California Watch Daily Report

Calif. schools employing fewer nurses, librarians

Joanna Lin — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Joanna Lin

Joanna Lin/California Watch Mary Nixon is one of two school nurses in Trinity County. The number of school nurses in California has dropped 13.3 percent in five years.

California is issuing fewer credentials for public school service positions such as librarians, school nurses and administrators, and its schools are employing fewer service staff, according to a recent report by the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

The commission issued 11 percent fewer service credentials between the 2006-07 and 2010-11 school years. The number of people employed in service positions declined 9 percent during the same period, according to the report.

The findings [PDF], released last week, track credentials and employment in five areas: administrative services; teacher librarian services; school nurses; speech-language pathology, and clinical or rehabilitative services; and pupil personnel services, which include school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and child welfare and attendance workers.

School nurse credentials saw the biggest drops, with just 209 issued in 2010-11 – a 26.4 percent decline from 2006-07. At the same time, the number of school nurses employed in public schools fell by 13.3 percent to 2,474.

The number of credentials issued also fell by 19.1 percent for administrative services, 18.9 percent for school social workers and 10 percent for school psychologists. Except for school social workers, whose ranks rose 20.2 percent, schools employed fewer service staff in all these areas than they did five years ago.

While service positions saw a downward trend overall, the number of credentials issued in some areas has grown.

The 104 new teacher librarian credentials in 2010-11, for example, represent an 8.3 percent increase since 2006-07. But the decline in working teacher librarians was three times that figure: Just 895 teacher librarians were employed in 2010-11 – 339 fewer than five years earlier.

The same was true among speech-language pathologists: More credentials were issued, but fewer people were employed in these areas.

California awarded 504 language, speech and hearing credentials in 2010-11 – a 40 percent increase over five years. At the same time, however, the number of speech-language pathology waivers remains high, with 439 waivers issued in 2010-11. The commission issues waivers when there are not enough credentialed individuals to fill positions.

In fact, since 2006-07, only in the past two years has the number of speech-language pathology credentials trumped the number of waivers, the report found. Overall employment for speech-language pathologists fell 8.4 percent in the five-year period to 4,646.

Only school counselors saw an increase in both the number of credentials issued and employment. The 1,166 school counseling credentials issued in 2010-11 represented a 14.8 percent jump over 2006-07. California's public schools in 2010-11 employed 8,201 counselors – a 4.7 percent increase.

The commission said the growing numbers of school counselors and school social workers, whose ranks climbed 20.2 percent to 417 in 2010-11, could be attributed in part to the Quality Education Investment Act of 2006. The act provides funding for the state's lowest-performing schools to improve student achievement.

Still, the commission said, California's student-to-counselor ratio remains among the worst in the nation: 49th in 2009-10, according to U.S. Department of Education data, with 810 students for every counselor. The national average at the time was 459 students to every counselor.

School officials challenged by post-redevelopment process

Kendall Taggart — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Kendall Taggart

401K/Flickr

With billions of dollars at stake, school district representatives charged with overseeing the shutdown of about 400 redevelopment agencies may be underprepared.

Seven-member local oversight boards consisting of representatives from K-14 districts, the county, the city and special districts are now responsible for vetting decisions about how the former agencies will be dismantled and how the property taxes that previously went to redevelopment will be spent.

But some observers are concerned that many school district representatives are not well-equipped to review the complex contracts and financial arrangements left in redevelopment’s wake.

In a report earlier this year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office suggested that the state provide $1 million to help train K-14 oversight board members, but no additional funds have been allocated. To fill the gap, the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which advises school districts on financial matters, has offered several workshops to help educate school officials.

“Even a district staff person who is an experienced school finance person generally has very little background that is directly relevant to redevelopment agencies,” said Dante Gumucio, CEO of Public Economics Inc., an economic consultancy firm that specializes in helping school districts with redevelopment issues and has led the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team workshops.

“I’m sure that there are some schools that don’t even know how to spell redevelopment,” said Barbara Christensen, director of community and government relations for the San Mateo Community College District, and a member of five oversight boards in the county. San Mateo County education officials have been holding regular meetings to help educate local school officials about redevelopment. “But we might be unique,” Christensen said.

Not all school officials agree about school officials’ level of preparedness. “I’ve been working with the redevelopment agencies for the last 10 years, and they’re not out of the ordinary for me,” said Doug Claflin, assistant superintendent of business services at the Etiwanda School District. He said that his work with bond issuances for school facilities has prepared him for his position on the Rancho Cucamonga oversight board.

In some cases, the oversight boards are finding potentially illegal items in the budgets.

A chief business official for Santa Cruz City Schools serving on the local oversight board sent an e-mail to the state complaining about the city's failure to disclose key information to the oversight board, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.

The state Department of Finance and county auditors are also charged with reviewing the former redevelopment agencies’ budgets. The state has already returned over two dozen budgets because of questionable payments, California Watch previously reported.

Members of the oversight boards work on a volunteer basis.

After the former redevelopment agencies are dissolved, it’s unlikely most districts will see any additional revenue. Instead of increasing school budgets, property taxes allocated for schools will offset payments previously made by the state to ensure all districts meet the required funding level.

Only districts whose revenue from local property taxes exceeds minimum funding levels – known as basic aid districts – might see more money. They make up about 10 percent of the 1000 school districts in the state.

State challenges local redevelopment budgets

Explainer: The end of redevelopment agencies

Issa blasts costly airport-security machines languishing in storage

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:05:02 +0000

G.W. Schulz

Oversight & Government Reform Committee Security-screening equipment in storage in Texas.

An estimated $184 million worth of security-screening equipment purchased by the federal government is gathering dust in storage rather than keeping Americans safe, according to the results of a congressional investigation [PDF] published May 9.

Staffers leading a joint probe that involved two committees found thousands of pieces of equipment sitting idle in a Dallas warehouse used by the Transportation Security Administration, an agency created after the Sept. 11 hijackings to keep terrorists off of commercial airliners.

The chairman for one of those committees responsible for oversight and government reform – California Congressman Darrell Issa, R-Vista – has become a thorn in the side of the Obama White House as he seeks to unearth evidence of waste, fraud and abuse. Issa in early May threatened to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for allegedly hiding information about a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms operation that went awry when guns wound up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers.

Issa’s latest aside targets spending at the Department of Homeland Security, specifically its investments in airport-screening technology. Capitol Hill investigators learned that hundreds of baggage-screening machines went unused for over nine months. A third had been in storage for more than a year, resulting in depreciated losses that totaled millions for taxpayers.

The Transportation Security Administration “knowingly” purchased more so-called “explosive trace detectors” than were needed in hopes of getting a bulk discount, according to the report. Instead, nearly 1,500 of them with a price tag of $30,000 each (a total of $44 million) were languishing in storage as of mid-February.

Between 2004 and 2006, the federal government rushed to purchase 200 machines known as “puffers,” which shoot the clothing of travelers with air in an attempt to dislodge and detect dangerous substances. But only half were deployed because the agency realized belatedly that they didn’t operate as expected. So they were removed and left in storage for four years.

Officials have "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds on failed solutions to secure commercial aviation, ignoring internal protocols to prevent such waste and adopting technologies that have repeatedly failed operational and covert testing,” the report said.

Federal officials even actively attempted to conceal evidence of warehouse mismanagement from Congress, the report alleges, by attempting to “hide the disposal of approximately 1,300 pieces of screening equipment from its warehouses in Dallas, Texas, prior to the arrival of congressional staff.”

In a May 9 statement, Issa blamed “systemic” purchasing dysfunction at the Transportation Security Administration.

“These flaws are exacerbated by a management structure that seems content to throw millions of dollars at untested solutions that are bought in excess and poorly deployed and managed,” he said. "This is not a security operation, but rather a recipe for waste and abuse.”

David Nicholson, the Transportation Security Administration's top financial official, testified [PDF] before Issa’s committee the day the report was released.

Nicholson said security equipment must be rapidly acquired and deployed due to “changing threat information,” and a stored inventory is necessary for airport facilities that change over time or are struck by a natural disaster.

“Our goal at all times is to maximize transportation security to stay ahead of evolving terrorist threats while protecting privacy and civil liberties and facilitating the flow of legitimate travel,” he said.

“To remain ahead of those who seek to do us harm, we continue to evolve our security approach by examining the procedures and technologies we use, how specific security procedures are carried out, and how screening is conducted,” he added.

Auditor Steve Lord of the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog arm of Congress, told the committee that purchasing problems have been a recurring theme at the Department of Homeland Security since its creation in 2003.

Testing and evaluation have not always met requirements, and some technologies were sent out to the field before their costs and benefits were fully analyzed. Such problems have led to the department’s continuing designation as “high risk” by the watchdog office, which has produced numerous reports in recent years questioning the young bureaucracy’s money-handling practices.

“Our prior work has shown that not resolving problems discovered during testing can sometimes lead to costly redesign and rework at a later date,” Lord testified [PDF]. “Addressing such problems before moving to the acquisition phase can help agencies better manage costs.”

Business growing for 2 Calif. drone-makers

3 Calif. residents battle in court over no-fly list

Advocates fear patient care will suffer under state budget cuts

Christina Jewett — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Christina Jewett

ideabug/istockphoto.com

Gov. Jerry Brown announced a state budget yesterday that relies on hospitals and nursing homes to achieve nearly $400 million in savings – a week after a far smaller proposal prompted concerns about patient care.

