California Charter Schools Vulnerable to Fraud, Report Says
The Washington Post - March 24, 2015, by Emma Brown - Journalists, auditors and other investigators have turned up more...
The Washington Post - March 24, 2015, by Emma Brown - Journalists, auditors and other investigators have turned up more than $80 million in charter school fraud in California to date, according to a new report by a coalition of left-leaning organizations, which argues that lax oversight of the state’s charter schools is leaving taxpayer dollars vulnerable to abuse.
California has more than 1,100 charter schools that serve more than a half-million students — far more than any other state in the nation. They receive more than $3 billion in public funds each year. But state and local officials don’t have a rigorous enough system to ferret out misuse of those dollars, according to the report, which says that oversight relies too heavily on audits paid for by charter schools and complaints by whistleblowers.
“Despite the tremendous investment of public dollars and the size of its charter school population, California has failed to implement a system that proactively monitors charters for fraud, waste and mismanagement,” says the report.
It was released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group that is allied with teachers’ unions and has published several studies of state-level charter-school fraud; the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Institute, an organization that works on issues including housing and education; and Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization.
The report recounts some of the charter school scandals that have come to light in California. In 2012, for example, state auditors found that the American Indian Model Charter Schools (AIMS) – an Oakland school that had won national recognition for the achievement of its low-income students — had paid its founder, his wife and their various businesses about $3.8 million. The audit was initiated after a whistleblower raised concerns.
More recently, in 2014, state auditors found that a Los Angeles charter school — the Wisdom Academy of Young Scientists Charter Schools (WAYS) — had made payments totaling $2.6 million to the school’s former executive director and her family members and close associates.
“There simply isn’t enough oversight to prevent a huge amount of fraud in the charter sector, and that’s unacceptable,” said Hilary Hammell, a lawyer for Public Advocates. “That’s unacceptable because it’s vulnerable youths and their families who suffer when money that should be spent on kids at the school level instead goes elsewhere.”
The California Charter Schools Association responded with an extensive statement that called into question the motives of the report’s authors, arguing that they had turned up no evidence of a substantial problem. Many of the examples of fraud cited in the report were old and resulted in charter revocation, overhauls in school management or changes to state law, the association said.
“We agree that inappropriate use of public dollars intended for public school students should be prevented,” the statement says. “We believe that the system that California has very carefully and thoughtfully implemented does just that.”
California school system superintendents who suspect fiscal mismanagement at charter schools can request an “extraordinary audit” from a state agency known as the Financial Crisis and Management Assistance Team. But that agency — or some other oversight body — should be auditing all charter schools on a regular basis, according to the report, which argues that absent such a systemic review, misuse of tax dollars is going undetected.
Charter schools are required to submit a number of financial documents to oversight agencies and local school superintendents, including annual audits performed by private auditors. The report’s authors argued that those audits are not designed to catch fraud, while the California Charter Schools Association questioned why charter schools should have to undergo state audits when traditional public school systems do not. “To assume that there is a greater risk at charter schools than school districts, particularly in light of all the real time oversight on financial reports, is simply unfounded,” the association said.
“The report not only provides no evidence of a systemic issue, it does not do justice to the system already in place and that is actually more rigorous for charter schools than for other LEAs in the state (e.g., school districts),” the association said.
Some critics of previous reports about charter-school fraud released by the Center for Popular Democracy have also argued that those reports did not offer equal scrutiny of fraud within traditional public school systems. Others have pointed out that the center counts teachers unions — which have been critical of the charter sector — among its allies and supporters. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a member of the center’s board.
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Are Scheduling Bills Like D.C.'s Helpful or Meddlesome?
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to...
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to tell employees what their work schedules will be several weeks in advance and require employers to compensate employees for last-minute schedule changes.
“This movement is under way across this country,” lead sponsor Vincent Orange Jr. (D-At Large) said when he introduced the measure Dec. 5. “San Francisco recently passed regulations to address this issue and bills have been introduced in seven states.”
The Hours and Scheduling Stability Act of 2015 wouldn't apply to all stores and restaurants, but it would have a big impact, Orange told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 17. If passed, the measure “will assist tremendously with providing [the district's] workforce and their families with certainty,” the councilmember said.
The bill would require employers to tell workers what their schedules will be at least three weeks in advance. A change in schedule less than three weeks out would require the employer to pay an extra hour of wages. Less than 24 hours' notice would require four hours of wages.
