Dear Editor,

I find it incredible that there is such a small interest in the Santa Monica airport, aka, SMO. This is credited to the impeccable job that the City Council and all related staff personnel have done in disguising the mismanagement of the approximately 215-acre parcel since the ink was wet on the 1984 federal agreement.

The fact is that the past city manager is solely responsible for the mismanagement and has full credit for being the master of deception or the master magician in covering up the mismanaged deeds of every airport director and manager he has hired. From factual events that would take the average person years to discover, this writer has found and experienced evidence of the mismanagement.

Our city claims pride for its concern on issues regarding open space, environmental awareness and the quality of live for its residents, yet they ignore SMO regarding these issues, have bungled the management of SMO and betrayed its residents. Currently, the Santa Monica airport association (SMAA) is suing our city because the staff has bungled their responsibilities, and because they can't have everything they want on a year-to-year basis. It is a group of mostly LA residents who act by intimidation, ruthless threats and selfish desires. This group has a track record of initiating lawsuits and handing them over to the big money national aviation interests.

Our city runs in fear of them. They are mostly Los Angeles and Culver City residents. The fact is that our city would be ashamed if they really knew just how few Santa Monica residents use the largest parcel of open space in our city. It is the opinion of this writer that our city staff believes that it is highly unlikely that its own residents will sue their own city, and therefore it acts continually to please the SMAA at the expense of the quality of life of tens of thousands of residents. The truth is that our city did not follow the Ninth District Court and Judge Hill.

They were supposed to move the day to day operations and fixed based operations to the north side. Instead, they allowed two jet centers to be developed, gobbling up most of the north side land and squeezing our small plane pilots. Last year during a budget review session when (Councilman) Bob Holbrook asked the airport director "has the city done anything to encourage the jets at the airport?", the answer was "no".

This was a flat out lie because the city allowed and targeted the huge jet centers and obtained federal funding for the runway to be resurfaced solely for the purpose of accommodating large jet aircraft. They hid the grants from the airport commission and gave them a filtered staff report to get them to approve the grant on behalf of the city.

The third fixed base operator now located on the southwest corner of the airport was suppose to move to the north east corner of the airport as documented in the 1984 agreement and the 1983 EIR because it was a noise generator and incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood. However, staff wants to leave it in its present location, betraying the residents request and leave it in its present location till the year 2015!

Imagine a fuel station for jets and helicopters in the proximity of our homes and apartments. This parcel was to be a buffer zone and used as tie-down space for aircraft! Staff has again brainwashed the present airport commissioners that this long-term lease is okay. What betrayal!

The staff was to implement a strict noise abatement program that would improve the quality of the environment to the residents surrounding the airport. This has been bungled big time. The ink was not even wet on the 1984 agreement and this airport started to get noisier. The noise program is one big joke and one big insider club of special interests. Do you know that you get a 100- dollar fine if you break the noise monitor the third time after two warning letters! There is no program for performance-based measurement as mandated by the 9th district court 16 years after the decision.

Brain Ouzounian
Former Airport Commissioner 1990-1998
Santa Monica

January 16, 2000

Dear readers,

The purpose of this email is to encourage you to attend the city council meeting this Tuesday, January 18, at 7pm to show your support for specific actions to improve our Lifelong Learning Community!!

This Tuesday, our Council members will discuss their priorities and give staff direction for developing the city budget for 2000-2001. This represents a real opportunity to make significant improvements and gains in our Lifelong Learning Community!

The mission of our Life-Long Learning Community is to ensure that every individual is born healthy and has a lifetime of quality learning experiences that supports individual growth, health, career, family, and community.

It is convenient to look at this mission in three parts:

1. A Great Start: About 1000 Santa Monica babies will be born in year 2000. At last year's budget hearing, Councilmember McKeown suggested the name 2020 Vision to describe an initiative that would, beginning with the year 2000, invest in and create a continuum of preventive services for our youngest residents and their families.

Paying attention to the lessons we learned at Lifelong Learning Community Conferences from Dr. Dan Siegel in his presentation on the brain, from the folks from Hampton, VA with their Healthy Families Partnership, and from our own experiences here in SM, many people, representing many different institutions and agencies*, have been working together to craft a Community Partnership that will provide a continuum of support and resources to all families and caregivers of young children to ensure that every child is born healthy, enjoys learning, and enters school ready and eager to succeed!

For 1000 babies a year --- Life Begins in Santa Monica! We need the city to invest in supporting families right from the start! And we think we now have a plan to effectively do that. We will be handing out 20/20 VISION badges for supporters to wear at the Council meeting.

