LAUSD Discord Spreads to Parents

Los Angeles Unified School District is huge making the task of actually creating and handing down policy a difficult task. The district is filled with a variety of schools where economic disparities run rampant.

Most recently the district was lambasted for an electronic payroll system that had some teachers out of paychecks for months, and in the past the district has been criticized for inefficiency and for providing an inadequate learning experience and environment for its students. But now, the problem has moved to the parental level where parents on the LAUSD advisory council disagree over whether meetings should be conducted in Spanish or English.

At a February meeting of the council, Chairman Roberto Fonseco began giving a speech in Spanish, which resulted in complaints from some members of the audience. Arguments broke out with some of the audience who felt that Fonseco had been wronged getting up and leaving the room.The objections and inability to come to a consensus resulted in a near fist fight and caused meetings to be canceled for all of March and April. After that, police officers had to be present at every meeting.

According to the council bylaws, all meetings have to be conducted in English which the LAUSD lawyer found to be illegal and impractical for a district where a large percentage of the parental population spoke in Spanish.

The debate over whether Spanish or English should be used in the classroom, is one that will not have any finality or conclusion coming any time in the near future. However, anyone can agree that the discord and drama being played out by this council is ridiculous and embarassing to say the least.

This council is in charge of offering advice and providing oversight to the district on the use of funds for federally-funded programs for poor students. The fact that they can't even come to a conclusion on how meetings should be conducted is sad and overall does not say much about the effectiveness of this group in coming to any genuine consensus on the real issues are, which is about the students and education.

As it is, the district has enough problems, but to add yet another problem to the mix, is just wasting time. If the council can't come to a consensus on how the meetings be conducted, then maybe it should just cease to exist because if it is causing more drama in LAUSD, then it's not doing much to help the students, teachers or anyone else. To make matters even worse, the police should never have to be at a school-related meeting. What a great waste of taxpayers' money.

At this point, the argument shouldn't be whether it is right or wrong to be using Spanish as the primary language to conduct a meeting. Instead, the councilmembers need to quickly figure out a way to come to an agreement to appease most people and get over the hump of whether this is a case of using Spanish or English. After all, there are much more important things to be worrying about for the entire school district and stumblng over an argument that will never end, is not very becoming of a group that is supposed to be advising the district on matters of policy.