LAUSD: A Bureaucracy That Doesn’t Learn

I was very interested to read the June 8 article about Supt. Roy Romer and how he is trying to change and improve the L.A. Unified School District. Based upon my recent experiences with the LAUSD recruitment process for prospective new teachers, there is still much room for improvement. At a recent LAUSD job fair, I was given incomplete and misleading information that has resulted in delaying my application process by several months. My interviewer at LAUSD headquarters verified that this was indeed the case.

Generally, the LAUSD personnel that I have dealt with have been insensitive and uncaring. The negativity that I have experienced clearly indicates that what is advertised as “the new LAUSD” is just as incompetent and riddled with bureaucratic problems as the old LAUSD.

Thomas Saito

Los Angeles

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In “A Lonely Battle for Students” (June 9), your article on counseling in the Los Angeles City Schools, Marino Parada seems to be a true counselor. I met many so-called counselors in my 30 years of teaching in high school, and most of them told me that they did very little, if any, counseling. The process of trying to make sure that 500 or more students are signed up for the proper classes takes up most of the counselor’s time. The only counselors who actually counseled the students on a regular basis were those who took their mountain of paperwork home and did it in the evening. Most students can go through high school and never see their counselor except on program day.

To call most of these public employees counselors is a misnomer. Unless the school district is willing to hire more counselors so they can be assigned fewer than 100 students, so-called counselors should be called student programmers; then maybe we would not expect so much.

James W. Cameron

Burbank

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Last year we had a psychology intern working at our school. She was wonderful, efficient and effective; parents, teachers and students loved her. She was also bilingual--Spanish-speaking. When she graduated, she applied for a a position with LAUSD as a school psychologist. The district assigned her to a school that she had previously worked at in another capacity. Due to her history at that school, she felt that it wasn’t a good match and asked for a position at a different school. She learned her lesson: How dare she, as a new school psychologist, make such a request. It was either this one school or no job with LAUSD. She was backed into taking a job with a different school district. There’s a shortage of counselors?

Seth E. Cutler

Los Angeles