Orange's bill would cover any D.C. franchisee of a restaurant chain with at least 20 locations nationwide or a retail store chain with at least five.
Unpredicatability Affects Planning, Benefits Eligibility
It's hard enough for families to balance work and personal life, Orange said when he introduced the bill. “Having a schedule you can count on leads to a better work environment and better harmony in scheduling family obligations.”
Liz Ben-Ishai, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, which supports legislation requiring employers to provide workers with advance notice of schedules, told California lawmakers in March of 2015 that volatile schedules affect workers’ ability to arrange child care. Such volatility also interferes with their ability to hold second jobs and pursue education or training, she said.
There's another problem with unpredictable schedules, Ben-Ishai told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 22. Many public assistance programs ask participants to estimate their income or number of hours they will work, she said. “Because they have these erratic schedules or insufficient hours they can't predict how much they'll make,” she said.
Utah is “an example of a good approach,” she told Bloomberg BNA. State eligibility assessors use “professional judgment” to draw on multiple sources of information, including paychecks and conversations with employers regarding anticipated hours and overtime, to determine an applicant's’ eligibility, Ben-Ishai wrote in a policy brief. Utah encourages workers to follow up on information applicants provide that may not reflect their current eligibility, such as out-of-date wage information
Ben-Ishai also suggested a different time frame for evaluating applicants’ incomes and work hours. She pointed to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which “requires a longer authorization period” and “accounts for fluctuation in people's hours.” This federally funded program allows states to determine eligibility “over a period of 12 months to provide a more realistic picture,” she said.
Bills Introduced Around the Country
The Washington, D.C., bill is one of several under consideration in state and local legislatures, as well as on the federal level. Within the past two years, there have been similar proposals in 13 other cities and states, plus one on the federal level.
San Francisco has been the first and, so far, only jurisdiction to pass a predictable scheduling law. It passed Nov. 25, 2014, by a 10-0 vote of the 11-member Board of Supervisors and became law without the signature of Mayor Ed Lee (D). Lee said he was “concerned about large numbers of impacted merchants who said there was little meaningful discussion” in the drafting of the law (243 DLR C-1, 12/18/14).
Lizzy Simmons, the National Retail Federation's senior director, government relations, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 30 that the San Francisco law has a “carve-out that allows unions and their collective bargaining agreements to waive out” of its requirements. She said she's concerned that allowing employees to contractually waive the law's requirements grants outsize influence to labor organizations “since a lot of the unions have been behind” efforts to pass predictable scheduling laws.
The San Francisco law actually “takes away and impedes on employee flexibility,” Simmons said. Retail managers and employees should work together to come up with schedules that can accommodate individual needs, she said. “A one-size-fits-all government mandate” makes that harder to accomplish, she said.
Part of the problem with scheduling bills is that there's little guidance on how to implement them, said Robin Winchell Roberts, the federation's senior director, media relations. For example, the San Francisco law exempts employee-requested changes from triggering schedule change compensation, which Roberts calls “penalty pay.” The key factor in determining when an employer must pay schedule change compensation is who requests the change, Roberts said. It isn't clear whether it is due when a retailer requires an employee who can't work a scheduled shift to find a co-worker to work the shift in her place, Roberts said.
The compensation might also be triggered if business is better than expected, Simmons said. For example, a store might want to extend a sale that's going well. If the store wants to staff up to respond to the additional customer demand, it might incur unexpected expenses on account of employees who weren't scheduled, she told Bloomberg BNA. “I don't think you can just say after the fact sales made up for that,” she said when asked whether the unexpected increase in revenue would offset the unexpected increase in expenses.
Flexibility Essential, Industry Group Says
“Flexibility is a trademark of the restaurant industry,” Christin Fernandez, director of media relations and public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, told Bloomberg BNA by e-mail Dec. 23. Businesses operate around the clock “with business models unique to each restaurant,” she said.
Starbucks is an example of a business that pursued its own scheduling model. The company announced in August 2014 that it would voluntarily change its scheduling practices. It said it would provide employees with schedules a week in advance. It also said it would prohibit scheduling employees to close a store one night and return a few hours later to open the next morning (157 DLR A-6, 8/14/14).
But 11 months later, a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization that describes itself as advocating for a “pro-worker” agenda, concluded that the company hasn’t kept its promises. The report, “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks,” drew on comments from a survey of employees who say back-to-back closing and opening shifts continue. Reached for comment Dec. 22, Brent Gow, global director for payroll at Starbucks, told Bloomberg BNA he couldn’t speak on the record because the company is still working on the issue.
