Follow up on first meeting regarding Mark Twain...

Here's a recap of the 7/18/06 meeting regarding Mark Twain. This was written by Nathalie Locas.

"Hi Everyone,

Last night (Tuesday) I attended the LA Unified reform meeting at the Boys and Girls club here in Venice. The local goal is to reform Mark Twain and turn it into a viable school option. The speakers Steve Barr (founder of Green Dot Public Schools and the Rock the Vote Campaign) and Marco Petruzzi (a Coeur d’Alene parent) were very interesting and informative. We all left there feeling like we can make this happen!

The strategy of Green Dot Schools is; To Create small, high performing college Preparatory schools in every neighborhood. In the case of Mark Twain, they are talking about making it into 3 individual schools within the whole property.

The 2000+ kids, pass them on no matter what, unsafe conditions, etc has to be a thing of the past! LA Unified currently has 19 Million dollars to create new schools across the district. It’s time that the parents have a say and get involved, because as history has shown LA Unified is not doing a good job. We Coeur d’Alene families are incredibly lucky, but it shouldn’t be luck, it should be the norm and that goes for Junior and High school as well.

At the request of many attendees, they are going to have a repeat meeting in a couple of weeks. In the mean time, I urge you to visit the small schools web site below and take a look. If it is something you agree with and would like kept ‘in the loop’, please sign up under Join the Los Angeles Parent Union If you click on the Send to School Board member it will go directly to them, and they will see the momentum building, and will know something has to be done. It does not cost any money to join!

http://www.smallschools.org/index.cfm

Thanks

Nathalie


Here's the follow up:

"Venice and surrounding area residents,

Thank you for attending our first meeting! If you weren’t able to attend, last night we held the first meeting of the Venice Chapter of the Los Angeles Parents Union. About 60 parents were present and the mood at the end was downright enthusiastic. There was absolute cohesion in the need to form a parent's union and define and demand an aggressive plan to transform Mark Twain. And the timing is now! Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools and The Small School Alliance was there to explain how we can achieve this if we unite and build our numbers. Check out the article from the Venice Paper attached. [NOT ATTACHED]

Clearly, the devil is in the details and we intend to waste no time in getting to them. We intend to have a second meeting in two weeks where we will get 300 people to show up this time, so everyone on this email has to: a) make sure to sign up for the parent's Union atwww.smallschools.org and b) commit to signing up at least 10 new members for the next meeting.

Training Session for Leadership

We would like to hold an information and training session for community parents that are interested in being part of the leadership of the Venice chapter of LAPU. Being part of the leadership will entail participating in at least one of these aspects: organizing the community, preparing communication materials, developing/managing a website, collecting data/stats, helping draft/finalize the plans for transformation, helping set up the governance structure, etc..

If you are interested in participating actively in this effort (no specific time commitment at this point, as much as you can do), we will have a training/information session on Tuesday, July 25th (next week) at 7pm (location TBD) to cover the following topics:

- The basics of California education (key differences between public and charter schools, state and federal funding, drivers of funding)

- How LAUSD is run and governed, basic numbers and stats
- The Small Schools Alliance Plan and the Mayor's plan
- The School transformation model (this will be generic for now, not the Mark Twain specifics)
- Basic plan for how to organize our community

I will need to have your RSVP so we can plan where to have the meeting. If only a handful, we can have it at someone's house, if more people, we'll need to find a space.

We will also soon send out a date and location for the plenary meeting. I thank everyone for coming last night and let's transform together public education in Venice!

Marco Petruzzi