The governor's revised budget is the starting point to closing a $15.7 billion deficit. He proposed making further cuts to human services, paring down hours of care provided to In-Home Supportive Services recipients, and limiting child care support provided by the CalWORKs program.

The revised budget poses a new set of challenges to care providers and patient advocates. Last week, groups representing doctors, nurses and nursing home residents decried a comparatively minor budget change that would have cut the mandate for hospital and nursing home inspectors to perform unannounced inspections to monitor compliance with state laws.

The budget proposal by the state Health and Human Services Agency would have eliminated 25 nurse-inspector positions and slashed fees paid by hospitals and nursing homes that go toward enforcing patient safety laws.

Health and Human Services Agency Director Diana Dooley said that the proposal to change facility inspections was unrelated to yesterday's budget cuts. Rather, it was meant to streamline state operations “where we believed we could assure quality and safety in care,” Dooley said.

While both Senate and Assembly budget subcommittees voted down the proposal last week, advocates say they are wary that it may arise again. Ken August, a spokesman for the Department of Public Health, which inspects care facilities, said no decision had been made as to whether the proposed change might resurface.

Under the proposal, inspections for compliance with federal patient safety safeguards would still take place. But advocates opposing the proposal point to a raft of California-only provisions that are meant to protect patients young and old.

The California Medical Association, which represents about 30,000 doctors, wrote a letter in opposition, listing some protections that might be curtailed if inspectors stop checking.

The protections include requirements that emergency medications in neonatal intensive care units are appropriate for babies. They encompass informed-consent rights for patients undergoing a sterilization or hysterectomy. And they require that inspectors verify that reports are made to the state Medical Board about potentially errant or negligent doctors.

The budget proposal would have also removed the requirement that hospitals be inspected by a licensed doctor, nurse and "persons experienced in hospital administration and sanitary inspections.”

The medical board also opposed that proposal, saying in an era of major changes due to budget cuts and health reform, “the need to continue to ensure facilities’ compliance with vital state laws has never been greater.”

State hospital and nursing home inspectors fine facilities for some violations. For others, they cite deficiencies and follow-up with administrators on corrective actions.

The California Hospital Association has not taken a position on the proposal, said spokeswoman Jan Emerson Shea.

Representatives of the United Nurses Association of California and Disability Rights California opposed the agency's budget change. Also, advocates for nursing home patients spoke out during last week's hearing.

Sylvia Taylor-Stein, executive director of Long Term Care Services of Ventura County, said the end of inspections to check compliance with state law would “set us back 30 years of reform.”

“To be doing this, we would be going so far back, we would be abandoning the residents who depend on us,” Taylor-Stein said.

A Senate committee analysis of the proposal said the changes would end checks on laws that require a doctor to approve the use of physical restraints on patients.

It would also lift requirements that the state examine nursing homes’ use of antipsychotic medications, which can hasten death in patients who have dementia.

The California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform reviewed a series [PDF] of 2010 state inspections on the matter and found that facilities repeatedly failed to obtain informed consent or dispensed potent and risky drugs to patients who had a tendency to wander.

The proposal would have had no effect on federal inspection requirements. Medicare authorities can put nursing homes under aggressive quality-improvement monitoring or cut their funding after major and recurring problems. A recent investigation by the U.S. Health and Human Services inspector general concluded that California health inspectors were falling short in documenting and ensuring compliance with federal standards.

During last week's hearing, Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose, spoke against the proposal, which would have also pushed out deadlines on complaint investigations that were set in a bill she carried in 2006.

“I think it’s really important to find out in a timely fashion what occurred, so hopefully it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

Critics struggle to end 'pay to play' in school bonds

Will Evans — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:04 +0000

Will Evans

Boaz Yiftach/freedigitalphotos.net

Critics of the practice in which financial firms help pass school bonds that they profit from are continuing to push for reforms, but so far have faced resistance and failure.

In California, underwriting companies hired by school districts to sell bonds often make campaign contributions to help convince voters to pass the bond measures. A California Watch investigation found that leading underwriters gave $1.8 million over the last five years to successful bond measures, and in almost every case school districts gave underwriting contracts to those same firms.

Underwriters are essentially middlemen, buying bonds from districts and selling them to investors at a higher price. Underwriters say they generally only give campaign contributions after getting hired; school districts argue the money has no influence. But critics call it a “pay to play” system that potentially costs taxpayers more than a strictly competitive process would.

The California Association of County Treasurers and Tax Collectors has been pushing to end the practice for years. Last year, it sponsored a bill to prohibit financial firms from providing both underwriting and campaign services for bond measures. The bill failed in committee, but its author, Assemblyman Chris Norby, R-Fullerton, vows to bring it back next year and add limits on campaign donations.

"It’s a clear conflict of interest. Wall Street brokerage houses are buying local elections," Norby said. "The whole democratic process is being subverted and corrupted."

Norby acknowledged his efforts face determined opposition from school districts and some underwriting companies. Similar bills failed in 2010, 2009 and 2008.

"You have the public school establishment in an unholy alliance with Wall Street," Norby said. "It’s hard to beat it."

School districts are worried that Norby's legislation would freeze underwriter campaign donations, which are needed to successfully pass bonds, said David Walrath, legislative advocate for the Small School Districts' Association.

"We believe this bill, if enacted, would make it less likely that we could pass bonds, which would mean we’d be less able to provide adequate facilities for our students," Walrath said.

Walrath said the proposal would especially harm small districts in rural areas, which are less able to raise money for bond campaigns from residents. He also takes issue with the bill for singling out financial firms, while architects, builders and unions also routinely give money to bond campaigns.

"What is it about the service (underwriters) provide that’s so objectionable that they cannot have political free speech rights to assist in a campaign for something they believe in?" Walrath said.

Federal regulators have also expressed concern that restrictions on bond measure contributions wouldn't pass constitutional muster. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld limits on contributions to individual candidates, but not for ballot initiatives.

"It does touch on a person's ability to make constitutional speech," said Ernesto Lanza, deputy executive director and chief legal officer of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board.

For years, some financial giants have been pushing the self-regulatory agency to adopt restrictions. In 2008, representatives of Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. urged the board to limit bond measure contributions from financial firms because of "the perception that making such a contribution could cause an underwriter to be selected and to help ensure that the playing field is leveled for all underwriters."

Other underwriters, however, pushed back. School districts and other government entities “are in need of the public policy and campaign expertise of experienced regional investment banking firms," wrote an executive of George K. Baum & Company.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board ended up requiring disclosure of campaign contributions and is still considering whether more regulations are necessary, Lanza said.

In California, the debate has focused on underwriters that provide election-related services along with their traditional underwriting business.

In 2010, for example, Franklin-McKinley School District in San Jose hired George K. Baum to help lay the groundwork for a bond measure campaign and to underwrite the bonds once they passed. The pre-election services included strategic planning, a public information program and a community opinion survey.

"George K. Baum & Company offers school districts a turnkey approach to facilities funding," the company advertised in its proposal. "Our school district bond election clients have been overwhelmingly successful."

The additional services are supposed to be free. School districts are prohibited from using public funds for bond campaigns. But county treasurers argue that school districts end up paying more under these arrangements.

"We feel that these prepackaged campaign and underwriting relationships result in higher fees to the taxpayers," said Jackie Denney, president of the California Association of County Treasurers and Tax Collectors.

Neither the district nor George K. Baum responded to requests for comment.

But in its proposal to the school district, the company stated, "Our competitors would like you to believe that the District will pay a higher fee for our additional services, but this is patently untrue. The only differences in this regard between our firm and our competitors are our smaller profit margin and our dedication to specialization."

Under its contract with the district, George K. Baum stood to make 1.1 percent of the bonds sold.

The company gave $8,500 to the campaign for Measure J, a $50 million bond measure on the November 2010 ballot. It also provided $10,000 worth of "Campaign Consulting Services," according to campaign filings. The measure passed with 70 percent of the vote, and George K. Baum has been selling the district's bonds since then.

CSU Long Beach spends student MBA fees on professor pay

Erica Perez — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Erica Perez

vmvm/istockphoto.com

Officials at CSU Long Beach spent nearly $200,000 on extra pay for some business school faculty, tapping student fees that were supposed to be spent on recruiting professors, getting more research published and boosting enrollment.

The CSU Board of Trustees authorized a new fee for graduate business school students in 2009. At $254 per unit, it nearly doubles the price of a degree, adding $12,000 to the cost. CSU Long Beach projects it will have spent about $1.7 million in MBA fee revenues from 2009-10 through 2011-12, documents show.

Fee revenues were supposed to help universities boost enrollment and strengthen their accreditation. The accrediting agency requires schools to have a high number of tenure-track faculty who are consistently publishing peer-reviewed research.

While Long Beach officials say accreditation status has improved, the college has seen a drop in enrollment in its MBA programs. Meanwhile, the College of Business Administration has spent $191,000 of the fee revenues on stipends for existing faculty members in the last three years.

Some 43 professors received $3,000 each for participating in a course development workshop. One faculty member has gotten $21,750 in extra income from the student fee since 2009.

The payments went toward developing and gaining buy-in for "Revitalized MBA," a proposed overhaul touted by College of Business Administration Dean Michael Solt and a group of professors. But the idea ultimately failed to win enough faculty support to survive a vote.

Although Revitalized MBA has ended, the spending shows the university went out of its way to use the student fee money to boost faculty pay for those who worked to support the controversial plan.

“I’ve never seen faculty paid that much to develop curriculum,” said Mary Celsi, a marketing professor who was paid to attend a June 2010 workshop.

