LA Unified: Sucking Taxpayers Dry
Mayor Sam’s got it right – the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has been sucking taxpayers dry for decades and now wants another $4 billion to crank out more illiterate dropouts. I have two short stories about what many Angelenos now call LA’s mummified school system:
Jan (not her real name) was a flower child of the 60s: a daisy-waving-psychedelic-peacenik-free-love-liberal-democrat-bimbo who bore a love child after high school. Jan spoiled her baby with no discipline or boundaries. One day when her toddler misbehaved and I offered a suggestion, Jan told me to mind my own business. Unfortunately for her child, I did.
About ten years later when the girl turned 13, Jan called and sounded hysterical: “Clark, I don’t know what to do. I have to go to work. She took my keys, my car and my wallet and left with her boyfriend. I think she’s on drugs or something. What should I do?”
It was too late. A few years later when her child returned to prison, Jan got custody of all five of her daughter’s children. That lasted a few months – until DPSS finally declared Jan an unfit mother and took them away.
Why is this relevant?
Jan is not only my cousin (yup, a blood relative), but has taught LAUSD elementary school children for about twenty years. Although she is unfit to raise her own children and grandchildren, the United Teachers of Los Angeles protects her job at the expense of her classroom children. Jan doesn’t want you to vote for Propositions 73 through 78.
My second story is shorter: I used to jog to-and-from work at LAPD’s West Valley Station. One day as I jogged past Mulholland Junior High School, I noticed a male student leave the school grounds as classes began. I watched the 9th grader run across the field and hop the 12-foot fence. He landed near me. When I told him to get back in school - he told me to F--- myself. I grabbed his wrist and walked him to the school office.
When I delivered the boy to the Principal, she demanded to know what right I had to kidnap the child from the street. When I identified myself as an LAPD officer and explained the relationship between school truancy and daytime residential burglaries, she made a complaint against me with the LAPD!
Based upon these and many other on-duty experiences with the LAUSD, I moved to Ventura County where my children would be far from LAUSD and their dysfunctional teachers and administrators.
That school principal doesn’t want you to vote for Propositions 73 through 78 or school vouchers for inner city families, however she does want more of your money.
The LAUSD is as competent as my cousin. The only LAUSD program I would endorse is disbandment. The unions are too strong and too dangerous for our children. If LAUSD was dissolved tomorrow, competent educators would find better jobs at better schools, leaving dangerous and incompetent teachers to find careers far from where they can influence our children.
As a retired Los Angeles police officer, parent, and neighborhood council board member:
- I urge a YES vote on Propositions 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, & 78
- I urge a NO vote on Propositions 79 and 80
- I urge a NO vote on LAUSD’s Measure Y
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