Daily Pilot

This three-part series examined the choices parents make about schools in Costa Mesa, Calif., a community whose ethnic and socioeconomic identity has shift dramatically in recent years.

Many parents take their kids out of local public campuses and enroll in nearby districts or private schools.

Their flight illustrates a larger trend in suburbs across the country. As immigrants continue to move into historically white communities, the established families are choosing to leave their neighborhood campuses.

Over the course of a year, Mike interviewed dozens of parents, and many teachers, children, education experts and administrators. They offered their perspectives and solutions to what many viewed as a serious problem.

School Flight Part 1: Why Mesa Verde families transfer out

School Flight Part 2: Not everyone chooses to leave neighborhood schools

School Flight Part 3: Families return to neighborhood schools

Video: How parents and educators respond

Comments: Readers respond to ‘School Flight’ series

(Don Leach, Daily Pilot)

Los Angeles Times

To some swimmers and boaters it’s a messy, gunk-filled weed, but to the federal government, this ribbon-like plant is crucial to the ecology of coastal bays.

Eelgrass, a protected species of marine life, provides sea creatures with food and protection. Yet many Newport Harbor-area residents and boat owners consider the plant a major headache. They say stringent federal protections instituted 10 years ago make it too expensive to dredge beneath their docks. They say so much silt has accumulated underwater that the keels of sailboats are scraping bottom.

“Boats are hard to use when they’re on the sand,” said home and dock owner Seymour Beek.

The city of Newport Beach is requesting an exemption from federal regulations, saying that an experimental technology used in the Bay Area is one of several new strategies that can help preserve eelgrass at a fraction of the current expense.

Read more…

A new garden at Hoag Hospital in Irvine follows feng shui principles. (Don Leach, Daily Pilot)

Los Angeles Times

The nurse just thought she was bringing a refreshing dessert — a Popsicle — to a new mother. She didn’t expect the grandmother, shocked, to stop her and intercept the treat.

The cold was taboo for Shu-Fen Chen.

After emigrating from Taiwan, Chen gave birth to her first child in a Los Angeles hospital. Her cultural beliefs say a new mother shouldn’t touch anything cold for a month after birth, or she will suffer headaches later in life, she says.
Eventually, Chen moved to Irvine, home to one of the largest Chinese American populations in the nation and once home to Irvine Regional Hospital, where she had her second child. There, the nurse knew better.

“So many traditions people cannot believe,” said Chen, executive director of the South Coast Chinese Cultural Assn. in Irvine. “But some nurses just understand our culture.”

When Hoag Hospital opened its Irvine campus recently, replacing Irvine Regional, administrators hoped they had done enough to understand Irvine residents’ cultural beliefs, traditions and language.

Since the 1950s, Hoag has served mostly white and increasingly Latino patients at its Newport Beach location. Now, the hospital is stepping into a community that is nearly 40% Asian and has a large Iranian population.

Hoag has made a number of special preparations for these patients. They include creating patient rooms arranged according to the principles of feng-shui and to serving steamed rice for breakfast, and less-tangible gestures such as respectfully presenting documents with two hands and speaking to patients with more formality.

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Los Angeles Times

As lifeguards begin their busy summer season, the bronzed guardians of California’s beaches find themselves at the unlikely center of the battle over costly public pensions.

The six-figure salaries of some full-time municipal lifeguards have fueled talk radio segments and blog comments in recent weeks, with some commentators expressing surprise at the pay for those who patrol the beaches.

For local government, the larger concern is over the pensions that lifeguards receive when they retire. Most full-time lifeguards get the most generous public retirement plan — the same “public safety” pensions received by police officers and firefighters. Lifeguards argue that they deserve the benefits because they put their lives at risk, not just from rescuing beachgoers but because of an elevated risk of skin cancer from years under the sun.

But a growing number of cities — including Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and San Diego — are demanding that lifeguards cut their pensions. Solana Beach has already taken action, eliminating the most generous plan, which made lifeguards eligible for a pension worth up to 90% of their largest paycheck at age 50. Pensions for new hires top out at about one-third less.

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City Limits

A year after the city settled a major lawsuit over the treatment of homeless families, the Department of Homeless Services is still turning away families for whom it is supposed to offer emergency shelter, say advocates, the city comptroller and the applicants themselves.

The biggest problem with family applications, they say, is that workers at the Prevention, Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) center in the south Bronx, where families with children apply for shelter, consistently overlook evidence indicating eligibility. Families often have to re-apply many times before finally being sheltered.

The Legal Aid Society claims this violates a Dec. 2008 agreement (negotiated in September, finalized in December) to settle the decades-long litigation known as the McCain case. That agreement established the right to emergency shelter for families with children, and specifically outlined steps that the city’s homeless services agency must take to fulfill that right.

“Regrettably, while the litigation has been settled, the errors and the suffering continue,” said Steven Banks, attorney-in-chief at the Legal Aid Society. “It is at this point only a matter of time before we are going to have to return to court to enforce the underlying order.”

Read more…

(Kevin Chang / Daily Pilot)

Daily Pilot

Newport Beach Mayor Mike Henn has long championed the revitalization of struggling Lido Village.

He led the city’s efforts to improve the commercial area’s streetscape, redesign streets and parking, and bring more shoppers through its stores. When residents or council members suggested they slow down or focus on other struggling parts of town, such as Mariner’s Mile, Henn insisted that Lido Village remain the top priority.

“It’s good for all the residents of Newport Beach,” Henn said in an interview. “It’s a critical issue to move forward.”

Henn’s council district includes Lido Village — a gateway area to the Balboa Peninsula — so his advocacy to improve the area and please his constituents should come as no surprise. But he is also personally invested in the zone’s success.

As a business consultant, Henn is paid more than $100,000 a year by a shop owner in one of the village’s distressed retail centers, according to disclosure forms he filed with the state.

Conflict-of-interest experts, however, say Henn should have avoided voting on or discussing the issue on the City Council because improving the retail center could directly benefit his client and indirectly help him.

“It’s just too close of a financial connection to participate,” said Bob Stern, president of the L.A.-based Center for Governmental Studies nonprofit and co-author of the state’s Political Reform Act, adding that his point of view should not be considered a legal opinion.

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(John Weiss/Landmarks Preservation Commission)

From the Metro-North station at 125th Street, it is one of the most visible features of the Harlem streetscape: a massive red stone building, covered with black netting, blue scaffolding and plywood boards. Through a gap, bay window frames and ornamental terra cotta rosettes peek out.

But soon, the throngs of commuters who pass by the landmark, the Corn Exchange Bank Building, an 1883-84 Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival structure, will be able to see even less of it. The top two floors will be gone.
On Wednesday, the city’s Department of Buildings issued a permit to demolish the two floors, finding that the building — as it has stood for 125 years — was unsafe.

A community activist purchased the building, at 81 East 125th Street, from the city in 2003 with the promise to rehabilitate it. Instead, the structure sat with a gaping roof and crumbling masonry for six years. The city moved to take control of the property, and this January, a judge ruled that the city could repossess the building.

But by then, it was too late. Click here to read the rest of the story in The New York Times and here here to read the version on city room.