“What I remember about the workshop is faculty saying to each other that we were convinced that the course integration and team-teaching concepts wouldn’t work, but we took the money because we were encouraged to do so,” Celsi said.

Solt said the spending was in line with the purpose of the MBA fee because it was aimed at improving the quality of the program for students.

“Our MBA program had not been revised for a very, very long time, so the ... MBA revitalization effort was an attempt to sort of bring our program up to date and try and make it as high a quality program as possible,” Solt said.

Under the Revitalized MBA proposal, faculty in different departments would collaborate to teach integrated courses. The university paid faculty $3,000 each for participating in one of two on-campus workshops on developing course outlines for these new classes.

The college also paid 16 faculty members $3,000 each for participating in a half-day conference panel held on campus in February 2010. Participants made presentations about what integrated classes might look like. Ten professors participated in both the panel and workshop, earning $6,000 each.

Solt dropped the MBA revitalization effort in fall 2011. Some faculty members have taught new classes as part of a pilot, but that is ending.

Solt said the university paid professors because they worked in summer and winter.

“Only on a voluntary basis can people do things during the summer and winter,” Solt said. “They were doing real work that was aimed at this revitalization effort.”

The faculty council has questioned the spending. The group provided California Watch with an internal financial report.

The council in April sent a letter to the attorney general's office, the California state auditor and the CSU Board of Trustees asking for an investigation.

Thomas Rhee, a finance professor and faculty council chair, chose not to participate in the workshops or panel.

“Our faculty members should have been solicited for any meaningful projects or ways to allocate this new source of income,” Rhee said. “But instead the dean has been spending the money for his own political convenience.”

Ying Liu, an assistant professor of information systems who attended the June 2010 workshop, said he worked with professors from the accounting and marketing departments on an outline for an integrated customer relationship management course. In addition to the time spent in the workshop itself, he recalled spending eight to 16 hours on the course outline.

"It’s not a normal workload. It's extra," Liu said. "You have to create a syllabus."

One marketing professor, Ingrid Martin, made a particularly handsome profit. Over three years, she garnered $32,000 in extra income for her work on the revitalized MBA, including $21,750 from the student fee. Her base pay is $121,600.

In 2008-09, Martin was part of a 10-member MBA task force that performed a competitive analysis and came up with the revitalization concept. She later became chair of the Graduate Program Committee, which came up with the idea for the workshops and panel.

For her work on the task force in the summer of 2009, Martin was paid $5,000. In January 2010, she got $3,000 for participating in the panel.

She received $10,000 in summer 2010 for MBA revitalization development and coordination plus $3,000 for participating in the June 2010 workshop.

In winter 2011, Martin got $2,000 for MBA revitalization development and coordination, plus $3,000 for facilitating the January 2011 workshop – even though the college also paid $9,000 to a professional development expert for developing and facilitating both workshops.

Solt defended the payments to Martin.

“Everything that she was compensated for was for work performed,” Solt said. “And she has done a great job at it.”

Martin also said her pay was appropriate.

“Summers are set aside to work on research,” Martin said. “Instead of being able to focus on research, I was having to take part of my time and focus on doing this.”

Martin's husband, CSU Long Beach economics professor Wade Martin, also received $3,000 for participating in the June 2010 session. He was the only faculty member from outside the College of Business Administration to take part in one of the workshops.

Ingrid and Wade Martin collaborated with others to create a course on sustainability. Ingrid Martin said she invited her husband to join.

“He has done a lot of work around the world in environmental economics, and so he had a certain amount of expertise that fit well with what we were looking for,” she said.

She said other business faculty could have proposed working with outside faculty members but chose not to.

“Everybody was encouraged to think outside the box,” she said.

Meanwhile, although the MBA fee was also aimed at increasing enrollment, budget cuts led the CSU system to close admissions to programs in spring 2009 and spring 2010.

Enrollment in the state-supported MBA program at CSU Long Beach dropped by nearly half in the last few years, from 292 in fall 2008 to 161 this spring, according to university data.

“Who knows? Maybe the MBA fee cost had a dampening effect on our enrollments,” Solt said. “They have declined, and we’re trying to help them grow back again.”

Lawmakers: Health care districts must unleash bank accounts

Katharine Mieszkowski — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Katharine Mieszkowski

U.S. Census Bureau

California lawmakers are moving to crack down on taxpayer-funded health care districts that have banked tens of millions of dollars at the expense of funding community-health projects.

A bill moving through the Legislature targets the spending habits of these little-known governmental agencies that were created to run hospitals, which many of them no longer do. These districts are run by publicly elected boards that have power over multimillion-dollar budgets.

New legislation in Sacramento would require the districts to spend at least 95 percent of their annual tax revenue on community programs and services. Districts would have to report their spending annually to local officials, including their county boards of supervisors.

Some of these districts have banked tens of millions of dollars and diverted resources to administrative and overhead costs.

“We really felt that there were three things that we wanted to see from these districts: transparency, accountability and responsibility,” said Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park who co-authored the legislation, AB 2418, with Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento.

In March, a Bay Citizen investigation revealed that about 30 of the state’s more than 70 publicly funded health care districts no longer run hospitals, a departure from their original mission. Some now give grants to fund community-health programs, such as physical education in schools.

Four grand juries over the last decade have called for the dissolution of the Concord-based Mt. Diablo Health Care District. The district has not run a hospital since 1996, yet it spent just 17 percent of its $3.2 million in property-tax and other revenue on community grants from 2000 to 2011, according to public records. The district is currently being taken over by the city of Concord.

Dickinson, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, held a hearing last month at which district officials were grilled on their spending practices. “We found districts that had large real estate holdings, providing noncompetitive grants and have very large reserves,” Dickinson told the Assembly’s Committee on Local Government last Wednesday.

Health care district officials do not relish the increased oversight and regulation. None of them is supporting the bill, and a lobbyist from the Association of California Healthcare Districts spoke against the bill before two Assembly committees last week, arguing that it would hinder the ability of smaller districts to operate.

“AB 2418 will have a dire unintended consequence for many districts that serve underserved communities and the communities that created them,” said Amber Wiley, senior legislative advocate for the association. “Restricting the use of these tax dollars will have a detrimental effect on small, rural districts.”

Lawmakers want all the districts to refocus on providing health services.

“These are property-tax dollars, and in a time when you have literally millions of people across the state uninsured with no access to any kind, let alone quality health care, I think you have to prioritize,” Dickinson said in an interview.

The Assembly Committee on Local Government approved the legislation last Wednesday, one day after it was approved by the Assembly Committee on Health. If it becomes a law, it would take effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

Supporters of the bill include health advocates from Health Access, a consumer advocacy group, and SEIU California, a union representing health care workers who may benefit if more money is injected into providing health services.

Assemblyman Luis Alejo, a Democrat from Salinas, where a financial scandal engulfed a local health care district last year, is attempting to restrict lavish payouts to hospital executives by health care districts. His bill, which the Assembly will consider this week, would prohibit districts from giving financial perks to hospital administrators that are not available to other employees.

"This is ongoing in many places for far too long," he said. "Some of their expenditures have been questionable."

State, tech companies build alliances to combat sex trafficking

Shoshana Walter — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Shoshana Walter

Jakub Krechowicz/stock.xchng

Last year, California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined attorneys general across the country in declaring war against Backpage.com, a free classified website run by Village Voice Media. The officials threatened legal action if the site didn’t stop running ads for adult services, some of which have been linked to underage sex trafficking.

But while Harris took a confrontational tone with Backpage – which has since balked at shutting down its adult pages – a more cooperative dynamic has emerged this year between the attorney general and online companies.

Harris recently announced an agreement with mobile and tech companies that requires their apps to better display their privacy policies. While Harris said she will not rule out legal action against sites such as Backpage, her office has begun to build more alliances with online firms. And as companies such as Facebook have matured, they have become more willing to cooperate with government leaders and law enforcement.

This week, representatives from Facebook and Microsoft will be among 50 law enforcement and nonprofit leaders who are meeting as part of a new Department of Justice task force on human trafficking in the state. By the end of the summer, the government task force plans to issue a report containing best-practice guidelines for law enforcement, tech companies and service providers combating human trafficking locally and online.

“Having everyone at the table, it makes them more vested in being part of the process and finding solutions,” said former special assistant attorney general Suzy Loftus, who organized the meetings. “These public-private partnerships are one tool at our disposal.”

But industry observers say tech companies’ increasing cooperation with government leaders and law enforcement is less a sign of goodwill than of self-preservation. As online companies come to dominate the marketplace, they’ll look for ways to keep the upper hand. And many say the cooperation could lead to problems for consumers.

“This is very basic economics. If you’re a company and you’re trying to undermine your competition, you look for the best return on your investment. And sometimes that means working with the government,” said Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute.

“If the industry and the government are getting cozy together, the industry might get a seat at the table that’s helping to shape regulation. Why wouldn’t they want to be a part of that?”

Some privacy advocates say partnerships between tech companies and governmental agencies threaten the rights of Internet users. Civil rights attorneys have criticized Facebook and other companies for signing on in support of CISPA, a bill that would allow private companies to share with the government any user information that constitutes a homeland security or cyber threat.

"It's a civil liberties nightmare," said Rainey Reitman, director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's under the guise of something everybody wants to get behind – internet security – but the actual implication of this bill would be to undo decades of privacy law."

Facebook already shares personal account information with law enforcement agencies upon subpoena, court order and sometimes request, and runs every single photograph uploaded onto the site through a federal child pornography database run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The social networking company advertises a national hotline for sex trafficking victims on the site, and lists information about help for victims in its FAQ.