Reporting Time Pay Laws Exist in Some States
Predictable scheduling laws don't take into account that “some of the people that go into these jobs to begin with do it for exactly the flexibility that's being challenged here,” said Diane Saunders, a shareholder in the Boston office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart P.C. who advises employers as co-chair of the firm's Retail Practice Group.
Saunders advises her clients to ensure that they comply with reporting time laws that are already on the books. In Washington, D.C., and eight states, employees are guaranteed a minimum number of hours of pay if they report to work but are sent home because business is unexpectedly slow, she wrote in a Novemberblog post.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's labor bureau chief, Terri Gerstein, wrote to 13 retailers in April 2015 as part of a review of on-call scheduling. In the letters, Gerstein reminded the companies that New York state law requires that an employee who reports for work must be paid four hours, or the number of hours of a regularly scheduled shift if that is less than four hours.
Gerstein told the retailers the attorney general's office had received reports that an increasing number of employers require their employees to call in “just a few hours in advance, or the night before.” Threatening enforcement action over this practice goes beyond what New York law says, said Jim Evans, a partner in Alston & Bird LLP's labor and employment practice who represents employers.
Whether the proposals become law, employers should focus on “the human aspect” of predictability in scheduling, he said. Employers that voluntarily change their practices and lawmakers who draft predictable scheduling laws should consider the “harsh economic consequences” of last-minute shift cancellations, he said.
New Application for Existing Laws
The New York attorney general's letters were sent to companies with household names such as Gap Inc., J. Crew and Burlington Coat Factory. One recipient was Abercrombie & Fitch Co., which is facing a class action in California over its use of on-call scheduling.
In the absence of laws requiring pay for on-call shifts, one team of lawyers is attempting to use wage and hour laws that are already on the books to help their clients. Hallie Von Rock and Carey James, of Aiman-Smith & Marcy, filed a lawsuit in December against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of C’endan Claiborne and a class they estimate includes between 15,000 and 65,000 members in three states.
In the lawsuit, Von Rock and James allege that the company's practice of requiring California employees to call in one hour before their scheduled start time in order to find out whether they're required to work the shift should be considered reporting to work. When an employee calls and is told to stay home, the employee is entitled to a few hours of pay, Von Rock and James told Bloomberg BNA.
Under wage and hour laws already on the books, Abercrombie should pay its employees for the time they spend calling in, Rock and James said. The calls last between two and 20 minutes, which adds up to several hours of unpaid wages per month, they said.
Von Rock and James contend that employees—who aren't paid for the time they spend on these phone calls—are reporting for work when they make these calls. “Even though they're not physically showing up” at the store, the phone call is the beginning of a work shift, Von Rock said. Abercrombie, which is represented by Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP and Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP, denies the lawsuit’s allegations.
James said the law “is undeveloped in California” as to what qualifies as reporting for work under the reporting time law. “To me, report is a straightforward word and it could just as easily mean call,” he said.
Von Rock expressed concern about a power imbalance between employers and employees. Predictable scheduling laws attempt to level the unequal bargaining power, she said.
Simmons, with the National Retail Federation, views it differently. These laws insert friction into the employer-employee relationship, she told Bloomberg BNA. “These bills punish job creators,” the federation says in its restrictive scheduling toolkit. A better approach would be to continue to allow the market to strike a balance, Simmons said.
Common Ground
One thing on which supporters and opponents of predictable scheduling laws agree is that it's too soon to tell what kind of impact San Francisco's law is having. Ben-Ishai, the policy analyst, and Simmons, of the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA it is too early to have meaningful research.
Evans, the employer-side attorney, offered advice on balancing employers' need for flexibility with workers' need for predictability. “Focus on the human aspect of it,” he said. “I represent large corporations, many of which are very focused on the human aspect of it. I think that the human aspect of the legislation and the impact of the practices can't be overemphasized.”
“It's just not fair to subject people to that last minute change and kind of harsh economic consequences,” he added. “When you measure who has the ability to absorb the impact of a last minute change in schedule, the answer's kind of obvious.”
Source: Clasp
The Fed should not raise interest rates until wages go up
Shawn Sebastian, Fed Up Campaign co-director, and Marshall Steinbaum, Roosevelt Institute research director, discuss...
