Mike Reicher

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

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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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.”

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