(Go ahead and join the discussion on this topic on The Liberal OC… There are plenty more words of wisdom to be found! : ) – promoted by atdleft)

OK, get ready for this… I AGREE WITH A REPUBLICAN AGAIN! This time, it’s about SB 227. Senator Tom Harman (R-Huntington Beach) wants to mandate community service for high school graduation, and GOP consultant Adam Probolsky speaks out against this bill in “The Orange Grove” column in today’s OC Register. And you know what? I agree with him here:

The first thing that struck me about this legislation was its complete ignorance or misunderstanding of the high school student mind. Harman wants teenagers to learn to appreciate community service. So what does he do? He makes it an obligation. I don’t know about you, but my high school classes were monotonous, the homework was annoying, and I worked part time. Community service? Well, I left that up to the kids who felt they needed to supplement their otherwise unremarkable college applications. If I were required to complete community service, like one of my wayward colleagues avoiding Juvenile Hall, I probably would have resented every second of it.

Sure, it seems high-minded to require high schoolers to get out and learn some valuable lessons about community service… But does this really accomplish that goal? I doubt it, and I’ll let a good friend of mine tell you why after the flip…

People that support high school slavery programs like SB227 believe that service learning gives students a chance to realize the need of their community and helps the students appreciate the reward of charitable work. In truth, the forced servitude erodes the spirit of charitable work, and generates a disdain for community service in the hearts of young people.

I work as the Staff Development Manager for a non-profit in Garden Grove, and we team up with local universities and high schools to bring in “service learning” or “field study” students. Free labor for us, and college or high school credits for them.

When we get unmotivated students that are simply trying to fill a requirement, it usually turns out to be more taxing for our organization than it is worth.

We don’t have time to spend hours training and motivating someone who doesn’t believe in our mission. It would be cheaper for us to hire one (motivated) employee and pay them an hourly wage than sit around and convince an apathetic volunteer to care about our cause.

That’s Mike Lawson writing at The Liberal OC. Since he sees this all the time at his job in Garden Grove, I think he knows what he’s talking about. So if this doesn’t help the non-profits doing the community service, then why should we burden them with uncaring high schoolers who are doing doing this to check a box that needs to be checked in order to get a high school diploma?

And once again, why should we be forcing students to do something that they should want to do? This is simply preposterous. When I was in high school, I volunteered for my library because I wanted to. Sure, the “credits” I earned from my school for community service were a nice incentive… But ultimately, I volunteered at the library because I love books and I love learning. Now would it make sense for the state to force kids to “volunteer” (read BE SLAVES) at the library when they really hate being inside a huge building with a bunch of old books? Would they really put their hearts into their work? Would they really do the best job possible? And would they really learn the valuable lessons of community service?

I noticed that SB 227 was amended. Now, it offers elective credits for community service instead of a state mandate for it. That sounds better. I just hope that we remember that volunteering ultimately has to be voluntary.

x-posted from California Notes

On February 27 State Senator Sheila Kuehl introduced SB 840, a single payer health care plan for California. At the press conference Kyle Harvey, a carpenter with the Stockton Unified School District, told reporters,

Last summer our school district narrowly averted a strike. The reason [for the strike], the rising cost of healthcare. Four years ago we paid $5 out of pocket monthly for health insurance. Three years ago the price went to $40 per month, two years ago it went to $180, last year we were requested to pay over $400 per month.

As an example of what this meant, we had workers who were forced to choose between paying their mortgage or buying insurance. Maria, a sheriff’s widow and one of our food service workers, faced this choice. She could either sell her home and buy insurance, or keep her home, put her kids on Healthy Families, and go without her own insurance.

Fortunately, we were able to come up with a compromise and averted the strike. Thankfully, Maria was able to keep her home and insurance – that is for now.

This year, once again, we are facing double digit rate increases for the fifth year in a row. We cannot continue a system that raises costs and lowers benefits year after year.

Fortunately for Harvey and his co-workers, the Stockton Unified School District Board of Education is supporting single payer health care for California. Citing a “strong link between healthy children and student achievement,” the board passed a resolution last week which “affirms its support for a California single payer health care plan.”

“Once this plan is enacted, we will be able to concentrate on educating our kids, not jumping through hoops to find affordable comprehensive care,” says Harvey.