At least one issue the task force has discussed is whether Facebook has the right to screen users’ search terms for words that might identify them as potential victims of human or sexual trafficking. The websites could then show the user ads for helpful organizations or a national trafficking hotline, something that Google, for example, already does when users enter "suicide" into the search bar. A suicide hotline appears at the top of the list.

"I haven't got much problem with that, because at that point you don't have much data going outside of Google," said Reitman. "I think you get into a different situation when you have data going from users to the government, without them understanding what's happening."

While many websites have joined in efforts to clamp down on the distribution of child pornography, trafficking is a newer issue. In a span of just a few years, the Internet has quickly entered the forefront in conversations about combating human trafficking.

In 2007, two years after California lawmakers made human trafficking a felony, the attorney general’s office convened a similar task force and released a report on trafficking in the state. The Internet was not mentioned.

Then in 2010, the State Department called together a meeting with researchers in Washington, D.C., to discuss the intersection of trafficking and technology.

Facebook and other tech companies attended the discussion, and Mark Latonero, director of research at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, and his colleagues decided to study the issue. They released a report, “Human Trafficking Online,” in 2011.

Previously, state leaders weren’t “really thinking about technology as a tool to help,” said Latonero, a member of the task force.

Attorneys general have also put pressure on Craigslist, Tagged and Myspace to alter policies and services. “We know technology can be used for good and bad," Latonero said. "We also want to understand how technology can be used not only to facilitate trafficking but also monitor and combat it.”

In February, Attorney General Harris decided to follow suit, inviting many of the same organizations and tech companies to the first task force meeting in close to five years. Google, with which Microsoft is at war over everything from monopolizing the market to search engine algorithms, was invited to participate in the second task force meeting last month, but declined.

Microsoft, which helped develop the PhotoDNA technology used by Facebook and other websites to identify known child pornography images, recently awarded grants to researchers on the topic of sex trafficking and technology. They are helping to build a searchable database of information mined from known and publicly accessible sex-trade websites for law enforcement agencies across the country. Researchers plan to analyze patterns in the data to understand how human traffickers operate online.

Samantha Doerr, a member of the task force and Microsoft's digital crimes unit, said researchers are not violating privacy protections because the data they are looking at is publicly available online. She said companies can build technology, such as PhotoDNA, that is more "exact" and that allows companies to detect illegal activity or images without impinging on users’ privacy rights.

“A lot of information out there is extremely publicly available and visible,” she said. “And these crimes we're talking about are really tremendously awful.”

Rural towns devise unique plan to solve water problems

Bernice Yeung — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Bernice Yeung

woodleywonderworks/Flickr

For a good part of its rich history, residents of unincorporated Allensworth, the first African American colony west of the Mississippi, have gone without a reliable supply of safe drinking water.

This is still the case today, where the Tulare County community’s wells – which provide water to the neighboring Colonel Allensworth State Historical Park that commemorates the area’s legacy – exceed federal levels for arsenic.

Arsenic is naturally occurring in the area, and consumption of the semi-metal can cause nausea and skin discoloration. It has also been associated with various cancers.

Residents of Allensworth and neighboring Alpaugh – both rural, unincorporated communities in Tulare County whose water has elevated arsenic levels – have advanced a novel proposal to resolve the water issues in their communities. Under the plan, the Allensworth and Alpaugh Community Services Districts would combine with the Angiola Water District, which sells water for irrigation, to deliver drinking water to residents. Late last week, Allensworth and Alpaugh’s proposal received nearly $420,000 in state grants [PDF] to research its feasibility.

Safe drinking water is a "necessity for healthy living and economic growth and opportunity for the community,” Denise Kadara, president of the Allensworth Progressive Association, said at a recent meeting of the Strategic Growth Council, a cabinet-level committee that coordinates activities related to issues such as water quality and public health among five state agencies. “Rural communities like Allensworth face huge barriers to clean drinking water and we need innovative solutions to overcome these barriers.”

Consolidation of water districts – there are more than 8,000 public systems in California – has become increasingly appealing to rural communities. “It’s become harder and harder for a very small water system to provide safe water and to keep the rates affordable,” said Laurel Firestone, the co-executive director of the Community Water Center in Visalia. “There’s an overall trend of water systems looking for collaborative solutions to help cut costs.”

The Allensworth-Alpaugh proposal is unique because it involves a consolidation between remote rural community water districts and an irrigation water district. The arrangement could serve as a model for other rural communities, water policy experts say.

“A lot of dispersed communities face similar challenges, and what is learned here could be pretty influential in the rural West,” said Tony Rossmann, an attorney who has handled some of the state’s most significant water cases.

The proposal had the support of the Tulare County Board of Supervisors, which submitted the application to the state Strategic Growth Council. “We know that in Tulare County, we have clean water issues in our unincorporated communities,” said Allen Ishida, a county supervisor. “We are not going to be able to solve these issues without consolidation because it’s too expensive.”

Ishida said the funding for the feasibility study is a step toward “finally, after all these years, getting acceptable and potable clean water” to unincorporated communities “so that residents can enjoy the health benefits and lessen the financial burden of having to buy bottled water.”

According to surveys conducted by advocacy organizations like California Rural Legal Assistance, residents of low-income, unincorporated communities spend up to 10 percent of their income on water.

California law states that residents have a “right to pure and safe drinking water,” but while the state Department of Public Health is charged with monitoring public water systems, there are few enforcement mechanisms, said Camille Pannu of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, who helped draft the Allensworth-Alpaugh proposal.

“The gap between rights on the books and rights on the ground is particularly stark in the (Central) Valley,” Pannu wrote in a recent issue of the California Law Review.

The Allensworth-Alpaugh proposal also included an additional $450,000 funds to study the extension of sewer service from the city of Tulare to the unincorporated community of Matheny Tract.

As California Watch has previously reported, Matheny Tract, on the outskirts of Tulare, is located just a few miles – and downwind – from the municipal wastewater treatment plant, but residents currently can’t connect to it. Residents rely instead on aging septic tanks.

A memorandum of understanding is already in place between the city and county to explore a wastewater connection to Matheny Tract, but feasibility studies are a crucial step toward infrastructure improvements for low-income unincorporated communities, advocates said.

A common obstacle to construction is "not getting through the planning phase,” often because there's a lack of funding, said Phoebe Seaton of California Rural Legal Assistance.

Tulare County Supervisor Pete Vander Poel added that the studies for the Allensworth-Alpaugh and Matheny Tract projects "can be used to leverage additional funds for construction." He said that state and federal funding sources typically require feasibility studies and preliminary engineering work to be completed before projects will be considered for future funding.

A separate $383,853 proposal to draft a planning document for unincorporated and disadvantaged communities in Tulare County along the Highway 99 corridor was also approved by the Strategic Growth Council.

Numerous Central Valley communities face similar conditions with water quality, access and delivery. A report by the environmental research organization Pacific Institute found that between 2005 and 2008, about 1.3 million San Joaquin Valley residents drank water with unhealthy levels of nitrates, which can lead to severe illness and even death among infants.

According to Oakland think tank PolicyLink, an estimated 1.8 million Californians live in low-income, unincorporated communities like Allensworth and Alpaugh, and many lack potable drinking water or other basic infrastructure. In the Tulare Lake Basin area, there are at least 370 of these communities.

Business growing for 2 Calif. drone-makers

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:05:02 +0000

G.W. Schulz

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

A pair of defense firms based in California that specialize in manufacturing pilotless aircraft, also known as drones, are considered rising stars among contractors for the Department of Homeland Security, according to an annual list compiled by trade publishers.

San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has already supplied nine pricey Predator drones to the Department of Homeland Security, but a fleet totaling 24 “unmanned aerial vehicles” is in the works.

The company has now built 530 overall, said a company official, many of them used abroad by the U.S. military as part of the global war on terror. Congress in February ordered federal regulators to move faster in establishing guidelines for the broader use of drones over U.S. skies, and clearer rules are required by the year 2015. Public debate over their usefulness and privacy implications has been occurring ever since.

The attention means vast new opportunities for General Atomics and another company headquartered in Monrovia, Calif., called AeroVironment, that builds much smaller “mini-drones,” which fit a growing demand by emergency responders, firefighters and law enforcement agencies. Local officials want the aircraft and live video provided by them for everything from visualizing disaster areas to sizing up suspects prior to tactical raids.

General Atomics is not publicly traded on Wall Street, so pinning down details of its balance sheet is difficult. However, available public records show the company has enjoyed more than $250 million in contract transactions with the Department of Homeland Security since 2005.

Over $78 million of that activity occurred last year, nearly double the agreements inked in 2010, records show. A “transaction” can be everything from the purchase of an actual drone to spare parts, operational and maintenance support services, and flight testing.

Customs and Border Protection AeroVironment, on the other hand, discloses certain activities to Wall Street investors in the form of Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Most of its unmanned aerial systems are still sold to defense agencies like the Army and Marine Corps, the company told [PDF] shareholders last year.

Overall revenue for AeroVironment’s unmanned aircraft business grew by $25.6 million between 2010 and 2011 reaching $249.8 million last fiscal year. Available data show just one U.S. Customs and Border Protection contract signed with AeroVironment in 2008, yet the larger homeland security market and its multitude of various customers holds plenty of promise. The company unveiled a product specifically targeting local governments in late October known as the Qube, which AeroVironment described as a “rapidly deployable eye in the sky” small enough to fit in a car trunk and easy enough to assemble and fly in less than five minutes.

