"So much for the golden future I can't even start
I've had every promise broken, there's anger in my heart"
- Judas Priest
Someone has to be very frustrated with the system to travel through Los Angeles traffic on a Friday morning to receive recognition for participating in one of the parent committees that the state mandates the District to have with the sole purpose of rejecting the District's offering. However, that is what Maria Luisa Palma did last Friday at the LAUSD's District Level Committee Recognition. After receiving her certificate she faced her fellow committee members. She then ripped it up telling the District that it was meaningless as long as the District continued to ignore the Parent Advisory Committee's (PAC) recommendations.
While not as dramatic as Palma's, the Chairs of each of the three parent committees (the PAC, the District English Learner Advisory Committee (DELAC), and the Community Advisory Committee (CAC)) each used their allotted time for comments to express their own frustrations. The common thread is that these committees are prevented from performing their state-mandated advisory roles. In some cases, the allegations seemed to border on illegality. Comments were presented to the School Board as coming from the committees when District Bureaucrats actually generated them.
As a member of the CAC, I have had a front-row seat to this behavior. Last year, the approval of the committee's membership was delayed for months after the District ignored the process outlined in the Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) and the CAC Bylaws and instead picked the members by themselves. Despite the harm caused by their actions, District Staff followed the same process this year. The selection process is supposed to be peer-driven but the CAC was not allowed to name the mandated Appointment Sub-Committee and had no input into the criteria that would be used to select membership. To no one's surprise, some of the most vocal members of the CAC have been driven from the Committee.
This year was supposed to be an important one for the committee as the SELPA was scheduled to be updated. While this is the main function of the CAC, it was prevented from having any meaningful part in the process. As a result, the CAC Chair has announced that she will not sign the certification of the plan. Her reasoning is outlined in the letter reprinted below:
As the CAC Chairperson, I will not be signing the certification of the Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) Local Plan this year. The CAC was not given the opportunity to meaningfully advise the LAUSD SELPA during development, amendment, or review of the Local Plan. I am unwilling to affix my signature to a document certifying something that clearly, demonstrably never occurred. I hope to meet with each of you to discuss the next steps for remedying these issues.
My concerns, which are shared by the vast majority of our CAC Executive Board, are the following four issues:The LPAC group was poorly organized and seemingly designed to prevent meaningful collaboration between stakeholders. I was not even invited to its first meeting even though I was a member because DSE failed to send me any notification that this session had been scheduled. Incredibly, DSE originally planned for separate sessions of parent members and those members in other categories. We only got consolidated meetings after strongly objecting that we wanted to collaborate directly with all stakeholders. Worse, DSE failed to provide ongoing updates to the CAC about proposed changes to the SELPA, then claimed at the end of the year that they expected the CAC LCAP members to provide updates instead. As with other decisions made unilaterally by DSE, no explanation was forthcoming, even though CAC members repeatedly expressed our concerns about this entire process.
- The Local Plan Advisory Committee (LPAC) was organized as something resembling a study group that was sadly ill-suited for true collaboration.
- The Department of Special Education (DSE) and Students Families and Communities Engagement (SFACE) prevented the CAC from collaborating and advising on the Local Plan. SFACE inexplicably and without notice changed the agenda for our final meeting by removing the review and discussion of the Local Plan. DSE was unprepared to discuss the Local Plan despite having representatives attend our lengthy agenda-planning meeting.
- DSE made no attempt to collect formal comments from the CAC as a committee, but only solicited individual member comments.
- CAC meetings over the past three years have not been held in accordance with CAC Bylaws, a practice that has robbed the CAC of dozens of hours which would otherwise have been spent conducting committee business.
Due to the egregious actions and omissions of both DSE and SFACE, the CAC was denied the opportunity to collaborate as a committee on how to advise the District on the Local Plan. For the entire year our plan had been to use the final CAC meeting for reviewing and discussing our Local Plan recommendations. Prior to that meeting, officers held an agenda-planning session at which we discussed at length with SFACE and DSE representatives that the entire three-hour time slot was needed for this purpose. We even planned to have a separate, additional meeting to review the Bylaws because we prioritized the SELPA meeting. Yet even with this clear prior understanding, on the day of the meeting, we were shocked that a Local Plan review was inexplicably no longer on the agenda. DSE claimed they were not prepared to review the proposed changes with us. To this day we have not received any explanation whatsoever for what I view as an utter failure to engage in honest discourse. I took the unprecedented step of recessing the CAC meeting to allow for later discussion of the Local Plan, but unfortunately we were never able to schedule a second, reconvened session to complete this review.
The comment-solicitation procedure carried out by DSE seemed designed to prevent meaningful collaboration as well. DSE collected comments through an online link distributed via e-mail to CAC members. The document DSE distributed for review did not even note what changes had been made. To make any meaningful suggestions, the reader would have had to meticulously compare the modified document to the older version.
The CAC was not even able to view, let alone consolidate and polish, these comments as we have done in previous years. Early in the LPAC process we requested that DSE provide clear guidelines for the scope of our comments, specifically what portions they were willing or able to change based on our recommendations. We made this request to use our time as efficiently as possible. We never received a clear answer. DSE just informed us that it would not implement some specific suggestions on which we spent hours of our valuable and limited time. DSE did not provide any rationale for our specific suggestions, which mostly had to do with CAC administrative matters. We cannot be expected to perform our advisory role in a meaningful and efficient way without such clear parameters.
Finally, since 2021 the CAC Bylaws have mandated regular monthly meetings of three hours each, with at least 90 minutes of that time devoted solely to conducting CAC business. Training and education meetings, including presentations by LAUSD divisions, should be held separately as needed and generally on a monthly basis. The reasoning behind this meeting format was to avoid situations precisely like the one we find ourselves in this year. We would have held our regular "business" meetings to discuss business such as SELPA revisions, with separate "training" meetings which could be attended by the stakeholders we represent. SFACE has never adopted this model for our meetings; instead, we've been forced into an alternating schedule of business and training meetings, with the latter limited in such a way that no CAC business can be conducted.
I have personally sacrificed many hours that might have been better spent working at my paid profession or spending time with my family, including our three children who are all LAUSD students with special needs and active I.E.P.s. Instead, it was wasted attempting to collaborate with LAUSD for the improvement of special education services to all students and families who require services for special needs. The same goes for every single CAC member. It is a slap in the face to know that our time and efforts were wasted without a second thought.
I look forward to speaking with each of you, in person, by phone or Zoom, in the near future.
In partnership,
Ariel Harman-Holmes,
LAUSD Community Advisory Committee Chairperson
This casting aside of state-mandated parent committees is not surprising in a school district moving further away from local control. Under Superintendent Carvalho LAUSD parents are treated like an annoyance rather than partners. Without their input, successful programs have been eliminated. They have not been kept apprised of serious threats. When Carvalho refused to negotiate in good faith with SEIU 99, parents had to deal with the consequences.
This is not Florida and parents have little patience for wannabee dictators. When will the School Board finally do their job and hold the Superintendent accountable for his poor performance? He is their employee.
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