Shawn Sebastian, Fed Up Campaign co-director, and Marshall Steinbaum, Roosevelt Institute research director, discuss agreeing with Trump about the Fed raising interest rates and why wages haven't risen.
Watch the clip here.
What Will a Trump Administration Mean for Supporters of Public Education?
What Will a Trump Administration Mean for Supporters of Public Education?
We don’t know very much about President-Elect Donald Trump’s ideas about education. Although, during the campaign,...
We don’t know very much about President-Elect Donald Trump’s ideas about education. Although, during the campaign, Trump briefly presented a plan for a $20 billion block grant program for states to expand market-based school choice, and although he has hinted that he will reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education and particularly its civil rights enforcement division, there has been no substantive explanation or discussion of these ideas.
One thing we do know for sure, however, is that every branch of our federal government will be dominated by Republicans—the Presidency, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court.
A new President whose plans we do not know. The absence of checks and balances. Federal public education policy that has for years been undermining support for the institution of public education. Those of us who believe improving the public schools is important have good reason to be nervous, even afraid.
After all, in 2000 and especially after we were distracted in September of 2001 by the attacks on the World Trade Center, we were unprepared to speak to the federal test-and-punish education law, No Child Left Behind. We failed to connect the dots between an accountability-driven, poorly funded testing mandate and the destruction of respect for school teachers and the drive for school privatization that lurked just under the surface of federal policy. And in 2008, we didn’t anticipate the collusion of government technocrats and philanthro-capitalists that emerged when the federal stimulus gave billions of dollars to the U.S. Department of Education for competitive experiments with top-down turnarounds to close and privatize schools and attack teachers.
Advocates for improving public schools—particularly the schools in the struggling neighborhoods of our cities where poverty is concentrated—were unprepared. We struggled to define what it all meant. Why had accountability replaced nurturing children as the mission of the schools? How are achievement gaps affected by opportunity gaps? What did it mean that everyone had come to define school quality by test scores without any attention to the capacity of communities to provide the necessary conditions for teaching and learning? How had it happened that everybody was suddenly focused on so-called “failing” schools? Why did everyone suddenly feel that it was appropriate to blame and castigate school teachers who were said to be protecting adult interests instead of putting students first? And how had it happened that so many people prized the innovation that was supposed to come with charter schools unbound from bureaucratic regulations, and yet those in charge no longer worried about strengthening the oversight necessary for protecting children’s rights and the expenditure of tax dollars? How had so many people come to accept that the market would take care of all this?
We watched with dismay as all this came to pass, but we were unprepared to name it, unprepared to think through how it all worked, unprepared to do something about it.
But there is an important development these days among advocates for public schools—the people who agree that we need to promote equity and justice in education’s public sector. Advocates today share broad consensus around the following priorities:
• driving long-denied public investment to improve the public schools in our poorest communities where family poverty is concentrated, and correcting inadequate and inequitably distributed school funding;
• addressing family poverty that, research has demonstrated again and again, is likely to undermine children’s achievement at school;
• ensuring that public dollars are not diverted and that charter schools do not operate as parasites destroying their host school districts;
• supporting school teachers as a strong, stable cadre of professionals;
• reducing reliance on standardized testing and eliminating high stakes punishments including turnarounds;
• rejecting privatization of education and ensuring strong oversight by government of the institutions that serve our children and spend our tax dollars;
• eliminating widespread overuse—especially in the schools serving our society’s poorest children—of the practices of suspending and expelling students and the widespread obedience-driven discipline practices imposed on poor children when more privileged children attend schools where they are encouraged to question and engage.
At the national level, organizations supporting justice and equity in public education are now unified across a range of constituencies and sectors to endorse and work for these values and priorities. Here are just some of the centers of advocacy these days:
• The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools is a broad coalition of unions—the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union; civil rights and community organizing groups–Advancement Project, Alliance for Educational Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Journey for Justice Alliance; and academic, philanthropic and justice advocacy groups—the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the Gamaliel Network, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
• The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have recently come together in the civil rights community to challenge privatization and lack of oversight as charter schools have expanded.
• The Network for Public Education is an alliance of advocates including school teachers, activists, and bloggers in support of strong and inclusive public schools and in opposition to unregulated charter schools and to over-reliance on high stakes testing.
• The National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado, publishes academic research and reviews research from other agencies on education policy.
• The Education Law Center, and its Education Justice program, and Public Advocates and other school law attorneys are working for school funding equity and civil rights protection.
