Dr. Gloria Zuurveen Calling On Black Parents To Help Close the Black Student Achievement Gap at LAUSD
Dr. Gloria Zuurveen, Founder & CEO, PACE NEWS
I am Dr. Gloria Zuurveen, Founder and CEO of Parent Action Coalition for Education (PACE) in 1995 as a vehicle to guide parents on how to organize and strategize ways to benefit their children’s education through the use of public policy and their tax dollars.
I know it’s a new way and it’s a new day; however, today is no different than yesterday when it come to parental involvement. Today, now more than ever, parents need to step to the plate and take charge in the right way to take back control of your God-given children. Parents are the first leaders.
The civics and severity of the politics of Los Angeles Unified School District is tantamount to a detriment and destruction and we see the evidence of it. Brother Ray Fleming and Lee Mollet are two examples.
Brother Fleming says that LAUSD should be sued for how they mis-educated he and many other Black brothers who were led to juvenile and then to prison based on the failure to educate appropriately Black children from all of the residual effect of blatant racism as well as the failure to provide them with quality rehabilitation after robbing them from a taxpayer paid quality education. Many Black brothers and sisters who are parents today are crying out for someone to stand up and say “It’s time for LAUSD to mend their ways when it come to education and the Black student achievement.”
Money has been directed away from the critical matter like closing the achievement gap for the Black students with money from defund the police and other state allocated funds to general funds allowing anyone to take the money and run. Larry Sand authored an article for the California Policy Center on February 4, 2020 exposed LAUSD as desperately trying to stay above water by moving money from pocket to pocket, sometimes unethically. Sand added that CalMatters’ Dan Walters writes that researchers at UC Berkeley in 2015 “concluded that LA Unified had shifted most of the extra money it received to improve the educations of poor and English learner students into general purposes, such as salary increases.” Despite complaints by civil rights groups, the district has not changed its ways. Walters adds that LAUSD “appears on everyone’s list of managerial basket cases” and “constantly flirts with insolvency by persistently overspending revenues and looks to Sacramento for bailouts.”
I am running to stop the bailout that benefits the legacy leaders, their cronies, and ilk. They have to be challenged because one can easily see the desperate harm of the historical educational neglect due to LAUSD’s cash cow and caste system using our tax dollars. This pattern of willful intent has to cease and decease. The parents have the power to demand their rightful seat at the table as ombudsmen and advocate on behalf of their children. It is only right and should be one where the parents stand and fight for their rights to stop the robber barons and their stealing tax dollars all the time making everyone think that their stealing is right.
Parents are ordained guardians because according to the Bible, which has never led my Big Mama, my mama nor any of my relatives of today away from the foundation that has help them find their way. We were reared under the tutelage of the Bible, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. The message is clear and it is real that parents have the authority over what happens to their children under the age of 18 at LAUSD.
It’s a new day and it’s a new way.
I want to be a voice for the parents, students and the community of District 1 and in addition, I am calling for a parent’s ombudsman to sit in meetings closely along side administrators who are making policies that affect the students and their parents. Look at this EdSource news article by Ali Tadayon reporting on how State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond was heckled and forcibly removed from a Chino Valley Unified School Board meeting Thursday after speaking in opposition to a proposed district policy that would force schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender. “I don’t mind being thrown out of a board meeting by extremists, I can take the heat, it’s part of the job,” Thurmond said. “What I can’t accept is the mistreatment of vulnerable students whose privacy is being taken away.”
I am in agreement with any policy being proposed that would force schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender. If the policy maintains parents rights over their under-aged children then yes, I am in agreement because I believe parents should know and that it is not an invasion of privacy of the child. It is just the right thing to do as the child’s sexual communications in any way, shape, form, or fashion should first and foremost be discussed with the parents of the students and it doesn’t matter what gender the child is claiming to be. Parents have the right to know about their children straight up. This is the right policy and this is a policy that for generations after generations, parents in Black communities in America all across this land have always taught and believed that parents and in Mississippi where I was born and bred, any adult had authority as a child were not about to lead and many practiced what we believed in the Bible like “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Train up, not let them do whatever they or the system want to do. No. The parents are to train up the children and the school has a role to play in the process for building up the homes and the community with educated and well grounded youth and young adults who are much more than tools for sexual orientation and genderization for political exploitation.