2. Quality Schools: Ensuring every student has a quality learning experience and enters adulthood ready for family, career, and community. Santa Monicans are proud to have wonderful public schools as the backbone of our Lifelong Learning Community and we want to keep them that way!! State funding is not only inadequate, it is increasingly targeted to remediate problems Santa Monica doesn't have - such as unqualified teachers!!

As the state continues to target funding, our students are in danger of losing the breadth of support and learning opportunities that have made our schools so special: elementary music, English as a second language, elementary library clerks, school nurses, technology support, P.E. coaches… But crisis can also mean opportunity. Please urge our elected city officials, presiding over economic boom times, to work with our public schools to find short term and long term solutions to the funding shortages that threaten the quality and diversity of programs in our community's public schools.

3. Continuing Education: Ensuring that every adult has continuing education supporting growth, health, family, career, and community. Please urge the Council to continue city support of our adult and elder learners -- through continuing support to service providers assisting robust and frail seniors and by continuing to utilize, integrate, and expand the tremendous wealth of human resources our retired residents provide through their active participation and involvement in our community --to everyone's benefit!

Thank you for your support of lifelong learning as a top community priority. Please express your values to our elected officials. See you Tuesday night!

Onward!
Louise Jaffe
Santa Monica

* The 20/20 Vision proposal has been drafted by staff and community members from: City of Santa Monica, Saint John's Health Center, SM/UCLA Medical Center, Venice Family Clinic, Westside Women's Health Center, UCLA, RAND, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, Santa Monica College, LA County
Department of Health Services, Connections for Children, the Santa Monica Childcare Task Force, the Southern California Association for the Education of Young Children, and the Lifelong Learning Community Project and will also seek partial funding from Prop 10.

January 14, 2000

To the Editor:

I attended school as a child in Cincinnati, Ohio and Gloucester, Massachusetts. At the age of 14, my family moved to Malibu and I enrolled at Samohi (no Malibu High then). Santa Monica was a dream come true for me. I had never seen such a beautiful city, with such creative, dynamic people, and an amazing climate! I have lived in Santa Monica most of the rest of my life. Santa Monica is my city now, and I love it.

So, it is with profound consternation that I have been reading some of the articles and letters from parents and others protesting proposed cuts to the already inadequate budget for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District's athletic programs.

I have been an Executive Recruiter for the last five years, placing candidates in lucrative positions in a variety of industries in the Los Angeles area. Consistently, I see that my most successful candidates in any type of career have some kind of competitive sports or dance in their background. There is a delicate balance between the mind and the body. And, competitive sports develop the team-playing skills, mental agility and split-second decision-making abilities needed to be powerful in any business.

What a sad, sad state of affairs that Santa Monica, with its incredible geographical and climactic attributes, a city capable of nurturing the most creative, inquisitive, healthy people in the world, ignores its most important assets: the schools that its young people attend.

Perhaps it is irony. It could be that this setting that is one of the most beautiful places in the world has fostered a population desensitized to the beauty and potential around them. Or, has the lack of support for the school system over time already created a blasé, lackluster generation in Santa Monica?

I challenge you, people of Santa Monica! We have a choice:
A) We can opt for immediate gratification. Make our kids content. Give them the drug of their choice and put them in a room with a big screen TV or computer games and an unlimited order of French Fries. To express any aggressions that may arise, they can apply for membership with the local gang (great babysitting facility, by the way). Now we can forget all about them and get on with our own uneventful lives. Yes, let's not do this halfway. We can breed a new generation of physically unfit, mentally crippled, socially maladjusted, utterly lethargic couch potatoes!
B) We can look to the future. Be proactive, be visionary. That takes a little more energy, doesn't it? We can work a step at a time to build for our young people the resources that a proud city should offer its next generation. We can give them the educational system and top quality athletic training that will allow them to grow into the healthy, creative, exceptional citizens who should be the moving force behind this great city.

Here's a final thought: is it within the bounds of realistic thought that our City of Santa Monica could possibly set an example for the State of California?

Sincerely,

Kathryn Boole
Santa Monica

January 12, 2000

Dear Editor,

I live at 1211 Georgina Avenue in Santa Monica. I grew up in Santa Monica and went to school at Roosevelt and Lincoln Jr. High. I think it is shameful that the city has allowed its public school system to sink into its current crisis. Its is wrong for the School Board to be forced to overcrowd classrooms with non-district students in order to avoid making deep cuts into a school budget that is already grossly deficient. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL DISTRICT IS GROSSLY UNDERFUNDED.

