Well, i'll begin by saying that my name is Janet Valenzuela and I am a senior at Huntington Park high school...and there is so much information being put in the media, through the internet, by letters, and just the wording of Huntington Park high school's future is not as transparent as "they" want us to believe it is. So i'm just pretty much fed up with hearing too many things at once and i would like to know what the public thinks. What students want, let me tell you what i want!
I have had a public school education all my life, i have had awesome, dedicated, responsible, caring teachers that have performed in extreme measures to provide "quality" education for myself and my peers. What i mean by "quality" education is that i know that i have learned the material. I feel that i'm well-prepared to go to college. I also have had teachers that don't care or just because they have better personal issues to deal with, it's understandable but as a teacher their hired to make the students learn something. If i take a World History class for example i'm not going to know everything in my World History class but i did learn and remember the Holocaust or the World War 2 for example, not because of what we read in our textbooks but because of the projects that my classmates present, or the films related to the subject. Maybe that's just me i like to do projects or creative work because well let's just face it not all of us students have the same learning abilities, and not all of us have the same interest.
High schools are being put into the "public school choice" a new way to evaluate the schools potential, the advocate Yolie Flores Aguilar. A hispanic women, that graduated from Huntington Park High school is now making changes to high schools that need a "push" or "motivation". Yea their are a lot of students in Huntington Park high school that are very apathetic and just don't value education. And then their are students that seek for information, and are curious to know how my school will be affected by this Public School Choice movement.
So there are too many questions that i haven't gotten answers from and i just don't get how LAUSD Board members are allowing teachers and staff to provide proposals that might not even get looked at, because in the end they are the ones who makes the Ultimate decision, e.g. Ramon C. Cortines and his side-kick Yolie Flores. Typical, American government, democracy right...majority rules, whoopiee. BUT
this is affecting Huntington Park high school and the staff, teachers, administrators, parents, community and STUDENTS not them, not any LAUSD Board member is being affected by the experimentation they plan to bring in to my school. I mean it "MY" school because it has been teachers that have guided me, prepared me, challenged me, and motivated me to question my knowledge for a better understanding of things. But Huntington Park high school is getting no answers, the answer that we have gotten from the principal is "To be determined".."Please refer to LAUSD.net" "There is no immediate plan at the moment" this movement is far from Transparent!!
Parents, teachers, and Students showed up to a meeting with Yolie Flores Aguilar, who we took under consideration that she took the time from her so-called "busy schedule" to listen to what we had to ask. To be honest, we didn't get our questions answered...we noticed things like not allowing students into the meeting while there was still room, administrators and Yolie's assistant said that maximum capacity had been reached, but there were chairs available. Her assistant saying that she will be running late because she was in a meeting, and then her apologizing for being late because she had to take her mother to the hospital. At least get your lie straight. Then a teacher asked what was her involvement with the charter school movement and why she is planning to work with the Gates foundation. She told us that she was not going to answer that question...hmm i wonder why??...any one that doesn't answer a question is because they have something to hide.
Another one of my suggestion would be not to target high schools, because if a student is at a 3rd grade level well where is that gap coming from, who allowed this student to continue to perform at a this level. Why not focus on the basic or the primary learning of a child's education: Elementary and Middle school. And they had said score 600 or better in your API score but yet "they" go behind our backs and create this different strategy in subtracting our scores with Libra, a soon-to-be pilot school that is allowed to borrow our football field, our campus, our budget and our resources but does not allow us to use their scores. why can they get away with this..? We asked Yolie and her response was, "because we like to share." I'm sorry who's we?
Students are not following her or their plan because we feel that the system that we have now is working, due to the fact that students are graduating and our percentage is going up, and many of Huntington Park high school students are attending prestigious colleges in California like UC Berkley, UCLA, USC the system must be doing something right. What I really would like to see the board do is instead of advocating small schools or pilot or charter which has been proven by Stanford University that only 17% are doing better, their experimentation is failing miserably. Why not go back and fix it, and make it efficient, instead of expanding an experiment that is headed to nowhere. Wasn't that there motive for students to perform better?? The board needs to rethink a better more effective and a fair way to evaluate the students and evaluate the teachers, because like a great teacher told me, "Teachers can make the worst students." I do find truth to this quote because teachers should inspire us and give us the tools we need to be prepared for our lives. Consult with us, guide us, and show us that they care pretty much. School is like my second home and that's why i care about it so much, and for them to think that 100 years of tradition isn't good enough, well students and parents need to work together and have communication as transparent as possible for what benefits us.
Not the board, not the administration..US. Power of the youth!