Last week the education writer, Jonathan Kozol, reminded us about what most of us now know how to articulate but what, ten or fifteen years ago, we would have struggled to say: “Slice it any way you want. Argue, as we must, that every family ought to have the right to make whatever choice they like in the interests of their child, no matter what damage it may do to other people’s children. As an individual decision, it’s absolutely human; but setting up this kind of competition, in which parents with the greatest social capital are encouraged to abandon their most vulnerable neighbors, is rotten social policy. What this represents is a state supported shriveling of civic virtue, a narrowing of moral obligation to the smallest possible parameters. It isn’t good… for democracy.”
Today we are well-aware of the organizations that have persistently undermined support for public education and at the same time pressed for an unregulated school marketplace as the alternative: the Hoover Institution; the Heritage Foundation; the American Enterprise Institute; the Thomas Fordham Foundation; Michigan’s Dick and Betsy DeVos and their many far-right organizations; New York hedge fund managers spreading their billions across New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts via the dark money Families for Excellent Schools; the New Schools Venture Fund; the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington that promotes portfolio school reform; the Gates, Walton, and Broad venture philanthropies spending billions promoting charter schools; the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan that granted billions of dollars—without much oversight at all according to the Department’s own Office of Inspector General— to states to expand charter schools; and the American Legislative Exchange Council that promotes school privatization across the states via its large membership of state legislators.
The same election that brought us President-Elect Donald Trump also brought evidence that today’s public school advocates have become organized and effective. Question 2 to expand the growth of charter schools went down to resounding defeat in a Massachusetts referendum, and Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s plan for state takeover and charterization of Georgia’s struggling public schools was also soundly defeated at the polls. Voters responded to protect the idea of public education when the stakes for public schools were clearly defined by well organized and well informed advocates.
During a Donald Trump administration we must stay organized, raising our voices persistently to name and frame our concerns with precision and passion. A public education system is the best institution to meet the needs of all kinds of children and protect their rights through law. Our public schools are, of course, imperfect. It is our responsibility to pay attention and ensure that our schools work for all children. Democracy makes our role as citizens possible and requires engaged citizenship.
Looking back on his life as an education professor and advocate for education, Bill Ayers suggests something that will be particularly important for us to remember under the presidency of Donald Trump: that public education is the institutional embodiment of the values that define our democracy. “Education for free people is powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal. Every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a work in progress and a force in motion, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force, each of us born equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience and agency, each deserving a dedicated place in the community of solidarity as well as a vital sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Embracing that basic ethic and spirit, people recognize that the fullest development of each individual—given the tremendous range of ability and the delicious stew of race, ethnicity, points of origin, and background—is the necessary condition for the full development of the entire community, and, conversely, that the fullest development of all is essential for the full development of each. This has obvious implications for education policy.” (Demand the Impossible, p. 161)
By janresseger
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Signature gathering begins for $12 minimum wage initiative
Signature gathering begins for $12 minimum wage initiative
PHOENIX (AP) - A group advocating for worker’s rights is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Arizona that...
PHOENIX (AP) - A group advocating for worker’s rights is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Arizona that would increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, at the same time Republican lawmakers are proposing their own ballot measure that would give the Legislature sole authority to set the wage in the state.
The fight over Arizona’s minimum wage has grown amid widespread worker frustration over sluggish wage growth that has fueled presidential campaigns and led to legislative battles on both sides of the country - California and New York lawmakers are poised to pass bills lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next several years.
The Fair Wages and Healthy Families Initiative incrementally increases minimum wage in Arizona to $12 per hour by 2020 and requires employers to provide earned paid sick time.
The initiative campaign has less than four months to collect more than 150,000 valid signatures necessary to get on the November ballot. Arizona’s current minimum wage is set at $8.05 per hour and is increased annually based on inflation.
Campaign manager Tomas Robles said his group has worked with people on both sides of the issues to find a compromise that offers workers a livable wage without putting too much of a burden on employers.
“We feel that this wage increase is that happy medium that protects small business and helps workers who can’t pay their rent at the end of the month even though they work full time,” he said.
The campaign committee has received backing from the Latino rights organization Living United for Change and the Center for Popular Democracy, a social and economic justice advocacy organization, Robles said. The campaign aims to collect more than 250,000 signatures using a combination of paid and volunteer petitioners to ensure they can get on the ballot.