“Public safety professionals have been asking for this capability for years,” Chief Operating Officer Tom Herring said in a statement at the time. “They have learned about the effectiveness of our Raven, Wasp and Puma (unmanned aircraft systems) over the battlefield and want a similar capability that is tailored to their mission requirements.”

As for larger, more complex drones, a draft audit obtained by the Los Angeles Times last month showed that keeping them airborne is no small expense for federal taxpayers, and their success in securing the border has so far been mixed. The report revealed that just one hour in the air costs $3,000, an hour of maintenance is necessary for each hour of flight, and the Department of Homeland Security “already owns more drones than it can utilize.”

Drones the department does have flew half the expected hours last year, the paper reported, and a former Air Force official conceded that the modest volume of drug interdictions so far is “not impressive.” But he defended the aircraft as crucial in situations where human pilots risked exposure, like dirty bomb explosions from terrorists or nuclear meltdowns. They’ve already been used in natural disasters.

Building drones, meanwhile, has benefited two Southern California lawmakers in particular: Congressman Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, and Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine. Almost $200 million in contract work signed with General Atomics by the Department of Homeland Security (and excluding defense contracts) was slated to be performed in their combined districts, records show:

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Both men are members of a unique club on Capitol Hill: the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. It’s chaired by Santa Clarita Republican Buck McKeon.

Privacy and civil liberties groups are pushing back against this growing drone lobby in Washington and have urged the Federal Aviation Administration to consider the extraordinary surveillance and data collection powers afforded the government by drones. They want greater protections put in place for citizens now before the aircraft become an everyday fact of life.

“With special capabilities and enhanced equipment, drones are able to conduct far more detailed surveillance, obtaining high-resolution picture and video, peering inside high-level windows, and through solid barriers, such as fences, trees and even walls,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote [PDF] to regulators this week.

Pentagon taps students to build robots, drones

Congressmen want war equipment for border

High-tech plan to block prison cell phones 'unwise,' report says

Michael Montgomery — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Michael Montgomery

oneword/istockphoto.com

A deal between Gov. Jerry Brown's administration and a private communications company to deploy special equipment to block the rampant use of contraband cell phones by state prison inmates is based on a technology that is unproven and could undermine public safety, according to a new report.

A study by the nonpartisan California Council on Science and Technology released this week raises “significant concerns” about plans to install “managed access technology” in the state’s 33 adult prisons.

"Managed access as proposed will not do the job that the (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) wants done," said Susan Hackwood, the council's executive director.

In April, corrections officials awarded a contract to build and manage a system to filter electronic communications at state lockups to Global Tel*Link, which already operates the traditional pay phones that inmates are allowed to use.

Department officials said the deal was “risk-free” for taxpayers because Global Tel*Link will pay for all equipment, installation and operating costs. Company officials expect to offset those costs through increased demand for the pay phones, which are available in most prison units and monitored by staff.

“This groundbreaking and momentous technology will enable CDCR to crack down on the potentially dangerous communications by inmates,” corrections Secretary Matt Cate said, noting inmates “have used cell phones to commit more crimes, organize assaults on staff and terrorize victims.”

But the 71-page study, produced at the request of four state senators, highlights a long list of potential problems with the proposed system, including:

The technology as it is currently configured cannot capture 4G, Wi-Fi, MiFi, Skype, text messages or satellite transmissions.
The technology cannot “triangulate” radio signals, thus limiting the effectiveness in identifying specific phones or users.
For prisons located in or near populated areas, radio frequency “leakage” could interfere with regular cell phone communications, greatly reducing the “capability of public safety professionals to serve the community’s needs or the general public’s ability to access a 911 operator.”
The corrections department has not identified the size of the contraband cell phone problem, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of the technology when it’s deployed.
Efforts by the state to test the system were “rudimentary and would, at best, constitute a proof of concept, not an acceptable operational pilot test.”
The only U.S. prison that has installed managed access technology, a facility in rural Mississippi, has encountered serious operational issues, and the system is not yet fully deployed.

Last year, 15,000 contraband cell phones were discovered at prisons and conservation camps around the state, up from 1,400 in 2007, according to corrections department data.

While the study affirms that cell phone smuggling in prisons is a serious problem, it recommends having private carriers identify and disable illicit phones and establishing airport-style screening systems “before investing millions in untested technology.”

“A long-term statewide investment in this technology before it is proven is, in our opinion, unwise,” the report’s authors said in a May 8 letter to lawmakers.

Unlike many other states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, California does not routinely search staff as they enter state lockups. (Visitors are required to pass through metal detectors.)

Some state officials have said they would like to impose airportlike security checks on staff at all state prisons.

But representatives from the prison guards union have said such a move would require the state to renegotiate its contract and would add to the time it takes correctional officers to get from their cars, or the prison gate, to their work stations. Union members are paid for this “walk time.” Added walk time could cost the state millions, according to some analysts.

According to the study, staff at two facilities “were observed carrying duffel bags and soft-sided ice chests in and out of the prison without thorough screening.”

Corrections spokeswoman Dana Simas said proposals requiring staff to submit to airport-style security screenings were "shortsighted" and failed to attack the root of the problem.

Simas said many of the concerns raised in the report were unfounded and managed access technology is backed by the Federal Communications Commission.

"It's risk-free," she said. "If it stops at least one criminal incident involving a cell phone from happening, it worked."

Oakland VA office mishandled claims, inspector general finds

Aaron Glantz — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:37:21 +0000

Aaron Glantz

videodet/istockphoto.com

Staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Oakland office regularly made incorrect decisions when evaluating disability claims and failed to inform veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan that they are entitled to free mental health care, according to a report released today [PDF] by the agency’s inspector general.

The report also found that the office, which handles all disability claims for veterans who live from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, had failed to close claims that, at the time of an inspection last December, had languished for up to eight and a half years.

“Processing delays occurred because of unclear guidance,” the inspector general wrote. “As a result, veterans did not receive timely benefit payments.”

The inspector general also found several instances of veterans' mail being misplaced, which the report said further contributed to delays and mistakes in deciding disability claims.

The report comes at a time of increasing scrutiny for the VA, which has seen the backlog of disability claims increase to 864,000 nationally under the Obama administration.

Over 45 percent of the more than 1.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have returned home and filed a disability claim. The most common claims granted have been for tinnitus, back pain and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The problem is particularly acute in Northern California, where returning soldiers must wait an average of 320 days for a decision, according to figures provided by the VA to Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton. Nearly 35,000 Northern California veterans are currently waiting for the department to issue a ruling on a disability claim; 82.5 percent have been waiting for at least 125 days.

The inspector general performed a limited review of 90 cases as part of its report and found the Oakland office failed to process 39 percent of them correctly. For cases related to traumatic brain injury, a signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the inspector general found 57 percent of claims were mishandled.

The errors in processing claims often led to delays and payments that were either too large or too small, the inspector general found.

“Each individual veteran has to go up against this error-ridden institution,” said Amy Fairweather, policy director at Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco veteran services nonprofit. “The bottom line is poverty, untreated mental illness and obviously we see suicides.”

The numbers cited by the inspector general paint a starker picture than VA officials have previously acknowledged. In testimony before the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs on April 18, Tom Murphy, head of the VA’s Compensation Service, said claims adjusters at the VA Oakland office made mistakes on 26 percent of claims.

The “audit throws into question (the) VA’s ability to honestly and accurately tell Congress how bad the situation in Oakland has deteriorated,” said Paul Sullivan, who serves as managing director of public affairs and veterans outreach for the Washington law firm Bergmann & Moore. Sullivan also testified at the hearing.

A VA spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story. In his written response to the report, the director of the Oakland office, Douglas Bragg, concurred with the inspector general’s findings.

In an e-mailed response to questions, Rep. Wally Herger, R-Marysville, said it was “appalling” that the inspector general found that the Oakland office failed to follow a department policy prescribing a monthly review of all claims older than one year.

Herger, who met in March with VA Under Secretary for Benefits Allison Hickey to discuss the claims backlog, said he would “continue to closely monitor the situation to ensure our veterans receive timely service.”

Bragg and Willie Clark, the agency’s western regional director, have agreed to answer questions on the backlog from the California congressional delegation at a public event at San Francisco’s War Memorial Building on May 21.

Veterans with pending claims have also been invited to attend the meeting and speak about their experience with delays. According to Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, VA staff will be available to help resolve claims in a separate meeting room.

In a statement responding to the inspector general’s report, Rep. McNerney, who sits on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, called the delays at the Oakland office “inexcusable.”

“The delays and inaccuracies we have seen are disturbing,” he said. “The veterans who are being subjected to these problems cannot wait for another report from the IG to shed light on the issue. The VA needs to take steps now to right these wrongs.”

In a separate report [PDF] also released today, the inspector general found the VA’s San Diego regional office made errors in 53 percent of the 79 claims sampled as part of its inspection. According to the VA, the San Diego office has a backlog of more than 30,000 claims, with 62.5 percent of veterans waiting more than four months for a decision:

“With today’s release of VA’s Inspector General’s audits for San Diego and Oakland, a reasonable person can conclude nearly all of the Veterans Benefits Administration remains deeply mired in crisis, with little chance of recovery unless President Obama and Congress act immediately.”

