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To the editor: I have followed with interest your editorials on reopening schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I disagree with you. (“Wake up, LAUSD. You have an urgent job to do: saving kids’ education,” editorial, May 11)
You seem to blame the teachers’ union for the muted reopening, and you do not mention the parent survey that supported the district’s reopening model. You need to recognize the awful toll this disease took on our LAUSD families and the widespread willingness to just wait until the next school year to start fresh.
Teachers everywhere have watched their students lose parents, grandparents and neighbors. Parents are understandably opting for a cautious approach, knowing full well there are just a few weeks until the school year ends.
Fire risk. As the number of tents, makeshift shelters and campers on Los Angeles streets has surged,
so has the scourge of fire. So far in 2021, fires related to homelessness occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all fires the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to.
Open but empty. Only 7% of high school students
have returned to campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Extensive safety measures
have failed to lure back the vast majority of families in the final weeks of school.
Recall isn’t popular. The campaign to recall Newsom has failed to gain momentum in recent months as significantly more California voters favor keeping him in office, with little support for Republican candidates,
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The amount of learning lost during the pandemic, especially among students who were already woefully behind, needs to be treated as an emergency a disaster that requires immediate and lionhearted effort and resolve. That is not what’s been happening in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
L.A. Unified finally got middle- and high-school students back to classrooms, but to do what? Zoom in a room remote instruction in a classroom where kids have to sit in one place most of the day, masked, taught by a teacher in another room. At home, at least, they can keep the mask off, stretch and move around. No wonder the vast majority of families more than 90% for high school and 88% for middle school have declined to return.
Zaruhy Sara Chitjian
Zaruhy Sara Chitjian, a long-time benefactor of Armenian studies programs and devoted supporter of the Asbarez Newspaper passed away on Monday, the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology reported.
As a longtime supporter of UCLA and the founder of the Research Program in Armenian Archaeology at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Chitjian lived to see US president Joe Biden officially recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Zaruhy Sara Chitjian, was born in Mexico City in 1933 to Hampartzoum and Ovsanna Chitjian, both survivors of the Armenian Genocide who had met and married in Mexico. In 1935 her family immigrated to the United States settling in Los Angeles where Sara spent the remaining of her life. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology in 1956 from UC Los Angeles and a year later went on to earn her teaching credentials. She dedicated her life to education and spent the next 40 years teaching for the Los Angeles Unified School District.