CommentsEASTSIDER-Figuring out how to reach out to people is always tricky, and in the case of our Neighborhood Councils, it’s downright daunting. As the Elections Chair for our Council, I am pleased that we have a new, motivated set of election and outreach folks – people who actually want to reach out to the 23,000 souls living within the boundaries of Glassell Park. This got me to thinking...
Neighborhood Councils probably reach out to more people in their boundaries than members of the City Council do…but that’s not saying much. I’ve begun to wonder about the people who live in my neighborhood -- how little I know about any of them outside of the few with political interests I meet at LANCC and City Council affairs.
I’m going to share some ideas about how our NCs can do a better job in going beyond the normal few hundred voters in our elections. I’d like you to know about our attempts to broaden our Neighborhood Council’s reach this election cycle.
Education seems like a good starting point, since here in Glassell Park we have some elementary schools, a middle school, the massive hybrid entity grandly known as The Sotamayor Learning Academies, as well as a number of Charter schools. From a Neighborhood Council standpoint, Schools are a neat way for NCs to cut across socioeconomic lines, providing a link to people who, by and large, have no interest in the NC system, little contact with City Hall, and whose only interface with the largely unresponsive behemoth called the Los Angeles Unified School District is through their PTAs.
Since the City itself has little to do with the K-12 school system -- notwithstanding all the platitudes from Garcetti, Villiaragosa, and Riorden -- schools are a great place to get outside of our bubbles and reach a different slice of our neighborhoods.
As an aside, when I look at the Sotamayor Learning Academies on San Fernando Road, it’s impossible to comment on the following: First, taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars in bond money on a 2500 student high school that the LAUSD couldn’t even afford to staff after it was built. Honest. And not missing a beat, that self-proclaimed maven of the “Cradle of Reform,” LAUSD Board Member Monica Garcia, repurposed the facility into three Charter Schools and two other new educational experiments.
We now have five mini-schools there, and yet we’ll not know how this has actually worked out for the students until long after it is too late to fix anything. God save us and the students.
The K-12 school system largely defines the next generation of Angelenos, and by all accounts, we aren’t doing so well. For example, we’re told that about one half of LAUSD students don’t even graduate from high school, and I’ve heard even higher numbers. So what happens to them? Where do they go? Research shows when it comes to jobs for teens and 20-24 year olds, the picture is depressing.
A recent Brookings Institute piece reports that, for teens and young adults, labor force participation (“geek speak” for who’s in the job market), employment and earnings are still declining.
How do the students who go on to Community College or to a four year State College/University and their parents cope? As Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in “The Two Income Trap,” the single greatest predictor of winding up in bankruptcy was having a child. Ouch.
Just to further make parents worry, Labor market research from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that young people’s participation in the labor force is continuing to go down, even as the percentage of those 55 and older who are still working continues to increase. Many older people don’t have any retirement and companies don’t want to spend money training young workers. A double whammy.
It’s no wonder these stakeholders don’t have much time for Neighborhood Councils, or anything else for that matter. So we’re trying to devise strategies to reach out and connect with this fundamental backbone of neighborhoods. Our initial idea is to list the schools in our NC area, contact their principals and get information on the PTAs. We need to find ways the NC can network with parents and students to involve them in specific actions that can better their lives.
Pretty daunting, but it’s the underlying reason we have neighborhood councils in the first place – to foster participation in government. I think this is a lot more important than the presentation of City Council scrolls or attending ribbon cutting events.
In future articles, I hope to cover other NC constituencies such as renters, jobs, particularly our growing “sharing economy” with what BNA calls “gig work” and others call “project employment” app-based, on demand temp gigs. Mostly I see a shift to part-time jobs – jobs that do not provide medical insurance, pensions, or long term employment. Sheesh!
Hopefully this piece will prompt some thought and feedback from readers, who can help with new ideas or areas that I haven’t even touched on. You can reach me at [email protected]
(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 14 Issue 7
Pub: Jan 22, 2016
Stepping Outside the Bubble – Neighborhood Councils Reach out through Neighborhood Schools
