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L.A. Cracks Down on Homeless Encampments Near Schools, Over the Jeers of Protesters

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8 months ago

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The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to prohibit homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet of schools and day care centers, during a raucous meeting where protesters shouted down council members and, at one point, halted the meeting.

The new restrictions, approved on an 11-3 vote, dramatically expand the number of locations where sleeping and camping are off-limits. And they come amid a furious debate over how the city should respond to encampments that have taken hold in many parts of the city.

Audience members repeatedly chanted “shut it down” as Councilman Joe Buscaino, a longtime proponent of increased enforcement, attempted to speak in favor of the restrictions. Council President Nury Martinez then stopped the meeting for more than an hour so police could clear the room.

After audience members had exited, council members reconvened, discussed the measure and voted.

“I think people were intent this morning to shut this place down and keep us from doing the very job that we were all elected to do,” Martinez said before the vote. “And that I think is incredibly disturbing.”

Under the new restrictions, people would be prohibited from sitting, sleeping, lying or storing property within 500 feet of every public and private school, not just the few dozen selected by the council over the past year.

Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles, voted against the restrictions, telling reporters they would move the city toward an “inhumanity that is beneath the citizens of the city.”

Councilman Mike Bonin, another opponent of the restrictions, said city leaders should devote their energy instead toward improving programs that help homeless Angelenos, such as those that help people with housing vouchers secure an apartment.

“We need to have a relentless, exclusive focus on getting people indoors,” said Bonin, who represents coastal neighborhoods from Los Angeles International Airport north to Pacific Palisades.

A second vote will be required next week. Bonin predicted the changes would result in a roughly tenfold increase in the number of sites subject to enforcement, taking it from more than 200 to about 2,000. The city’s supporting documents on the proposal did not give a clear figure showing how many sites would be covered.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials told the Los Angeles Times that about 750 school sites are within the city limits, a figure that does not include private or parochial schools. Nearly 1,000 commercial day care businesses are registered with the city’s Office of Finance, although it’s not clear whether all of those locations would be covered by the city’s new law.

Tuesday’s vote came more than two months after Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, made a surprise in-person appearance before council members to ask for the new restrictions. Parents and school staff have also spoken out in favor of the changes, saying they have observed erratic or even violent behavior near or on L.A. Unified campuses.

Martha Alvarez, who oversees government relations for the school district, told the council that L.A. Unified had found 120 campuses with encampments over the past year.

“These conditions are a public health hazard,” she said. “They are unsafe and traumatic for students, families and staff as they enter school campuses.”

Buscaino also spoke in favor, saying he has already been working to open more beds for homeless people across the city, using a variety of strategies.

“I’ve supported Bridge Home shelters. I’ve supported tiny homes, Project Roomkey, Project Homekey, permanent supportive housing,” Buscaino said. “But what I don’t support are drug dens near our schools, parks or anywhere children congregate.”

The new school year starts Aug. 15.

Foes of the proposal have repeatedly argued the council’s restrictions would effectively outlaw poverty, leading to the deaths of homeless Angelenos. Prohibiting encampments around schools, they said, would simply push people and their belongings a block or two away.

“There are a lot of people who are struggling right now, and we should be helping them,” said Andrew Graebner, appearing before the council.

The new restrictions come as city officials are gradually closing one of the signature programs set up to help homeless Angelenos during the COVID-19 pandemic: Project Roomkey, which turned multistory hotels into makeshift shelters.

Those facilities allowed the city to bring far more people indoors than they had before, at a time when the congregate shelter system, where many people sleep in a single room, had to operate well below capacity under social distancing guidelines.

The Mayfair Hotel, which provided 252 rooms under the program, recently ended its participation in the program. The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown and the Highland Gardens Hotel in Hollywood, which provided a combined 553 rooms, are scheduled to cease operation as Project Roomkey sites at the end of the month, according to Brian Buchner, the city’s homelessness coordinator.

The Airtel Plaza Hotel, which has provided 237 rooms, is set to end its participation in the program on Sept. 30.

Buchner said there are “active discussions” at City Hall and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority about extending the deadline at one or more of those facilities.

Tuesday’s vote represents a shift in the city’s approach on enforcement of its anti-camping law, reducing the amount of discretion wielded by individual council members and establishing a more sweeping policy. That’s a major contrast from last summer, when backers of the law pitched it as a narrow and targeted measure, with enforcement accompanied by offers of services from outreach workers.

Over the past year, permanent metal signs setting deadlines for homeless people to leave have been posted at more than 200 locations, 33 of them schools or day care centers. At some locations, tents and makeshift shelters have remained weeks or months past the enforcement deadline, as outreach workers struggled to persuade people to move voluntarily.

Although some sites are now clear of tents and encampments, others have had more people living on the sidewalk than they did when outreach workers initially assessed the spots.

City and county officials along with homeless services providers previously told the Times that an insufficient number of outreach workers and a lack of interim housing options have hindered the implementation of the law.

Foes of the council’s homelessness strategy have repeatedly called for the restrictions on sidewalk camping to be repealed. Some of those critics are now leading candidates in the Nov. 8 election.



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Adnan Syed of ‘Serial,’ Newly Freed, Is Hired by Georgetown University

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3 months ago

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December 23, 2022

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Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.

Mr. Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.

Mr. Syed, who was 17 at the time of Ms. Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

The university said that Mr. Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.

Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Mr. Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.

“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Mr. Syed said in a statement. “P.J.I. changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”

He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.

The new job this month culminated what has been a remarkable year for Mr. Syed, whose case has again received widespread public attention after a flurry of recent legal activity.

In September, Mr. Syed was released from prison after a judge overturned his murder conviction. Prosecutors said at the time that an investigation had uncovered various problems related to his case, including the potential involvement of two suspects and key evidence that prosecutors might have failed to provide to Mr. Syed’s lawyers.