At the same time, Arizona Republicans have proposed to increase the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2020 with annual adjustments based on inflation - in a bid to stymie an increase in wages they say small businesses could not handle.
“This offering is kind of a counter-balance to the insane socialism we hear in other quarters,” said Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, during a committee hearing in March.
It would also prevent cities, towns and counties from setting their own minimum wage, which Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has said would “drive our economy off a cliff.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee passed the measure on a 5-3 party-line vote. It will now undergo a standard review before going to a Senate vote. If passed, House Concurrent Resolution 2014 could go before voters this November.
If both measures end up on the ballot and both pass, the initiative with greatest number of “yes” votes would win.
By RYAN VAN VELZER
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May Day rallies across U.S. target Trump immigration policy
Labor unions and civil rights groups staged May Day rallies in several U.S. cities on Monday to denounce President...
Labor unions and civil rights groups staged May Day rallies in several U.S. cities on Monday to denounce President Donald Trump's get-tough policy on immigration, a crackdown they said preys on vulnerable workers in some of America's lowest-paying jobs.
Protests and marches challenging Trump's efforts at stepping up the deportation of illegal immigrants drew crowds by the thousands to the streets of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with smaller gatherings popping up across the country.
Read full article here.
SF Finalizes Settlement in Nevada ‘patient dumping’ Case
SF Finalizes Settlement in Nevada ‘patient dumping’ Case
A $400,000 “patient dumping” ...
A $400,000 “patient dumping” settlement with Nevada approved Tuesday by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also requires that state to regularly report to The City for the next five years regarding any patients sent to California.
The settlement establishes criteria for sending those patients to California in the first place.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera had sued Nevada two years ago over the state’s improperly discharging psychiatric patients and sending them on Greyhound buses to San Francisco with little means and nowhere to stay, a practice first exposed by the Sacramento Bee.
The Nevada Board of Examiners, which reviews claims for payment, approved the settlement Oct. 13 and on Tuesday the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved it, making it official.
As part of the settlement agreement, made public Tuesday, Nevada agreed to only provide travel assistance for released patients based on certain criteria. That would include, for example, cases where the patient was a California resident at the time they were admitted for treatment in Nevada.
Other criteria includes cases where a clinic has agreed to accept the patient in the destination city in California or an acquaintance or family member has agreed to care for the patient.. The agreement also requires the discharged patient to have a travel chaperone, like a family member, who must be present when released in Nevada and accompany the patient on the trip to California.
“I’m pleased we reached an agreement that will assure the well-being of psychiatric patients when they’re transported, and that also offers a model for how jurisdictions can work together to better protect our patients and taxpayers,” Herrera said in a statement released shortly after the Board of Supervisors vote.
When the proposed settlement was reported by the San Francisco Examiner on Oct. 5, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said in a statement, “We look forward to working with California to ensure all patient transfers to and from both states are managed using these best practices and adhering to conditions detailed in the agreement.”
The settlement agreement requires Nevada to provide San Francisco with a semi-annual report regarding any patients Nevada’s state mental health system sends to to California between January 1 and December 2019. The report must include patient information like date of discharge and eligibility for travel under the agreement.
Since April 2008, San Francisco identified 24 patients bused from the state-run Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas to San Francisco, with 20 in need of medical care “some within mere hours of getting off the bus,” said the lawsuit. Over the past five years, Nevada sent a total of 500 patients by Greyhound bus to cities and counties in California,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit sought $500,000 in expenses for the medical care of the patients.
Also on Tuesday, San Francisco increased gun control regulations, which has prompted the closure of the last remaining gun store.
Supervisor Mark Farrell, who introduced the legislation, offered no apologies for the pending closure of High Bridge Arms at 3185 Mission St., which plans to shutdown on Oct. 31.
“I believe all of us in San Francisco will be better off,” Farrell said of the anticipated gun shop closure. The store was opened by Bob Chow, a Chinese American who competed in the US Olympics, in 1952, operating primarily as a gunsmith. In 1987, it was sold to Andy Takahashi, who before coming to San Francisco via Alaska lived in Japan.
The legislation requires the video recording of all firearms sales, which would be available to the police with a search warrant. The legislation would also require at least weekly reporting the Police Department of store bought ammo. The law was supported by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Even though our city and our state have some of the toughest gun control laws on the books there still remains more that we can do to protect public safety,” Farrell said.
The legislation was approved in a 9-0 vote. Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos were absent from the meeting. Both were attending the Local Progress convention in Los Angeles.
