California Watch's investigation reveals serious flaws in a California state agency's enforcement of earthquake regulations for public schools. Two residents of a coastal community have spent months trying to determine whether the school their children attended is safe.
Producer/Correspondent: Anna Werner
Editor: Marjorie McAfee
Camera: Japhet Weeks, Josiah Hooper, Ariane Wu
Senior editor: David Ritsher
Executive producer: Sharon Tiller
Tonight, 19 months after joining our staff, Corey G. Johnson finally gets his first byline at California Watch.
I hope you will agree that it was worth the wait.
At 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time we will begin rolling out a three-part series on seismic safety in public schools called "On Shaky Ground." It’s a project that Johnson began working on almost immediately after we gave him his laptop and a desk back in September 2009.
His first assignment was supposed to be a quick-turn anniversary piece about safety issues for the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Johnson had just arrived from North Carolina, and we figured it would be a good, easy way to get his feet wet – and to get him that first early byline. Johnson had never been to California. But his fresh eyes began to see things that other reporters had overlooked. The project became virtually all consuming for Johnson – and ultimately for us.
His desk soon became cluttered with reams of documents, forming a fortress growing higher and higher. Tens of thousands of PDF files about earthquake safety in California’s public schools soon taxed his laptop hard drive. The documents painted a disturbing picture of a system of oversight in disarray.
Louis Freedberg/California WatchSusan Yee, director of the Oakland High School Wellness Center, stands in front of the new health center under construction.
Two of the state’s largest districts are undergoing a major expansion of health centers on school campuses after promised help from Sacramento never came.
To build new facilities, Oakland and Los Angeles are tapping a combination of voter-approved bond money, fees from Medi-Cal and health insurance reimbursements and philanthropic dollars. Health advocates hope these efforts spur similar initiatives around the state.
California lags behind many other states in the number and scope of school-based health services, despite evidence that children who use school health centers have better health and education outcomes. Out of nearly 10,000 schools in the state, only 176 school health centers [PDF] exist for more than 6 million children.
Eight centers will be built in Oakland – added to seven existing ones. Some of the operating costs will be covered by a $15 million grant from New York-based Atlantic Philanthropies and $6 million from Kaiser Permanente awarded last fall.
Construction is being underwritten by a bond measure approved by Oakland voters in 2006. Los Angeles Unified is building 17 health centers, complementing the 32 it established over the last several decades.
Nearly five years years ago, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to add 500 health centers at elementary schools throughout California. But not a single clinic was established as a result of his pledge.
The initiative foundered because of the state’s failure to pass its own health reform legislation, its deepening budget crisis, and lack of follow-through from the governor’s office and state Legislature, experts in health policy said. After approving the School Health Center Expansion Act in 2008 [PDF], lawmakers declined to appropriate any money for the program.
Last month the state earned a D+ for children’s health coverage in the 2011 California Report Card [PDF] issued by the Oakland-based advocacy organization Children Now. Health educators worry that school-based health care is unlikely to be high on Sacramento's policy making agenda anytime soon, even though public health officials are convinced of its importance. Gov. Jerry Brown mostly ignored health issues in an otherwise detailed policy platform during his 2010 campaign.
“We continue to believe in the benefit of additional school health clinics and would hope resources to support this program would be available in the future,” said Al Lundeen, spokesman for the California Department of Public Health
At the state’s largest district, students in Los Angeles have significant health problems that damage their ability to learn, according to the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health [PDF]. About 105,000 students have asthma. More than one-third are obese or overweight. A high proportion of students have been diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
School health centers in California could get an additional boost from the federal health reform law, which includes $200 million for construction of school health centers nationwide, the first time Washington has provided funds for this purpose. Local school districts and health providers can apply for up to $500,000 for new construction, equipment or renovation of existing facilities.
