School Funding
I read with interest your article on volunteers in the schools (June 6). I am a 79-year-old retired engineer and have been volunteering at the Elysian Heights School in Echo Park for the last seven years.
I have observed many students coming to school with no preschool educational experiences. Because of large classes and little time for individualized help that would bring these students up to grade level, many of these students seem lost to education and headed toward dropping out. I observe this happening to students as early as the third grade.
Volunteers such as myself serve only as a Band-Aid against the disease of underfunding of the schools, but each each day I see headlines that the governor or the Legislature is proposing further cuts in school funding. If California does not wake up soon and begin to adequately fund our schools, then we are destined for further economic and social decline.
NATHAN HITTELMAN, Los Angeles
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