Lawmakers scrutinize Calif. 'diploma mills'

Jennifer Gollan — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:30:26 +0000

Jennifer Gollan

Thor Swift/The Bay Citizen

California has more diploma mills than any other state in the nation, but it is not doing enough to protect students from the unaccredited colleges and vocational schools that issue worthless degrees, state lawmakers said at hearing yesterday.

“The increasingly diverse array of substandard education robs students of their time and money,” said Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, chair of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. “The most serious consequences occur when people are hired for positions for which they are not qualified. The challenge for the Legislature is to establish an oversight structure that prevents predatory practices."

Among the measures Dickinson will press legislators to consider: providing state regulators with additional resources to undertake more investigations, requiring more thorough reviews to identify diploma mills, and encouraging California's attorney general and local district attorneys to prosecute more diploma mills.

Dickinson outlined his plans after a joint hearing by the Assembly Higher Education Committee and the Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. The hearing followed a recent Bay Citizen investigation, which revealed that many unaccredited or questionably accredited colleges and vocational schools had been operating in the state without regular inspections or evaluations by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

The Legislature established the bureau two years ago to strengthen protections for students attending private vocational schools. Laura Metune, who became bureau chief last month, told lawmakers that she has a staff of 20 assigned to enforcement, but is still assessing whether they can inspect all of the schools seeking state approvals.

“Our process is designed to make sure that these institutions meet minimum operating standards,” Metune testified. “We are required to do 1,500 inspections a year. We are in the process of figuring out whether we can meet that.”

Metune's appointment followed a series of Bay Citizen investigations that revealed the bureau had failed to properly oversee the state's 1,300 technical, vocational and other private postsecondary schools. The series found that the bureau failed to vigorously investigate complaints, monitor the quality of educational programs, and track or penalize unaccredited schools. The Bay Citizen later found more than 130 postsecondary schools operating with expired state approvals.

After The Bay Citizen began publishing its reports, Karen Newquist, the head of enforcement for the bureau, resigned. In addition, the state shut down a school featured in one of the articles.

“Your article clearly raised more awareness of the problem in the Legislature,” said Assemblyman Marty Block, D-San Diego, chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. “We need a better understanding of what diploma mills are and to make a determination of who is best to regulate and to prosecute these diploma mills.”

Block introduced a bill last month requiring postsecondary schools to disclose crucial information to students, such as their accreditation status and job placement rates. If approved, the bill would take effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

During yesterday's hearing, consumer advocates testified about the diploma mill industry's rapid rise.

“This is a really big deal. It is not mom-and-pop printing degrees with a laser printer on their kitchen table,” said John Bear, the author of “Degree Mills” at the hearing. “More than half the Ph.D.'s in California are fake.”

Bear held up a counterfeit degree from Harvard that he said he bought online for $39.

Steve Boilard, the managing principal analyst for education from the Legislative Analyst's Office, testified that it will not be easy to root out diploma mills.

“It is not hard to find them if you are looking for them,” responded Marcia Trott, the former head of the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Schools, which shut down in 2007 after lawmakers deemed it ineffective. “There are plenty of laws on the books. We just have to have the political will to enforce them.”

SF 3rd-graders fight against sea lion killings

Susanne Rust — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Susanne Rust

Courtesy of Angela Casey A third-grade class in San Francisco has launched a campaign to save California sea lions, who are being euthanized by Northwest officials to protect salmon.

One third-grade class at San Francisco’s Lafayette Elementary School wasn’t going to let another California sea lion get shot without its voice being heard.

In the past two weeks, students in Angela Casey’s class have created and launched a political campaign to stop the governors of Oregon and Washington from allowing any more sea lion deaths at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.

Over the past several weeks, Oregon and Washington state officials have captured and euthanized California sea lions seen eating salmon at the Columbia River dam.

The two states, along with Idaho, have been granted exemption from the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, allowing officials to kill the sea lions. The officials argue that the animals are having a “significant negative impact” on wild, endangered salmon populations.

Since May 4, 10 California sea lions have been trapped, nine killed and one shipped to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

The Lafayette Elementary students have caught the attention of activists up and down the coast, who have arranged an Oregon tour for Casey.

The activist groups, which include the Washington-based Sea Shepherd and the Portland, Ore.-based Sea Lion Defense Brigade, will join her as she tries to hand deliver her students’ letters today to Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber.

Casey said the Oregon governor will not meet her in person to receive the students' letters, such as one that says: "The sea lions of Bonneville Dam have more of a right to eat salmon than you do. Why can't you just fish a different kind of fish?!"

Kitzhaber’s office had no comment.

Casey became interested in the sea lions after seeing Facebook links from friends and marine animal advocacy groups to news stories and blog posts, including several from California Watch.

Already working on a marine-environment curriculum with her class, Casey decided to use the Bonneville sea lions as an example of a complex environmental situation, where management of one species – salmon – can interfere with another.

“The kids seemed pretty concerned about it,” she said. "They wanted to find out more about the sea lions’ impact on salmon.”

So the class started investigating. They looked to see how many salmon the sea lions ate and how big of an impact they were having on the fish. They then started researching other factors that threaten salmon, including commercial fishing, hydroelectric dams and invasive species.

The kids, she said, concluded the killings were wrong. But they weren’t content to leave it at that.

Coincidentally, another area her class was supposed to cover this year was letter writing, Casey said. So she suggested the students write letters to the politicians involved, including the governors of Oregon and Washington and even President Barack Obama.

The kids also wrote to state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, whom they hoped would sympathize with the cause.

He did.

"My office received 15 letters from Lafayette Elementary students,” Leno said in a statement. “I applaud these young people and their teacher for taking a stand on this animal protection issue and thank them for their advocacy and passion.”

Others took notice, too.

Other classes at the school invited Casey's third-graders in to do presentations on the sea lions. Some of those students started writing letters. Casey started a Facebook page to feature the students' letters, drawings and paintings.

“And then the parents got involved,” said Casey. And before she knew it, she was being contacted by organizations interested in the topic, including Sea Shepherd.

“The ripple effect has been amazing,” she said, adding that she hopes the students are learning a valuable lesson about democracy and civil engagement.

“They made an effort to have their voices heard,” she said. “And they are being heard.”

Indeed, the one sea lion spared from euthanasia by Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium was named “Casey” after the third-grade teacher.

Casey leaves today for her trip to Oregon. And although she’ll be alone, without her third-graders, she’ll keep in mind the saying she has spread across her Facebook page:

“Alone we are a drop, together we are an ocean.”

Judge: Ex-school official can't join lawsuit over his postal records

Corey G. Johnson — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Corey G. Johnson

Brigaid/Flickr

A federal judge has rejected a former school official's request to join a freedom of information lawsuit the state Fair Political Practices Commission has filed against the U.S. Postal Service.

U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. ruled on April 26 that William Eisen's request didn't meet the legal standards required to be allowed to argue alongside government attorneys representing the Postal Service in the case.

The Fair Political Practices Commission has sued the post office in federal court over what it calls the "improper" withholding of records related to Eisen, a former member of the Manhattan Beach Unified School District board.

The commission regulates the political activities of public officials, lobbyists and campaign committees. It also enforces California's campaign reporting and disclosure requirements, conflict-of-interest rules and election laws.

Since 2008, the state watchdog agency has investigated allegations that Eisen violated campaign disclosure rules related to mass mailings, but the Postal Service declined to release certain records to state investigators, citing privacy concerns. At the time, Eisen was the focus of a recall effort.

State investigators wanted postal records that would help determine whether mass mailings purportedly from the South Bay Taxpayers Association and the South Bay Republican Club, in support of Eisen, were actually sent by Eisen.

The U.S. Justice Department is defending the Postal Service against the state's claims. Eisen petitioned the federal court in February, asking for the right to join in the defense. The Justice Department didn't object to the move. State attorneys, however, argued Eisen's addition would only confuse and impede the case. Commission attorneys wrote:

Mr. Eisen has not given any reason why the USPS would not vigorously defend its position, right or wrong, or why Mr. Eisen’s interest in non-disclosure of this same information would be inadequately represented.

The fact is, Mr. Eisen has not offered any such evidence because there is none. Both he and the USPS share the same ultimate objective: to prevent the FPPC from obtaining information that would enable it to perform its duty of enforcing important provisions of California’s Political Reform Act on behalf of the people of the State of California.

When a proposed intervener and a party share the same ultimate objective, as they do here, a presumption of adequacy of representation applies.

The outcome of this unusual records battle between California and the federal government could have broad repercussions. Justice Department attorneys are slated to file new arguments against disclosure this week. A hearing in the case has not been set, but could occur in early August.

The state commission has determined that Eisen might have violated state law. But no final action has been taken because the records that would fully substantiate the case remain with the Postal Service.

Commission Chairwoman Ann Ravel said in January that she fears if the state isn't allowed access to the records, it would result in a shutdown of campaign disclosure enforcement:

California, twelve other states, and the Federal Election Commission all regulate mailed political communications with regard to either the number of mailed pieces or dollar amount spent on the mail pieces before being categorized as a mass mailing.

Without compliance from the USPS, neither these 13 states, nor the federal government will be able to determine whether a mailing is in violation of their respective laws. The USPS denial of these claims will effectively shut down enforcement of state and federal laws regarding campaign communication disclosure on mass mailings, thereby depriving the public of the ability to identify and take action against persons in violation of these laws.

Eisen, 69, blamed the commission investigation on past political opponents, who he says are still seething over his criticisms of wasteful spending and his other political stands.

"For the last year and a half, I'd thought this whole thing was dead," Eisen told California Watch in a previous interview. "Now I see they're back on the track, trying to drum up stuff against me."