The need is greatest among high school students, the population health surveys show are least likely to visit a doctor’s office. Focus groups in Alameda County indicate students prefer to use school health centers because they are free, confidential and usually operated by youth-friendly staff.
A mountain of research has underscored their effectiveness. The American Journal of Public Health reported this fall that school health centers improve students’ mental health while reducing pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates. The centers also help promote better eating habits, increase immunizations and lower Medicaid costs. Recent studies show improvements in the grade point averages of students who use mental health services in school clinics and in the attendance of students who took advantage of their medical services.
At Oakland High School, the services offered by its health center are scattered among four different classrooms. Medical services are provided in several tiny rooms. The exam room is barely larger than a closet, offering little privacy for students or staff. But all the services soon will be brought together under one roof in a much larger facility under construction in the shell of the abandoned auto shop in front of the school. It will be named Shop 55 as a reminder of its prior history.
Tenth-grader Bethany Saetern feels much more comfortable going to the health center than a regular doctor’s office.
“Everyone is in their comfort zone,” Saetern said, referring to its casual atmosphere. “They ask you if you need anything, they help you a lot in school, with life and everything.”
When she started falling behind on class assignments, she got extra help from the counselors at the health center, and “my grades are going up,” she said.
At John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, the new health center is housed in a simple one-story building painted beige with brown trim. With a waiting room, two examination rooms, a laboratory, two counseling offices and a reception area that holds medical records, it is twice the size of the school's previous health center, which for 10 years was squeezed into a classroom portable.
Principal Daniel Harrison said the health center, which is operated by the Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, a nonprofit community health clinic, “is not a luxury; it is essential.” For many of his students, “they either see a doctor here or they don’t see a doctor at all, period.”
Some communities resistant
As Oakland and Los Angeles expand, some communities have resisted school health centers, fearing they will provide birth control and abortion advice without parental permission. Under California law, these are classified as “sensitive services.” [PDF] Health care providers, whether on or off school campuses, are barred from sharing information with parents about the care their children may have received, at least not without their permission.
Harrison, the Marshall High principal, said parents at Huntington Park High, where he previously taught, were mostly recent immigrants who opposed the idea of providing condoms and other reproductive health services to students. As a result, that school has no clinic.
Community resistance, however, has not been a problem in most urban areas. At Marshall High, many students come from rougher neighborhoods in East Hollywood, with a heavy dose of medical marijuana storefronts and billboards advertising their wares, neighborhood bars, and prostitution. For parents and students alike, Harrison said the need for the services its health center provides is self-evident. “It is in your face,” he said. “No one would say ‘stay away from the clinic because it could teach your kid something too soon.’ ”
At Oakland High, Dr. Suzanne Nguyen said that “by providing confidentiality and ease of access in an environment they feel they can trust, we are able to successfully combat those public health diseases that are out there, like chlamydia, gonorrhea and HIV.”
Louis Freedberg/California WatchA new wellness center is under construction at Oakland High School.
Nor can she avoid the reality of teenage pregnancies. She said she regularly has been able to keep pregnant girls from dropping out by carefully managing their class schedules, scheduling doctor’s appointments so they don’t interfere with school work and, if necessary, providing mediation with upset parents.
“We want to be a safe haven for them,” she said.
Like many school health centers, medical services at Oakland High are provided by a community-based clinic, in this case Asian Health Services, in conjunction with the East Bay Asian Youth Center. As a “federally qualified health center,” the community clinic is key to the financial viability of the school facility because it can collect patient fees from students with health coverage and enroll uninsured low-income students in programs like Healthy Families and Medi-Cal.
So far this school year, nearly half of Oakland High's 1,650 students have used one or more of its services, according to health center director Susan Yee.
The school clinics reinforce a push by Oakland’s superintendent of schools, Tony Smith, to turn schools into community-based institutions that provide a range of services – not just educational ones.