In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Mr. Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Mr. Syed’s innocence, officials said.

Ms. Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.

On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.

Marc Howard, the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, said in a statement that Mr. Syed’s “commitment to the program and to his education was clear from the moment he stepped into the classroom.”

He added that Mr. Syed “is one of the most resilient and inspiring people I’ve ever met, and he has so much to offer our team and the other students in P.J.I. programs.”

In a Georgetown University article about the hiring, Mr. Syed said that he was in disbelief when he first saw a flier for the program.

“It became this domino effect to see us be accepted,” he said. “It made it become something real in the eyes of others, that there are opportunities. There can be a sense of hope: a sense of hope that things can get better, a sense of hope that I can work hard and still achieve something, a sense of hope that I can still do something that my family will be proud of.”

His attachment to the school was evident on Sept. 19, when he walked out of prison for the first time since he was a teenager.

Amid a throng of reporters and his supporters, Mr. Syed walked down the courthouse steps in Baltimore, smiling. He gave a wave.

And in his hand, he carried a binder with a Georgetown sticker. His graded papers and tests were inside.

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At Berkeley Law, a Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech and Campus Ideals

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3 months ago

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December 21, 2022

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“Supporting Palestinian liberation does not mean opposition to Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” the group said in a statement to the Berkeley law community. Members of the group did not respond to messages seeking an interview.

After learning about the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky met with the university’s Hillel rabbi and spoke with several Jewish students, but, aside from concerns within the law school, the reaction was relatively muted, he said.

That changed, he said, after Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.”

Mr. Marcus wrote that the bylaw was “frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night,” and said that free speech does not protect discriminatory conduct.

The article went viral.

Mr. Chemerinsky said he learned about Mr. Marcus’s article, which he described as “inflammatory and distorted,” while he was in Los Angeles for a conference. Mr. Chemerinsky said he typed out a response to the article, which was appended to it, and then didn’t think much of it. That afternoon, he was deluged by emails. At an alumni event that night, the law school’s perceived hostility to Jews was “all anyone wanted to talk about.”

In an interview, Mr. Marcus, a Berkeley law school alumnus, said that he was contacted by law students there who were concerned about the bylaw. He said he spent weeks trying to support them and wrote his article after Berkeley did not “rectify the problem.”

Not allowing Zionist speakers, he said, was a proxy for prohibiting Jews. The provisions, he said, are “aimed at the Jewish community and those who support the Jewish community,” even while acknowledging that the policy could allow Jewish speakers and bar those who are not Jewish.

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‘Better Defined By Their Strengths’: 5 Ways to Support Students With Learning Differences

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3 months ago

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December 21, 2022

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“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.”

We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences.

Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.

Focus on students’ strengths

There are many ways of encouraging students to play to their strengths, as educators Winston Sakurai and Phyllis Fagell demonstrated in an August 2022 article by Education Week Assistant Editor Denisa Superville.

They detailed how they shared their own learning struggles as a way to connect with their students. Their personal successes show students, who may be struggling academically or socially, that anything is possible.

Here’s what other educators had to say.

1. Help them understand their learning strengths and challenges and growing them as strong self-advocates.

2. Devoting time and money to developing teachers’ abilities to differentiate.

– Amy S.

By having high expectations and giving them exposure to high-quality materials and experiences, even ones that seem “above them.” They will shock us with their insights every time.

– Angela P. 😒😒🥴

Meet students where they are

In a 2015 primer on the topic, EdWeek Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks wrote about how “differentiated instruction”—the process of identifying students’ individual learning strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them—became a popular approach to helping diverse students learn together. Respondents largely agreed.

Time to work with every student. If you can meet with a child for a bit of time to help with exactly what she or he needs, it might ignite both learning and understanding.

– Alison K.

So many ways…start with environment, a.k.a. The Third Teacher.

  • Reduce obstacles

  • Increase supports

  • Meet kids where they are

(h/t @drncgarrett)

–Matt R.

Small class sizes, strong positive teacher/student relationships, differentiated instruction, and reflection.

–Yvonne E.

Smaller class sizes

In a 2017 Opinion essay, former teacher Marc Vicenti wrote about “the daily wear and tear on educators when trying to juggle a full teaching load and meaningful relationships with lively young people who all have different needs and experiences.”

“We can either choose to be less effective in our practice or exhaust ourselves—neither of which is beneficial to students or our own well-being,” he wrote.

Smaller class sizes are one way of mitigating the risk of burnout while working to meet each student’s needs.

Small classes, small schools, local control. I am the principal in a pretty small school in a small community and I know every child, and every family and we can build programs to meet our students’ needs. A country run or state run school system can’t do that.

– Ryan G.

Increase funding to actually lower the student-to-teacher ratio. This allows teachers to give more time to the individual.

– Cathleen W.

Fewer standardized tests

Standardized tests have long been criticized for narrowing instruction and for holding all students to the same standard when “students enter school at varying levels and learn and grow at different rates.”

The backlash against standardized testing renewed interest in alternative ways to evaluate students’ learning progress, like “performance assessments—the idea of measuring what students can do, not merely what they know”.

STOP standardized testing.

– Dawn W.

Fewer standardized or timed tests, teaching to mastery, not according to a schedule.

– Autumn

Give students a voice

Sometimes it’s best to go to the source to discern how to best tackle an issue. Giving these students a voice can not only empower them in their learning, but also help educators understand how to have the biggest impact.

Ask them how they learn and what helps. Give them a voice!

– Grisel W.

Yes! Listening to what students need and giving them a voice is something we need to do for all students, but especially those who need more help in the classroom.

– Victoria D.



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