Senators Do Homework--at School

They complained about defective heaters and air conditioners.

They complained about a cafeteria crammed with people and problems with leaky roofs solved by putting trash cans under the trickles of water.

They complained about having to sell chocolate to raise funds for supplies such as team uniforms and about outdated and damaged textbooks.

If a pair of state senators thought they would get the unvarnished truth by letting high school students testify at a subcommittee hearing on a Los Angeles Unified School District campus Friday, they were right.

“We don’t often hear from those most affected by the policy decisions we make,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education and the author of pending legislation that would sharply increase state funding for textbook purchases.

So he and Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), two of the three members of the subcommittee, came to John Marshall High School near Silver Lake.

On that campus, designed for 1,100 students but now serving 4,000, overcrowding was a major concern to students who addressed the senators in three panels.

Their main complaint was the multitrack system of year-round schooling, in which students’ vacations are staggered so they are not all in session at one time.

At Marshall, that means teenagers in Track B are not in school during football season in September and October. It means that because there is just one physics teacher, some students must look beyond their own tracks and sacrifice their vacations.

“(Since) I started on July 1, I haven’t had a vacation other than a week off for Christmas,” said Dylan Grant, 17, adding that the schedule is burning him out. “I’m not at all motivated to go to school. I’m absent a lot. I don’t put in half as much effort as I used to.”

Other panelists said the system segregates the students by tracks, providing little feeling of school unity and spirit.

Students complained that teachers have little time to offer individual attention and are so overloaded with grading that it can take up to a month to correct a class’ short essays.

“So we don’t learn from our mistakes,” said Siv Maggie Chau, adding that the number of students at Marshall who passed the Advanced Placement English test dropped dramatically in recent years. Some students complained that they are missing out on real learning because they are often assigned busy work by teachers who do their grading in class. Others said classes should be longer.

“When the class finally gets rolling and the students are doing their work, the bell rings,” Sona Samboltsyan said.

Textbook shortages have been rampant in the Los Angeles Unified School District for years, and officials have been pledging millions of dollars for new books since a Times report last summer detailed the extent of the problem. Similar complaints were echoed Friday at Marshall.

“In books like calculus, you’re reading Page 26, and you turn the page and you’re on Page 135,” one panelist said.

The senators saw the campus disrepair firsthand before the panel discussions when students took them on a tour of the old brick school. As they stepped into Ben Nieberg’s world history class, they entered the hot, humid atmosphere created by too many people in one room.

Nieberg pointed out dark rings on the ceiling left by rainwater.

Often during the winter, student Samboltsyan said, “you’re not concentrating on your classwork, you’re focusing on staying warm and dry.”

Hopes of more state funds to solve such problems took a beating this month when the Assembly defeated a proposal to put a $9.2-billion education bond measure on the June ballot. The proposal had narrowly squeaked through the Senate, where Democrats Schiff and O’Connell said they both supported the measure. The third member of their subcommittee, Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), opposed it.

Schiff said the students’ vivid complaints would help him make decisions on where to steer education spending.

“I think what we heard most strongly about was reducing class sizes,” he said.