"School News" Roll Call prints a summary of each of the 80 school districts in Los Angeles County.
Of the many subtle yet unsettling elements which I discovered in this paper, one features the prevalence of advertisements for school construction companies. Balfour Beatty occupies the entire inside front cover, taking in a great deal of attention for the casual observer who picks up and glances through the publication.
Even though schools are laying off and even closing throughout the county, the building craze is in full swing. From the Beach cities to the mountains, schools are expanding with new facilities. Whether there will be teachers to staff these new classrooms is another matter entirely.
Then the contents of "School News" grabs the reader. The eighty superintendents throughout the county have outlined the important and glowing stats for their respective districts.
The two most contrasting appear on adjacent pages: Hermosa Beach City School District and Inglewood Unified. Hermosa Beach is one of the higher performing schools in the country, with API scores in the upper 900s. The city school district has one K-2 Campus, and the other, Hermosa Valley, serves students 2-8. The superintendent who provided a description of the district, Dr. Bruce Newlin, minced no words about the unprecedented challenges which face the district:
"We are faced with the cost-cutting problems that all district in the state are faced with and like those other districts we are having to reduce the kinds of services we provide and to cut back on the people who provide those services. The net result is that our education programs will be dramatically impacted and our focus on quality will take a back seat to survival."
This grim appraisal sums up the descriptive outline of Dr. Newlin's district. He pulls no punches, writes the situation as it is, no pretense.
In stark contrast, superintendent Gary McHenry of Inglewood Unified, one of the poorest and most dysfunctional districts in the county, presents a rosy picture that "all is well" in his district.
"Despite the low socio-economic level of students district-wide, IUSD elementary schools have earned national and international recognition for their out-standing [sic] performance."
So far, so good, so it seems.
"The Inglewood Unified School Districts [sic] strengths are demonstrated in its support from various partners, including local businesses, organizations, and institutions of higher learning." This is one of the vaguest promotions in the entire publication."
Yet for all these simple niceties, not one mention is made of the repeated financial failures and legal wranglings which are bringing the district into receivership by the state. Despite promoting a new school on La Tijera Blvd, no mention is made of how this school completely failed to boost the drastically declining enrollment of a failed district which has received wide and diverse press for its record failure to educate inner city youth. The outlandish white-washing which persists in Mr. McHenry's account of Inglewood Unified is a slap in the face to every reader, every share-holder, bond-holder, stake-holder, and stock-holder in the South Bay, in statewide education, or who even picks up a newspaper once a year, only to find another shocking story of epic failure in Inglewood Unified.
Hermosa Beach is a high-performing district facing immense financial difficulties, yet their chief spokesman did not hide these grim realities. In contrast, Mr. McHenry of IUSD gives the biggest spin of "We're just fine!" when nothing could be further from the truth. This everyone in the South Bay knows, and the Inglewood Superintendent is without excuse attempting to foist upon a casual reader that all is well, when that is just not the case.