The one and only solution is to provide more funding for the schools! Clearly that money
should be coming from the county and state, but it is not. The city needs to deal with the reality that county and state cannot be counted on, and if the city is going to have a decent public school system, the city needs to step up and provide the funding.

California is the wealthiest state in the country. It has one of the highest costs of living in the county. It has the largest non-English speaking populations in the country. Yet its funding is 42nd out of 50 states. Currently the difference in funding between California, and the funding provided by the average state, is about $1,000 per student, which equates to a loss of about $12,000,000 per year for the Santa Monica School District. It should not be a surprise that Santa Monica School District provides an education that is significantly below the national average. The only thing that should be a big surprise is that the school district does not do a lot worse.

Those who ask: why should I pay for other people kids should be reminded that most of their education was paid by people who did not have kids in public schools.

Those who ask: why should city council intervene in a school board problem should be reminded that the school board does not have the resources to effectively lobby state legislators, nor do they have the power to tap into the general fund for emergency funding.

Those who ask: what should Santa Monica children be entitled to should be told, "the same high quality education enjoyed by Santa Monica's adults when they were growing up."

Those who ask: how can the city afford to bail out the deficiencies of the county and state should be reminded that educating our young is the most important function of government. Until Santa Monica is able to get the county and state come up with its fair share of funding, all other city programs need to come second.

EVERY CHILD IN SANTA MONICA SHOULD BE ENTITLED TO AT LEAST AN AVERAGE EDUCATION.

Best regards,

Jeff Segal
Santa Monica

January 6, 2000

Dear editor,

I currently have a child in 6th grade at Lincoln Middle School who is in his 3rd year playing the violin. He participated in the Stairway of the Stars program last year (his 2nd year) without any private violin (or any other) music lessons. He is doing very well on the violin - all from the elementary (and now middle) school music programs! I am truly amazed how fast and well these kids are taught and can learn to play an instrument. I highly value this program.

I also have a 4th grrader in Roosevelt Elementary school. His #1 birthday present wish for his 9th birthday was a cello and private lessons (in 3rd grade - before he could enter the elementary music program in 4th grade) because he watched his brother excel in violin and was exposed to other string instruments in his older brother's performances. He is now in the advanced music class at Roosevelt in 4th grade playing the cello. He has a
passion for music that may never have been discovered if he was not exposed to it in elementary school.

As an adult who played the organ growing up and was in choral groups in school, I can say that I (perhaps sadly) have retained more from my music instruction than, say, history or science. I can still read music, and can recite all 50 states in alphabetical order from a song I learned in chorus in school ("Fifty Nifty United States"). But, unfortunately, I remember little that I learned in history or science (now as an adult, I should take these
classes - because now I would appreciate them and perhaps remember more).

My point being -- music has a lifelong benefit. Even if my children do not continue with their musical instruments all their lives, they may pick another instrument or simply, I believe, will have an appreciation and understanding of music they wouldn't have had. Now as we listen to orchestras or symphonies, my pre-teen boys discuss the instruments they are hearing, what the timing is, and other musical terms that I have no idea what they are talking about!

Therefore, based on my personal experience and the experiences of my two boys, I strongly encourage you to do everything possible to support and maintain the elementary (and all school's) music programs. They are very valuable - and the teachers are doing a wonderful job!

P. S. Have you seen the movie. "Music of the Heart"?

Debra Kermath, CPA
Santa Monica

January 5, 2000

To the Editor,
As a mother of four young children, with two currently in Santa Monica schools, I feel very strongly that students and teachers should not bear the responsibility for the unfortunate management decisions made by the Santa Monica School Board.

The Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) dominated school board made some terrible miscalculations and decisions, which now threaten to destroy school programs and the quality of education for our children.

It's about time for the SMRR dominated city council to step forward and commit funding to help our schools. After all, the city is flush with cash and this city council has been able to allocate millions of dollars to "beautify" Pico Blvd., and to buy property for affordable housing and homeless shelters. Now it's time for the city council to commit to our children's future.

Patricia Dawson
Santa Monica

January 4, 2000

Dear the members of the board of education,

Hello! my name is Chelsea and I am a member of the concert band at John Adams Middle School. I have been told by my music teacher, Ms. Woo, that the board is considering cutting music education from the elementry schools.

I think that is a bad way to earn back the lost money. The music program in elementary school is very important to the middle schools and high schools because the middle schools will have to start everyone at a beginning level, and then the high school will not have as much experience as it does now. That will lead up to having less of a chance of doing special opportunities. Well I hope that you take what I say into consideration.

Sincerely,

Chelsea Kadish
Santa Monica