Parents have won partial restoration of federal poverty funds for 23 schools in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside. Many of the schools are in middle class neighborhoods but have substantial numbers of poor students.

The reprieve is only for a year. And the funds will come from money allocated to schools with many more poor students. While it’s a nice win for the parents with kids in the 23 schools, it’s really sad. People are fighting over scraps as Washington and state governments slash school funds. The situation is bleak in many states and California is one of those being hit the hardest.

John E. Deasy, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent, said the 23 schools would receive a part of the money they would have lost under a Board of Education decision made in December. The money is distributed under Title 1 of the federal aid to education law.

Involved are schools that have been receiving the aid because at least 40 per cent of their students are classified as living in poverty. With federal funds being reduced, the board raised the level of poverty students needed for eligibility to 50 percent, resulting in the proposed cutoff to the 23 students.

“In a time of great economic challenges and uncertainty, this option provides (the) schools with a ‘safety net’ while we transition to the new eligibility threshold,” Deasy said in a letter to the board.

Tamar Galatzan of the San Fernando Valley, the only school board member to vote against the cutoff, said, “ This is a short term solution to help the 23 district schools… It is our duty as a district to try to help them find both short-term and long-term solutions.”

The only long-term solution is giving more money to public education.

One is being proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who advocates an initiative for the November ballot that would raise state sales taxes by a half a cent and income taxes on taxpayers earning more than $250,000. The increases would expire in five years.

The proposal would, Louis Freedberg wrote in the EdSource web site, “yield billions of dollars for California schools.”

Brown will have a tough fight. Other well-meaning people are proposing their own tax increase initiatives. Too many initiatives make defeat of all of them likely. The best thing concerned parents can do is pressure all of them to get behind one measure, and then campaign like mad in the fall.

A big parental revolt is shaping up in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside as federal budget cuts reach deep into the Los Angeles Unified School District.

At issue is the school board’s 6-1 vote in December to take federal poverty funds away from 23 schools, a number of them in middle class Valley and Westside neighborhoods. Nevertheless, they have student bodies that include substantial numbers of poor youngsters.

The funds are distributed to school districts under Title 1 of the federal school aid act, a program begun in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. They are designed to provide schools with additional funds to help students overcome obstacles from impoverished families and neighborhoods. The money pays for more teachers, counseling, instructional material and training for parents.

Washington has reduced Title 1 funding. In the past, with more Title 1 money, the Los Angeles district distributed its share to schools where at least 40 percent of the students are classified as living in poverty.

Now, with less money to allocate, the school board voted to raise the level to 50 percent. This means funds would be cut off to the 23 schools. “We have less Title 1 money to give out,” Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy told me. He said the district should “concentrate the funds in schools where there is the greatest concentration” of poverty.

The impact would be painful. Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume told how the decision would affect Superior Street Elementary in Chatsworth, where 43 per cent of the students are low income. The cut would deprive the school of $200,000 a year, which pays for an instructional coach, intervention teachers, teacher aides, a library aide and a clerical worker, who also acts as an informal nurse. The school’s academic level has risen. “We could not have made these gains without the support of this funding for these children,” said Principal Jerilyn Schubert. “I’m devastated,” said Schubert, “I just want to cry. I really do.”

At the Westside’s Los Angeles Center For Enriched Studies (LACES) Magnet, Principal Harold Boger said the school would lose $460,000, which pays two teachers, a counselor, a three-and-a-half day nurse, math intervention programs, a parents representative, two educational aides and choir assistance. One of my granddaughters is a student there, and through my daughter I have seen the extensive e-mail and organizing campaign being waged by the parents.

“Are the low-income children at LACES and the other affected schools somehow less deserving of intervention services, tutoring and after school programs than a student who attends a school a few blocks away with a slightly higher percentage of Title 1 student?” parent Elizabeth Dennehy wrote to school board member Steve Zimmer, who voted for the cut.