Feds ask judge to drop Calif. postal records suit

State, USPS battle over postal records of former school board official

In N.Y. and Calif., different approaches to patient abuse reform

Ryan Gabrielson — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Ryan Gabrielson

Monica Lam/California Watch Donna Lazzini with her son, Timothy Lazzini, who died at the Sonoma Developmental Center in 2005.

Wherever the developmentally disabled live, abuse is their neighbor.

It comes as deliberate assault by caregivers and sometimes relatives. It comes as acts of frustration, when people exhausted from the relentless difficulties of caring for patients with intellectual disabilities shove and hit the vulnerable.

Government agencies are often judged as much on their response to abuse as on their success at preventing attacks. By this measure, California and New York have repeatedly failed, as news reports over the past year have detailed numerous cases in which state officials overlooked evidence of attacks and suspicious deaths.

Both New York and California are working to overhaul their abuse response systems. However, the states are taking different approaches.

New York lawmakers plan to add a new independent overseer focused solely on the disabled. This model is considered the gold standard, patient advocates argue. First implemented in Massachusetts, a disability protection agency coordinates with state police on investigations of community group homes and developmental centers.

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration is working to upgrade an existing in-house police force that has long struggled to investigate crimes at the state’s institutions for residents with cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities. This force, called the Office of Protective Services, is operated by the same state agency that runs the institutions.

Ideally, California developmental centers officials would not be in control of criminal investigations at their facilities, said Greg deGiere, public policy director for The Arc and United Cerebral Palsy in California. But the state is unlikely to spend to construct a new law enforcement agency in the midst of budget shortfalls.

“That’s the problem with everything we do now, we try to fix problems with no money,” deGiere said. “But there is stuff that can be done.”

One measure deGiere and other patient advocates have lobbied for is having the governor's office, rather than the Department of Developmental Services – which runs the facilities – appoint the institutions' police chief. Such a move could make the in-house police force more independent.

California lawmakers have also introduced two bills that would require the institutions to alert outside law enforcement of suspicious deaths and other serious cases, including sex assault allegations.

In a series of stories in February, California Watch reported that detectives and patrol officers at the state's board-and-care institutions routinely fail to conduct basic police work even when patients die under mysterious circumstances. The facilities have documented hundreds of cases of abuse and unexplained injuries, almost none of which have led to arrests.

The state operates five developmental centers that house roughly 1,800 patients with cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Sonoma and Tulare counties. California is budgeted to spend $577 million on the patients and facilities this fiscal year, or about $320,000 per patient.

The legislation, SB 1051 and SB 1522, continued to advance yesterday, approved unanimously by the state Senate Public Safety Committee.

Rather than expand state government’s role, the bills would seek to better engage outside groups in tracking and investigating abuse. SB 1051 would require state and local police agencies to document when a disabled person is a victim in their annual crime statistics.

The bill would also require developmental center administrators to report cases involving “death or harm” to Disability Rights California, a patient advocacy organization.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week announced the proposed agency in that state would be responsible for prosecuting crimes against the disabled, offering an abuse hotline and referring allegations to law enforcement. It would also track caregivers found to have abused patients and block them from working with the disabled or people with special needs.

“I think it raises the bar significantly on the degree to which states address the issue of abuse and neglect across all disabled populations,” Nancy Thaler, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services, told The New York Times.

The measures in New York come in response to reporting by the Times, which revealed numerous cases of violence and 1,200 unexplained deaths at homes and institutions for the developmentally disabled.

Read more of our coverage on the Office of Protective Services

Basic police work ignored in autistic patient’s suspicious death

Unexplained deaths behind closed doors

GOP senators call Wine Train project 'tax dollar sinkhole'

Wed, 09 May 2012 07:05:03 +0000

Lance Williams

Dewet/Wikicommons The Napa Valley Wine Train flood-control project is costing about $79 million.

No-bid contracts cost taxpayers big money, and that’s one reason the $79 million Napa Valley Wine Train flood-control project has become a “tax dollar sinkhole,” two U.S. senators say.

In a statement issued yesterday in response to a California Watch report, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., faulted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for not seeking competitive bids on the Wine Train job.

The project involves relocating a rail bridge for the Wine Train tourist attraction as part of construction to stop serious winter flooding on the Napa River.

“Taxpayers ultimately lose when contracts aren’t competitively bid,” the senators said. “The Wine Train project is truly a gravy train of government waste.”

As California Watch reported last week, the Corps of Engineers, in an apparent rush to get work under way, steered the $64 million Wine Train contract to a small Alaska construction company called Suulutaaq in 2008. Competitive bids weren’t solicited because the company was eligible for sole-source federal contracts under a program to assist Alaska Natives.

In 2010, Suulutaaq’s former chief executive testified in a lawsuit that the government had paid $10 million too much because it hadn’t sought competitive bids.

Meanwhile, costs on the project have risen by more than 20 percent, from $64 million to more than $79 million, records show. About $64 million has come from the federal stimulus program.

McCain and Coburn first criticized the Wine Train project in 2009, when they listed it among the 100 most “silly and shortsighted” federal stimulus projects in the nation. In their statement yesterday, they derided the project as a “stimulus handout,” and said, “Sadly, we’re not surprised by allegations that the Army Corps overpaid by $10 million.”

Spokesmen for the Corps of Engineers, Suulutaaq and the city of Napa didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.

But in last week's story, Suulutaaq General Manager Tracy Crain disputed that the government had overpaid on the Wine Train project.

Napa Mayor Jill Techel in a 2009 interview defended it as an ideal stimulus project, saying it was "shovel-ready, green and it creates jobs.” The Corps of Engineers told the Government Accountability Office in 2010 that the no-bid contract speeded completion of the flood-control project, saving taxpayers money on overhead and inflation.

Allegations that the government had overpaid by $10 million surfaced in pretrial testimony in the 2010 lawsuit, which involved a contract dispute between Suulutaaq and a construction management firm. Greg Poynor, former Suulutaaq CEO, testified that after the company had obtained the contract for the Wine Train job, it subcontracted heavy construction work to the giant Kiewit Corp. construction firm.

Before work began, Kiewit officials scrutinized the no-bid contract, Poynor testified. The Kiewit officials concluded that a competitive bid would have been $10 million less than what the government had agreed to pay Suulutaaq, Poynor testified.

Crain, the Suulutaaq official, contended that Poynor couldn’t be trusted, saying he had been fired for fraud. In a lawsuit, Poynor has denied wrongdoing and said his firing was unjustified.

In a phone interview last week, Sen. Coburn also questioned whether there had been “an adult in the room” when the corps decided to steer millions in stimulus funds to the Wine Train project.

Federal money for flood control in California is limited, Coburn said. He said it might have made more sense to spend flood-control funds in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. There, some experts worry that the system of 100-year-old levees may be prone to collapse during earthquakes.

“If you set priorities, probably (the Napa project) would not have been one,” he said.

State spars with EPA on air quality standards

Bernice Yeung — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Bernice Yeung

Jeff Kubina

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is not protecting public health and has violated federal law by failing to review air quality standards, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Lung Association, the state air board and a consortium of states.

A brief filed late last week by the EPA in federal court in Washington, D.C., states that it does not plan to complete the mandatory review until Aug. 15, 2013 – about 22 months after the legal deadline.

The EPA "does not dispute that it has missed the statutory deadline," the agency wrote in court documents.

But, it said, the delay is "due in part to the abundance of new scientific evidence concerning the potential health and welfare effects of PM (particulate matter) pollution" and the complexity of the issues involved.

The agency is required by the Clean Air Act to review every five years the federal standards for various pollutants in light of the most recent science. The agency’s review of fine particulate matter, a pollutant that has been linked to a number of health problems, was supposed to be completed by October 2011. The plaintiffs sued the following February.

The fine particulate matter standards that the plaintiffs want reviewed may not be adequate to protect public health. According to a 2009 federal court decision, the EPA has not reasonably demonstrated that the existing standards would protect public health with an ample margin of safety. As a result of that decision, the EPA is under court order to revisit the national fine particulate matter standards so that they conform to scientific research on the pollutant’s health impacts.

Lawsuits demanding that the EPA meet its standards review deadlines are not unusual. But Paul Cort, an attorney representing the American Lung Association, said the overdue review, coupled with the 2009 court decision, gives the case urgency.

“From a legal point of view, this case is about enforcing the deadline, but the reason that enforcing that deadline is so important is because the standards that are in place right now are known not to be adequate to protect public health,” he said.

Janice Nolen, assistant vice president for national policy and advocacy for the American Lung Association, said that fine particulates, which can lodge in the lungs and potentially enter the bloodstream, are “probably one of the most dangerous outdoor air pollutants.”

Research has associated fine particulates with premature deaths, heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks. A 2012 EPA study estimated that based on 2005 air quality levels, between 130,000 and 360,000 Americans would die prematurely due to fine particulate matter exposure.

Fine particulates are a byproduct of combustion. They are emitted from sources such as diesel trucks and power plants, and during residential wood burning.

The California Air Resources Board joined the litigation "because we believe it's important that the EPA meet its deadline and that it regularly reviews the stringency of the pollutant standards to protect public health," said agency spokesman Stanley Young.

Industry organizations like the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers did not return requests for comment. But in prior litigation, these and other industry groups have argued that fine particulate matter standards do not need to be further tightened because when it comes to health risks, the “approaches EPA used in the 2005 risk assessment virtually ensured that assessment overstated the risks.”

