Education LAUSD Los Angeles Writers

LAUSD….If You Can’t Fix It, Feature It

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Today the LA Times has a story about an LAUSD teacher
who got so fed up with the district that she……

….turned the details of her maddening experience into a one woman show called “Dance of the Lemons”—named for the lousy district administrators who, when they failed at one school, simply got rotated to another one.

When Karen Kay Woods started teaching music in the Los Angeles Unified School District, it was as if she were Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole. She was given 14 flutes; one worked. She had 56 students — and 48 chairs. When she took her class on a field trip, she had to return hours early because the school buses hadn’t been reserved for the day.

Only unlike Alice, Woods didn’t wind up in Wonderland, she wound up in the not-so-wonderful world of school district red tape…

A very cute, and slighty horrifying tale that will nonetheless cheer up your day.

3 Comments

  • And the good ones leave. Henry Estrada was the Principal at Garfield when Jaime Escalante was standing and delivering. He encouraged the AP programs all over the school so that it was one of the state leaders in the number of AP course offered – not just math. When he took a sabatical to complete his doctorate he found, on his return, no place was available for him at the school level. So he quit and went to the Sacramento School System. And we lost a great leader.

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