School board member Tamar Galatzan, the only board member to vote against the cuts, said the district, in allocating the money, doesn’t know what programs work. Before cutting, she said, “we need to know what programs are helping. Is it dropout prevention, is it Saturday classes, and is it smaller class size?”

At Galatzan’s town hall recently, many parents asked questions about the Title 1 funds. They had been alerted by calls from Galatzan’s office, and by protest organizers’ e-mails and letters.

An LAUSD source told me the matter still could come up again. Perhaps the protests are working.

To some of us disillusioned alums of the weak and failing City Ethics Commission, mayoral candidate Austin Beutner is saying the right things.

In a piece in the Daily News, Beutner noted the weakness of the city’s incomprehensible ethics laws, and pointed out that any attempt to improve them must be approved by the City Council. In my five years on the commission, I watched the council, which hates the commission, kill any of our plans to strengthen the law. The council and the mayor must be pleased now that the commission barely receives any public notice.

I asked Beutner about his Daily News piece when he met with reporters after speaking to Town Hall Thursday. Would he favor going around the city council blockade?

“I would like to see the ethics commission truly empowered to put measures directly on the ballot,” he said. “Let’s take it directly to the voters.”

Since most voters, readers, viewers or Angelenos don’t care about ethics laws, I wouldn’t recommend Beutner make this a major part of his campaign. But the fact he tackled it at all is noteworthy--and indicative of serious tone he might bring to the mayoral campaign trail.

Beutner is a multi-millionaire retired investment banker who impressed former Mayor Richard Riordan and other old white guys who like to throw their weight around. They persuaded Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to put him on as a $1-a-year top deputy. Beutner supervised several departments, including the messy Department of Water and Power before leaving to seek the top job himself.

He’s the un-Villaraigosa, with a spare, matter-of-fact speaking style, showing none of the mayoral emotion that has captivated, appalled and annoyed us for so long. The somewhat slight and slender Beutner sounds like another ex Wall Streeter, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and he looks a bit like him too.

Some people say he is boring. Gene Maddaus wrote in the LA Weekly that Riordan fell asleep during Beutner’s Town Hall speech. “Hey, Beutner can have that effect on people,” Maddaus wrote.

But I stayed awake and enjoyed the way he dug into details. He was right about the miserable conditions at LAX and the MTA’s refusal to buy electric buses. In the Daily News, he wrote about the sad ethical conditions at city hall. He didn’t, however, connect ethics to the airport, although there is a connection. The food is lousy and the shops inadequate and overpriced because concessionaires—using campaign contributions and an influential gang of city hall lobbyists—call the shots with the council and mayor when it comes to the airport. Bad ethics produces bad food.

Even so I congratulate Beutner for taking on the ethics laws and the commission that administers them. When then City Controller Laura Chick, a great reformer, appointed me to the commission she told me to raise hell. I tried as but my friend Tim Rutten pointed out at the time, I was “treated like the drunken uncle at a Seder.”

Even more than anything I learned as a reporter, that experience taught me that it will take someone tough and smart to change the culture of city hall and shake up the intertwined politicians, lobbyists and campaign contributors who dominate it.

Although Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky didn’t shed much light on whether he will run for mayor, he gave a scathing and knowledgeable critique of L.A. city hall and indicated what he might do if he ran the place.

Of course, whether he would be a mayoral candidate in 2013 was the first question asked by designated questioner Dave Bryan of Channel 9 at a luncheon of the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum at the downtown Palm Monday.

The supervisor, a former city council member, drew an unusually large crowd to the forum luncheon, hosted by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer. Crowd size is important when discussing the forum, which is attended by people who, in one way or another, make their livings from government contracts and contacts. When this group figures a guest lacks clout, the crowd is small. Perceived clout equals a big turnout, and Yaroslavsky, as potentially strong mayoral candidate, got one.

“I will let you know in due course,” he said of his decision, adding that “it won’t be long…I’ll keep you posted.”

What was most interesting was the way he ripped apart city government on subjects ranging from redevelopment to potholes.