Here goes more of the research from Sand in Feb. 2020’s article, it says, “In fact, the state is hardly starved for edu-bucks. The California Department of Education projects total state expenditures for 2019–20 from all sources to be a record $214.8 billion, with a great deal of that headed for LAUSD, the state’s largest school district. And the gluttony seems to have no bounds. Another potential tax grab is coming to California in the form of a school bond, which will be on the March 3rd ballot. The ironically named Prop. 13, a “School and College Facilities Bond,” would authorize $15 billion in general obligation bonds for school and college facilities. At the same time, we are pouring taxpayer dollars in education, the ROI is quite poor. On the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just 30 percent of California 8th-graders scored proficient in reading and just 29 percent in math. And a measly 18 percent of Los Angeles 8th-graders scored proficient in reading and an even worse 16 percent did so in math. This what is going on and many in the Black community haven’t a clue as to how much money is being siphoned off through the scandalous scheming at LAUSD.
I ask the question like Marvin Gaye said back in the day, “What’s going on?”
This is why I am calling on parents, Black parents, in particularly because when you look at the numbers relating to Black youth in LAUSD it is horrendous and parents are needed to step up to the plate, to organize, to strategize and to affirm our own action by working together to fight this onslaught to eliminate parents from the scene and to continue graduating our children with Ds to fill in the gaps to stop the dropout rate by sending unprepared young people helpless and uneducated out in the streets and Lord knows they are unable to compete with the other minorities who have left them behind all the time our Blacks in charge have dropped the ball and let our Black children fall. LAUSD need to play a vital role in connecting with parents and providing them with the appropriate resources for participation and learning to negotiate the halls and wall through active parenting patrols, by bringing them in and connecting them with the right resources for their children and youth to succeed.
I am calling on the policy that were instituted under the current board member, Dr. George McKenna to be revisited and revised to state otherwise. That is, I believe that the policy he stated announcing his retirement in the Los Angeles Sentinel that he was most proud of the fact that he kept in place the policy of students being able to graduate and pass with a “D” to stem the tide of dropouts in LAUSD. This is asinine and for any one who has been aiding and abetting in this practice should lose their credentials for failing our children. This is why it is necessary to have parents at the table to assist in making the rules when it comes down to what is right for their children and stopping the perpetrators of the tragedy from allowing young people to fall by the wayside because they can’t read a billboard, a road sign, or even fill out an application and sign their signature on a dotted line and these are the people who want to stay in line and continue the patterns of the old times. It’s time to change some minds. On top of all this you have the head man over California’s Education Department, Superintendent Tony Thurmond, who said what he said about he didn’t mind being thrown out of a board meeting by extremists….What I can’t accept is the mistreatment of the vulnerable students whose privacy is being taken away. Well Mr. Thurmond, I don’t know what house you came up in but in my home and community, children were only vulnerable when they strayed away and ran into extremists like you and your ilk who wants to control and shape the mindset of children without parents permission.
Children, like sheep, are vulnerable and like sheep, they also need a shepherd to guide them along the way in this cold, cold world and like sheep today which are seen as a commodity, so too, are our children seen the same way. But parents have the power to stand up and have their say warning extremists and predators and to stay away. I agree with the parents in Chino Valley, and as for me I would have thrown Thurmond out too because during the school board meeting in Chino Valley he was clearly outta order all the time calling for a point of order.
PACE, Parent Action Coalition for Education is on the move and I am calling all parents to participate in improving the record that currently reflect our children in a negative way and help lift them up in the academically and excellent way especially the Black students who are way, way, behind when it come reading, riting and rithmetic now, Black parents it’s our time to shine helping each other one child at a time. Help us with any amount to stand in the gap for children at LAUSD. Donate at https://www.efundraisingconnections.com/c/GloriaZuurveen2024/