Expansion in Los Angeles
A similar expansion of health centers is under way in Los Angeles, using $28.5 million from voter-approved bond measures for school construction. Two new centers have been built (the clinic at Marshall High and a mental health clinic at Caroldale Learning Community), and 15 more are in the design phase. All are expected to be open by December.
At David Starr Jordan High School in Watts, the health center is part of a larger neighborhood revitalization that will include new housing, businesses and redevelopment projects. Part of the ambitious $1 billion plan involves tearing down the troubled Jordan Downs housing project, building 2,100 mixed-use housing units and turning Jordan High into what officials describe as a “model high school.”
“Our wellness center will be the hub of a whole renewal of a community,” said Rene Gonzalez, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s assistant superintendent of student health and human services.
In addition to the benefits to students, school districts have a financial reason to offer on-campus health services: Schools receive funds from the state based on each day a student attends classes.
Each year, for example, California children miss 847,000 days of school because of dental problems alone. Health advocates say absentee rates could be drastically reduced if students didn’t have to leave campus for medical appointments.
But with the state still facing a grim budget future, local communities will have to come up with their own funding mechanisms to treat chronic conditions on school campuses.
That is what happened in Alameda County in 2004, when voters approved Measure A [PDF], which raised sales taxes by a half-cent and now provides $1 million each year for health programs in 17 schools. In San Francisco, the school district and city jointly invest about $7 million in 17 wellness centers and other health programs at each of its high schools and six of its middle schools, in part through the Public Education Enrichment Fund [PDF] approved by voters in 2004.
Now health advocates are hoping funds from the federal health reform law for school health centers will help spur further growth in California.
“What we would really like to see is that school health centers become part of how health care is delivered to kids, so when you think of schools, you think of the library, the gym, and the health care center," said Serena Clayton, executive director of the California School Health Centers Association.
The first attempt to use a controversial "parent trigger" law to convert a regular public school into a charter school has raised at least one key question: Just how public should the petition drive to gather the parent signatures needed to trigger the change be?
On Dec. 7 a majority of parents at McKinley Elementary School in Compton Unified School District filed a petition demanding that their school be turned into a charter school, and naming the charter school company (Celerity Educational Group) that would take it over.
The petition was the end result of a stealth campaign led by Parent Revolution, a nonprofit organization closely allied with the charter school movement, headed by Ben Austin, who is also a member of the State Board of Education. (For a remarkably detailed account, read this report in LA Weekly by Patrick McDonald who was "embedded" with the campaign, but did not report on it until it was over.)
Jerry Brown is calling on Californians to come together to resolve the state's deepening budget crisis, but he got a heavy dose of how difficult that will be at the forum he hosted in Los Angeles focused on education financing.
Although their tone was conciliatory, school superintendents and union leaders reminded Brown, over and over again, of all the ways K-12 schools have borne the brunt of the budget cuts over the past three years, and presented ominous scenarios should they be cut any further.
Joel Shapiro, South Pasadena superintendent of schools, asked Brown to be courageous in defending what remains of school budgets, "because there are no other ways for us to make additional cuts in education."
CTA President David Sanchez said "we understand we have to make some hard choices." At the same time, he pointed to the sacrifices teachers have already made, like the 30,000 teachers laid off over the past two years and the unpaid furlough days teachers in many remaining districts have agreed to protect against even bigger layoffs.
Michael Hulsizer representing the Kern County Office of Education said he knew Brown would be "fair and honest, that is all we ask." At the same time he said that he hoped his budget director would point out to other claimants on the state's general fund the high percentage of cuts K-14 education has already endured.
Incoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, not even sworn into office, presented a bleak portrait of public education in the state, without giving any hint of how K-12 schools could contribute to a resolution of the state's budget crisis.
Is Davis Guggenheim backing off from the largely one-dimensional picture presented in his potent critique of the nation's public schools?
