of 2008. The young man with the enormous smile and the willing attitude quickly endeared himself to both staff and customers. Just four months ago Paul was promoted to sales manager.

---

We got the call from Roxanne on Sunday afternoon. She was only able to say my name several times, sobbing, until her grandma took the phone from her to tell us Paul had died. At first we were simply in shock. Later, as we thought more clearly, we searched for news of the crash on the Internet and discovered that Rochelle was in critical condition, as was Destiny. It was not certain that they would survive. Jimmy, the birthday boy and father of Rochelle’s child-to-be, was dead too, as was David and his wife, leaving behind their two children. We drove to UCI Medical Center where our own pain and loss was dwarfed by the soul-wrenching agony we saw in the eyes of Roxanne and the rest of the Romero family, whose lives were irrevocably shattered.

Now that more than a week has passed, Rochelle is off the critical list, as is her unborn baby. She has a badly injured spine, various broken bones, and must now piece together a life that includes the loss of her boyfriend and her brother.

Thursday afternoon, Destiny Mendoza, who has undergone multiple risky spinal surgeries, was finally told, along with five-year-old Emery, that Paul is gone. Destiny, still frighteningly weak, replied to her distraught family. “Yes, I know. Paul told me in a dream everything that happened.”

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

---

POST SCRIPT: Rose Hills Mortuary has opened a fund to help Paul’s family with the burial costs, and can accept credit card payments. Phone: (562) 692-1212, ext. 5207, Funeral #212813, Paul Romero, Jr. Rose Hills will stop accepting donations when Paul’s burial costs are covered. Mullahey Chevrolet and staff have donated a sizable amount to help Paul’s family and are collecting donations for Paul Romero’s family at 600 West Commonwealth Ave. Fullerton, CA 92832.

EDITOR’S POST SCRIPT: Tuesday night Phil received word that, despite earlier optimistic prognostications, Paul’s younger sister Rochelle has lost her baby after all.

NOTE: Paul is at the center of the Romero family photo above, Destiny is just to his right. Emery, their daughter is being held by her aunt Raelyn.

The photo was taken in 2010 at Roxanne’s graduation from Coast Community College. She has just been accepted as a transfer student to Cal State Fullerton, the first of her family to go to college.