Source: San Francisco Examiner
Toys "R" Us Workers Meet with Senator Bernie Sanders and March Against Private Equity as the Legacy of Geoffrey is Further Tarnished...
Toys "R" Us Workers Meet with Senator Bernie Sanders and March Against Private Equity as the Legacy of Geoffrey is Further Tarnished...
Today, a group of Toys "R" Us employees met with Senator Bernie Sanders in Washington D.C., later marching alongside...
Today, a group of Toys "R" Us employees met with Senator Bernie Sanders in Washington D.C., later marching alongside representatives from The Center for Popular Democracy and Rise Up Retail as they took to the AIC in protest of private equity destruction at the hands of Bain Captial, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Vornado Realty Trust.
Read the full article here.
Families, Lawmakers to Speak at Rally in Washington, DC on Six-Month Anniversary of Hurricane María
Families, Lawmakers to Speak at Rally in Washington, DC on Six-Month Anniversary of Hurricane María
“Protesters will gather for a rally at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and then...
“Protesters will gather for a rally at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and then march towards several congressional offices to voice their demands. The event is organized by Power 4 Puerto Rico, a coalition made up of the Hispanic Federation and Center for Popular Democracy, among other community organizations.”
Read the full article here.
Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped...
The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000.
Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to run its campaign. The Phoenix-based firm got the job done in the form of Proposition 206, which will appear on the November 8 ballot.
Preliminary state campaign-finance records show that Bright Owl, a limited liability company of which Scheel is the sole member and manager, made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign on August 4.
Asked on Wednesday about the cash infusion, Scheel said the money is an interest-free loan, not a donation, and that it will be classified as such on the campaign's official pre-primary report, which is due to the state on Friday.
According to Scheel, the loan came in the nick of time to cover legal fees for an unexpected court challenge to the initiative, and was made possible by money he inherited after his parents died a few years ago.
"I couldn't think of a better way to honor their memory than to provide this loan, which has helped get our Healthy Working Families initiative on the ballot," he said.
If Arizona voters approve the measure, the state's minimum wage would go up to $10 an hour next year and rise to $12 in 2020.
But it almost didn't make the ballot. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued, claiming many of the petition gatherers hired by the campaign ineligible to collect signatures. The association wanted tens of thousands of signatures thrown out, potentially enough to knock the initiative off the ballot.
The campaign itself was in need of a raise.
Before Scheel's loan, the two largest payments to the campaign were a July 19 donation of $25,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union Region 8 States Council, and a May 12 donation of $25,000 from the California-based Fairness Project. Prior to that, records show, from January 1 to May 31, the effort was funded with $384,642 donated by the nonprofit activist group Living United for Change in Arizona, (LUCHA), which reportedly received money for the effort from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy.
During that same period in the first half of 2016, the group spent $337,975.59 on signature gatherers, printing services, and other expenses, including $3,000 in consulting fees paid to Tomas Robles, the campaign's chairman and LUCHA's executive director.
Scheel says the campaign pays his company $10,000 a month for campaign management, plus another $5,000 a month for communications, all of which is split by several people at Javelina.
On top of all those expenses came the legal bills for the lawsuit by the restaurant association.
"We didn't have money set aside for legal expenses," Scheel explained, adding that his loan was a "huge help" to the campaign. It was also a risk to put his own money on the line, he admitted.
"If the court had ruled against us last Friday, my $100,000 would be gone," he said. "Legal fees is basically what [the money] was spent on."
Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families
The group's tenacity, along with Scheel's inheritance money, paid off in the courtroom. Last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit because the association filed the complaint seven days after the signatures were submitted to the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, exceeding the statutory limit of five days.
Now, the website for Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families lists Bright Owl as a major funding source, along with LUCHA, the UCFW, and the Fairness Project.
Scheel, who hasn't made any other contributions to the campaign, expects to be repaid out of donations that come in between now and November, he said.
"There will be future donations coming into the campaign from donors," he said. "About $1.5 million."
In response to questions from New Times, he said he hasn't made any deals with the unions and activist groups behind the campaign, nor does he expect anything in return other than repayment, if the group can manage it. His loan simply came at the right time and was a "huge help" to the legal effort that saved the initiative, he said.
"This really is a labor of love for me," Scheel said. "When I work on a campaign, I go all in. I want it to succeed."
By Ray Stern
Source
2 days ago
2 days ago