In an interview with the new PBS show "Need to Know," Guggenheim takes a far more nuanced, and multifaceted, view that seems at odds with the one-dimensional argument of his documentary, "Waiting For Superman," which lays the blame for huge dropout rates on bad teachers and offers charter schools as virtually the only alternative.
It is impossible to watch the movie without becoming enraged at the plight of mostly poor, minority children who fall, or are pushed, through the cracks of dysfunctional or ineffective schools. Two of the five children profiled are from California: Emily, an eighth-grader from Redwood City, and Daisy, a fifth-grader from Los Angeles, both of whom struggle to get into a charter school.
But the movie fails to show that there are regular public schools that are doing exceptional work – like my own children's highly diverse schools in Berkeley, Calif.
The major thrust of the movie is that charter schools present the only educational model in America that works – despite pointing to research indicating that only 20 percent of charter schools result in outcomes superior to those of regular public schools.
The movie is also exceptionally one-sided in laying virtually the entire blame for the failure of poor and minority children on teachers unions.
A landmark agreement to halt teacher layoffs at Los Angeles schools serving disadvantaged children is now facing opposition from an unlikely source: the biggest local teachers union in the state.
The United Teachers Los Angeles is considering suing to block the layoff-ending settlement made on Tuesday with the L.A. school board, the ACLU and a coalition of other public-interest attorneys, according to the L.A. Daily News and the L.A. Times.
In February, the group accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of violating the constitutional rights of students to a fair and equal education by imposing massive teacher layoffs and budget cuts at schools that were already struggling. Tuesday's agreement effectively ended layoffs at up to 45 schools in high-poverty areas, leading some observers to tout the agreement as groundbreaking.
But union president A.J. Duffy said in published reports that the union was shut out of talks over the settlement. Duffy say his group may act to block the settlement over worries that the agreement could spawn "unintended consequences" at schools, including prompting schools to stock their teaching staffs with a disproportionate number of young, inexperienced teachers.
Underscoring the unworkability of California's current school "accountability" system, test scores at California schools are going up, at the same time as the number of failing schools as defined by the federal government are going up dramatically as well.
The number of schools in need of "program improvement" – those schools labeled as failing under the federal No Child Left Behind Act – has now soared to 3,197 schools, out of some 6,142 which are rated under the law. This includes 567 schools that have been designated "program improvement schools" for the first time.
The reason is because the No Child Left Behind law has set what virtually every education expert admits is an unattainable target: requiring that 100 percent of students score at a proficient level on state tests by the 2013-2014 school year. Each year the federal government is ratcheting up the percentage of students that must be proficient in math and English in order to escape the dreaded, and somewhat Orwellian, "program improvement" label.
That means for the first time more than 50 percent of schools receiving federal Title 1 funds targeted at low-income children are now labeled as failing.
Depending on how long they remain a "PI" school, they are on a track for all kinds of sanctions, including being shut down and reopened as a charter school, having their staff and principal replaced, or being taken over by an outside organization.
It's a nagging question that won't go away: When local school officials and their district-level administrators charge fees for classes and extracurricular activities despite a statewide ban on such practices, who is responsible for stepping in?
Is it the state, which sets education policy and guidelines, certifies the public school systems' teachers, creates the curriculum and provides the funding?
If so, then why haven't state officials intervened?
These oversight concerns form the basis of the class action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union. The civil liberties organization is accusing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of failing to crack down on school districts imposing illegal fees.
ACLU says it has found 40 school districts across California whose schools openly list fees on their websites for courses including art, home economics and music, for and for materials including gym uniforms. According to the suit, in one incident, a student’s Spanish teacher humiliated her because she could not pay for assigned workbooks. Another student, who requested anonymity, was required to pay for a workbook for English class, foreign language workbooks, science lab manuals and a school-issued agenda, which he could not afford.
ACLU is asking for a court order to force the state to enforce the law on illegal fees. The organization said they will send letters to school districts telling them about the legal action in hopes of dissuading them from imposing illegal fees during the current school year.
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