In response to a California Watch inquiry about the lawsuit, the EPA said that it “will review” the case.

Regina McCarthy, assistant administrator for the office of air and radiation at the EPA, said the amount of time that the agency has taken to conduct a review is reasonable because of the “importance and complexity of the issues involved,” according to a declaration filed with the court.

“EPA had earlier indicated publicly that EPA planned to propose and take final action … on a more aggressive schedule,” the declaration said. “Notwithstanding these plans, EPA was unable to do so due chiefly to the time needed for the preparation of the complex and comprehensive supporting documents.”

But Cort, an attorney with Earthjustice in San Francisco who also represents the National Parks Conservation Association in this case, said that the agency is “dragging its feet.”

“It's really disappointing because they have said publicly that fine particulate pollution is one of their top priorities,” he said.

The American Lung Association’s 2012 State of the Air report gave 18 California counties an “F” grade for particulate pollution.

Seismic concerns stall Los Gatos school plans

Corey G. Johnson — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Corey G. Johnson

snapphoto/istockphoto.com

A Los Gatos school district's decision to halt construction of a new elementary school over state geologists' safety concerns has inflamed a local mountain community and highlighted the difficulty of building schools in seismically vulnerable areas.

Los Gatos Union School District officials will meet with the California Geological Survey this week to discuss whether plans for a new Lexington Elementary School can be salvaged. Last month, school trustees voted to halt building plans after the state geologist's office found a district engineering report didn't adequately account for seismic hazards at the school site.

Trustees also approved a plan to vacate the existing buildings at Lexington and transfer students to portable buildings at Fisher Middle School — a decision that outraged some 300 people at the April board meeting and sparked a flood of parent complaints.

According to a March 27 letter to the district, state geologists found that Pacific Crest Engineering's analysis of Lexington Elementary failed to account for ground moisture in its predictions about land stability, despite test results that showed evidence of water-saturated soil.

State geologists also concluded the engineering report underestimated the severity of earthquake forces present at the school. Lexington Elementary has been at its Old Santa Cruz Highway location since the 1950s. The property is vulnerable to landslides and is near the San Andreas Fault, one of the most active in the nation. Pacific Crest Engineering's report is based on ground shaking during a 7.3-magnitude earthquake. But state geologists wrote that the school should be designed to withstand a 8.0-magnitude quake, which is what seismic experts recommend for that area:

According to the National Seismic Hazard Maps, the M8.0 earthquake is the characteristic earthquake from co-seismic rupture of all four northern San Andreas fault segments (Offshore, North Coast, Peninsula, and Santa Cruz Mountain) and it represents the largest contribution to the ground motion hazards at the Lexington Elementary School site. ...

Consequently, the consultants' emphasis of a M7.35 scenario instead of a M8.0 scenario in their duration estimation is not conservative.

The issue highlights the thorny complexities that can surface in striving to build schools that are seismically safe. State geologists say private geologists and engineers often make errors assessing hazards.

However, when state experts catch technical mistakes or errant interpretations, some contractors are resistant to making changes. The financial burden for fixes and the resulting delays are frequently passed onto the school district, causing construction costs to skyrocket. School administrators usually end up paying the bill – regardless of who's at fault.

Construction estimates for Lexington have increased from $18 million to $21.5 million, in large part from spending close to $4 million on seismic hazard investigations, school officials said. In a September 2011 letter, the state geologist cited 34 issues that went unaddressed by Pacific Crest Engineering.

Mike Kleames, an geotechnical engineer for Pacific Crest Engineering, told Los Gatos board members last month it would cost millions more and require administrators to be "jumping through the same hurdles" to mitigate the latest concerns.

State officials have denied being too strict and said they continue to work closely with the district. But cost concerns and school attorney warnings of possible lawsuits apparently weighed heavily on Los Gatos school officials. Trustees voted 5-0 to abandon the current Lexington Elementary campus. A final decision will be made at the May 15 board meeting, and student relocation could begin by August.

Meanwhile, some parents and others in Los Gatos say they feel betrayed. Local residents were promised school improvements for Lexington Elementary when they supported a school bond in 2001, yet most funds were spent on work at four other schools. Community members were also told the school would be included in a $30 million bond. Despite the measure's successful passage in June 2010, Lexington Elementary parents are now seeing their hopes for a new school dashed, again.

In a letter to Los Gatos Patch titled "Help us save Lexington School," one parent wrote:

I deeply believe there is someone out there who can help our kids, the kids that have a love for their community, and the first-graders who cried together when they heard they are moving next year and asked so many questions.

What is going to happen to my friends, what about our teachers, what about the trees, the nest of the bird on that big tree, what are they going to name us? What is going to happen to my desk and chair? When are we going to come back? What do they want to do with our school, with our building? What do they want to do with our soccer field? Does our new place have a soccer field? Does our neighborhood postman bring the mail to our new school? Can we still play in (the) new school after school is done?

I demand answers to their questions and teach them that they have rights and they are going to get their rights, like all other kids in the Los Gatos Union School District who got a new school.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a school and gave an incorrect voter measure. Trustees are planning to transfer students to Fisher Middle School. Los Gatos voters approved a school bond in 2001.

On Shaky Ground: A look at seismic safety in California schools

Fresno Unified disputes father's account in special education case

Joanna Lin — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:05:02 +0000

Joanna Lin

Eric Paul Zamora/The Fresno Bee Donell Stiers reviews documents related to her son's expulsion from Fresno Unified School District.

Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Michael Hanson said he never told a special education student's parent that he would have the district pay his legal fees if he fired his attorney.

Hanson spoke to California Watch on May 4 – the day it published a story about the district's ongoing dispute with the student's family – after declining repeated requests for comment for more than a month.

Hanson zeroed in on a claim made in a court declaration by Pablo Lopez, a longtime Fresno Bee reporter, that in August, while Lopez's son was pending expulsion, Hanson offered a deal: The district would pay Lopez's legal fees if Lopez fired the attorney he hired to handle a special education complaint against the district. The family said it declined the offer.

"Never did I say – I don't think I would even use the phrase – 'to fire your attorney,'" Hanson said. "There was not, 'You drop this, fire the attorney and we'll do that.'"

On May 4, Hanson said in a letter [PDF] he e-mailed to colleagues and also posted to the district's website that the California Watch story "paints a very inaccurate picture of a situation that the District has been trying to resolve as fairly as possible for well over a year now."

Lopez and his wife, Donell Stiers, have been fighting Fresno Unified since their son, a former foster child who is now 15 years old, was recommended for expulsion last May. Their dispute has escalated from the district to the county board of education and now into two separate-but-related legal battles – one between the district and the board of education and another between the district and the family.

Hanson said Lopez initiated discussion of legal fees and also their August meeting, which occurred in Hanson's white pickup truck in the Bullard High School parking lot the Friday before the school year began.

He said the meeting, whose location he called "a matter of convenience" because it allowed him to work while watching his son's football practice, "was a result of repeated requests that he (Lopez) made to me and our school district to try to reach some resolution before things ended up, frankly, where we are now."

Lopez said yesterday that neither he nor Stiers ever asked to meet with Hanson. The superintendent called him at the Fresno Bee newsroom to ask for a meeting and insisted the context was "father-to-father, not superintendent-to-reporter," Lopez said.

Hanson said he is "regularly in conversations with people parent-to-parent. … That's the nature of being an educator."

"I think it's always best to try to meet informally to try to resolve things. It's the way we should work," he said. "That's why we have a legal process if we can't, but we always encourage our folks to reach resolution at the lowest possible level."

Hanson said he was allowed to break his silence about the district's dispute with Lopez and Stiers after a court order – dated April 26 but that district officials said they were notified of on May 3 – denied the district's motion to seal court records.

The dispute has risen to a level that Hanson said is rare for Fresno Unified. The district, which served more than 7,500 special education students in 2010-11, has been involved in three due process cases over the last five years, he said.

But a California Watch review of Office of Administrative Hearings records found 33 student-filed due process complaints against Fresno Unified since July 2007. Three of those complaints were resolved by an administrative law judge.

The district's expulsion of Lopez and Stiers' son has been challenged in two venues – the county board of education and a due process complaint filed in the state Office of Administrative Hearings. Last month, a due process decision by an administrative law judge invalidated the district's manifestation determination review – the disciplinary hearing that allowed the district to expel the couple's son.

When California Watch asked Hanson why the district has challenged in court a county board of education order overturning the expulsion, an attorney for the district, Mary Beth de Goede, responded by citing its court filings.

"The District has been forced to conclude that the County Board abused its discretion, and failed and refused to perform its legal duty … by improperly considering information outside the record in reaching its decision in this case," Fresno Unified wrote in its court challenge. "Contrary to its legal obligations, the County Board failed to set forth factual findings to bridge the analytical gap between the record under appeal and its Order."

Fresno Unified's challenge to the board's decision is pending.

A second hearing on the family's due process complaint is scheduled to begin this month. It will determine whether, after their son's misconduct last year, Fresno Unified should have conducted a functional behavioral assessment, which could have established a support plan to address behavioral problems.

The hearing will also determine whether the district failed to provide their son a free appropriate public education, as guaranteed by federal special education law, and now owes him compensatory education. The parents said Fresno Unified kept their son out of school and without independent study for five months while his expulsion was pending and even after the school board ordered that he attend a new school in the district.

"It's unfortunate that in trying to reach a resolution that's best for a student and family that we end up here almost a year later in legal entanglements," Hanson said. "That's not our practice, and we don't find ourselves here all but very infrequently."