• LBUSD employees keep telling us that a teacher too hide-bound to accept change is an 'excellent teacher'. 

• The principal isn't our pal.  He wants his next promotion more than he wants our child to get a proper education.

• The school superintendent thinks it's just fine if parent concerns are ignored unless/until they are submitted  in writing.

• The school board almost never responds to parents even when concerns are expressed in writing.
• If a parent objects, in any effective fashion to any of the above, the parent is a trouble-maker who is probably planning to sue the poor, impoverished school district.

     Quite honestly, had we not discovered that options exist for withdrawing from the madness, we probably would have filed some sort of lawsuit by now. Not because we're particularly litigious, neither of us have ever sued anyone and don't have any desire to, but because LBUSD is so difficult to deal with. 

     We began this very annoying and educational journey when we made what we believed to be a reasonable request. 

     We asked that a third grade teacher provide homework packets on Fridays so that we could resequence them into a Monday-Friday order rather that the subject order that the teacher, a Ms. Marenghetti, chose to use.

     We asked this because Ms. Mereghetti claimed that, after she had provided an in-service for the rest of the class, only our child had difficulties understanding which pages should be completed on any given day and only our child was seeing her grade drop for failure to complete Monday's homework on Monday or Tuesday's homework on Tuesday and ending up at the end of the week with all homework completed yet getting credit for completing almost none of it. (Talking to other parents eventually revealed that Ms. Mereghetti had not been completely truthful, but we were still gullible enough at that point that we accepted that our kid, mad-scientist-in-the-making that she is, really was the only one who completed the photocopied pages in logical order.)

     In response to our request, Ms. Marenghetti informed us that continuing to provide the homework on Fridays would be an 'undue burden' on her.

     We asked Mr. Gutierrez, the principal, to ask Ms. Mereghetti to provide the homework packet on Friday so we could put it into order for our little mad-scientist-to-be. Mr. Gutierrez very kindly explained to us that he, a mere principal, doesn't have the power to give orders to a teacher about what she does in her own classroom.

     At that point, we began to read. There are, it turns out, a number of rules that instruct schools about what is supposed to happen in classrooms. One set of rules,resulting from a settlement of the Williams vs. State of California case,  for example, requires that children have actual textbooks to use at home and in school to study from. It turns out that, those homework packets that we found objectionable, probably would not be looked upon favorably by the state of California, either. 

     At the end of a meeting where Mr. Gutierrez told us that he knows our child's needs better than we do, we filed an official Williams complaint. We thought that, faced with the State's requirement that students be given books, Frank would admit that the photocopied weekly packets would have to stop. We thought that filing a Williams complaint would result in all the kids getting books and having homework assigned from actual textbooks. 

     Instead, we were told that ours was an invalid complaint. According to LBUSD's response to us:

• The homework packets were legal rather than illegal photocopies.
• The kids had the legal photocopies so didn't NEED textbooks to do homework.
• Because the students can do homework without textbooks, no valid complaint can be made saying that they lack textbooks.  

     It was about this time that we began to see how big the problem actually is. That type of answer, relying on technicalities to avoid blame without ever addressing the actual problem, provided at the district level, went a long way towards convincing us that the district itself had no interest in our child's education.

     In an attempt to gain their interest, Gabston-Howell.org was born. It's still quite young, but appears to be growing in a healthy fashion. Our original plan was to speak the absolute truth, pulling no punches except to refrain from naming individuals below the superintendent level. 

     We hoped that LBUSD would be so shamed, or so determined to prove that we were wrong, that they'd make the many, nearly cost-free, improvements that would so greatly improve the quality of local education. 

     We hoped that public reminders of the law and of the rights of parents to sue to enforce those rights would scare them into following the law. 

     What we got was more of the same, but piled higher and deeper with a few attempts at retaliation from the principal thrown in, just to make things more interesting. 

     We also got the point that, if our children are to have their educational needs met, we have to be more proactive. 

     Therefore, we have withdrawn our youngest children from LBUSD and enrolled them in CAVA. Our son, being older, has been given the freedom to unenroll from LBUSD at any time he wishes, but hasn't been forced to do so. CAVA isn't yet set up to handle the older girl's needs or they'd have the same freedom. 

     We're still very interested in the goings-on within LBUSD.  We still plan to be annoyingly truthful about anything we hear.  However, now that the babies are no longer hostages to our good behavior, we no longer have any real reason not to name names!