He said city streets are in bad shape compared to those maintained by the county in unincorporated areas, he said. He sarcastically compared the streets in East Los Angeles, run by the county, to those in neighboring Boyle Heights, in city territory. Boyle Heights streets are filled with potholes, a condition ranging from there to Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards, from the center and south of the city to the Westside. Yaroslavsky said the gap between East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights street maintenance is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Yaroslavsky blasted the city hall plan to float bonds for street repairs, saying there is plenty available money from various transportation programs. And he said there was no need for the city to furlough employees, Good management would have prevented it, as it did with the county. “Where did all the money go?” he asked. If he ever gets back to city government, Yaroslavsky said, he would find out.

The question is whether he wants to undertake the difficult task of returning to city hall and trying to get a straight answer to such questions.

Watching Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck deal with Occupy LA at the Bank of America plaza Thursday, I was struck by how much the police department has changed for the better.

When I got there about 3 p.m., the plaza was pretty well filled with occupiers, onlookers and the media. Tents and demonstrators were in the grassy portion of the plaza. There were probably a few hundred people in all. About an hour later, Beck showed up, accompanied by a couple of command officers and someone from the departmental press office. He stood on Hope Street, which had been blocked and was crowded with police cars. He looked relaxed as he took in the scene.

There was no command post, which had been the heart of the military style approach the old LAPD anti-demonstration strategy. Nor was there the old police hostility. Several clergy—rabbis, ministers, and priests—walked from the plaza to talk to the chief. I followed them. He spoke quietly, and they did too. So I wasn’t sure what was said. But I sensed the conversation was calm, polite and probably reasonable.

The media then gathered around the chief, and Beck was just as calm. He said the demonstrators had a point to make, and they had a right to make it. But the owners of the plaza and other businesses had a point, too. Negotiations between the police and demonstrators were continuing. Then he walked over to the plaza to talk to the demonstrators as if it were no big deal.

This is a man who is confident with himself and with a department that was reformed by his predecessor, Bill Bratton. Before Bratton, the chiefs and the cops treated a demonstration as if it were the start of a revolution. Unlike them, Beck didn’t fume and fret because the demonstrators are liberal. His attitude seemed to have seeped down to the SWAT officers on the plaza, and the cops on Hope Street.

The SWAT officers on the plaza generally were unsmiling, although I saw a couple of them chat in a friendly manner with the demonstrators. Some demonstrators yelled “This is what a police state is like.” Having recently returned from China, I thought, “No, China is what a police state is like.” One demonstrator handed a bottle of water to a cop, who said thank you. The demonstrators applauded the police officer’s courtesy.

Beck or some other police officer had given them a deadline. By 4:30 p.m. the arrival of motorcycle cops and a bus big enough for those arrested heralded action. Finally, around 5 pm, the cops started arresting people. But the arrests were done pretty peacefully. Maybe the two sides had worked out the procedure.

Beck exhibited the same abilities last year when the Latino community around MacArthur Park protested over a police officer's shooting of a man with a knife, He showed up at community meetings, listened and answered in a direct style, understanding and not defensive.

A word on Occupied LA’s expansion to the Bank of America plaza: It was a good idea. The choice of the bank gave Occupied LA more focus than it has had at city hall. The bank is relevant to our national economic crisis. Not that our lobbyist-campaign- contributor- dominated city hall is innocent of wrongdoing. But its offenses are local. The Bank of America, saved by the bailout, has wrecked the lives of people across the nation, if not the world.

The mainstream media whines about the Occupied movement having no specific goals. I talked to Elise Whitaker, an organizer. She was specific: “No bank money in politics, publicly funded elections. Once we get our democracy back, we the people will be empowered to make decisions again.”

My afternoon at Bank of America plaza and two previous visits to the Occupied LA city hall site doesn’t make me an expert on the movement. But I like what it’s doing. And an afternoon of watching Charlie Beck and his cops doesn’t make me an expert on them. But so far, they have handled things better than their counterparts in New York and Oakland.