In the resolution which passed with only one dissenting vote board members noted, “a basic employer interest in the health and welfare” of employees. Employee health care has a direct impact on efficiency and productivity they said. If more employers would recognize the connection between employee health and productivity perhaps there would be more emphasis placed on finding ways to provide employees with affordable and comprehensive health care, like single payer.

Health care isn’t only an issue in school districts. Public and private employees everywhere are feeling the impact of increasing insurance cost, cuts in services, and insuring retirees. “The lack of affordable health care is a crisis of growing proportion in our local community, California and in the nation as a whole,” the Stockton Board said in their resolution.

Stockton Unified has chosen to support a solution that benefits the broader community. They noted findings from a January 2005 analysis of a proposed California single payer health care plan conducted by the Lewin Group. The report “confirmed that by pooling California’s purchasing power; creating efficiencies, and greatly reducing the administrative costs of health care, that all Californians would receive affordable, quality health care with the creation of a California single payer health care plan.”

If a single payer health care plan, such as SB 840, were in place now, Stockton Unified would save an estimated $10 million to $17 million. That’s money that could go toward actually teaching kids and improving schools.

The Board also noted “skyrocketing health care costs” which create serious economic problems for both employers and employees. With money diverted toward health care, wages and pensions are undermined. This increases the number of uninsured and under insured and places “a significant strain on funding for public institutions.” It also places significant strain on the rest of us who end up paying for the uninsured.

Stockton Unified has taken the lead among school districts, now it is time for the rest to get on board and pass their own resolutions. Resolutions supporting single payer should also be coming from cities, counties, and special districts. In an earlier post I wrote,

It makes sense that school boards would endorse single payer as a health care solution. Millions of dollars could be saved, if single payer becomes a reality. That’s money that would then be freed up to be used improve education and enhance student programs. Certainly employees would make their claim on the new money, and that will have a direct positive impact on schools as well.

Let’s hope that school boards across the state follow Stockton’s lead and support single payer health care in California.

Stockton Unified is leading the way in what could become another groundswell of support for single payer. Having more public employers join them in support will greatly enhance the opportunities that, at the very least, a pilot program can be established to prove the claims of a single payer system. At most, single payer becomes a reality in California and the nation.

This was surprising to me: grassroots action last week protesting the Governor’s prison policy.

Busloads of protesters fighting the construction of new penitentiaries swarmed the Capitol on Wednesday, while inside the statehouse, the simmering politics surrounding the prison overcrowding crisis boiled into full view.

The protesters attacked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to build 78,000 new prison and jail beds, saying that $11 billion worth of “bricks and mortar and debt” are no substitute for true reform.

Instead, the demonstrators – some dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and standing in makeshift cells – said lawmakers could quickly thin the inmate population by releasing geriatric and incapacitated convicts and by sanctioning thousands of parole violators in their communities rather than in state lockups.

I would add revising sentencing guidelines through a newly-created independent commission, but just the presence of these protesters at all suggests that this issue will not be as invisible as it has been in previous years.  Which makes sense, as we’re two months from a court-imposed deadline to do something about overcrowding.

over…

And good for Gloria Romero for stepping out on something that will win her no friends in the voting public, but is simply the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, political fireworks were flying over a decision by Senate Democrats to place a moratorium on bills that would lengthen criminal sentences and thereby exacerbate prison crowding.

The maneuver infuriated Republicans, but Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Senate Public Safety Committee, said it could not be “a business-as-usual year” in Sacramento given the overcrowding emergency.

“The Legislature bears a share of the responsibility for the crisis, and we must accept that,” Romero said. “We can’t keep having bills fly out of committee like pancakes just because we want to appear tough on crime.”

There have been over 1,000 such bills in the last 30 years.  They look good on glossy mailers and they can easily be used as a club to damage opponents.  But they have a major indirect impact on our quality of life.

And this mass incarceration is a symptom as well, a function of increasing inequality in the Bush years.  As the chasm between haves and have-nots grows, desperation leads to increased crime.  And then the imprisonment itself keeps the snowball rolling down the hill:

Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides-walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor…

The 1990s were said to be a time when rising tides finally did lift all boats. Western warns that part of the reason, statistically speaking, is that many poor men have been thrown overboard-the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western does, and joblessness swells. For young black men it grows by more than a third. For young black dropouts, the jobless rate leaps from 41 percent to 65 percent. “Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990s economic expansion,” Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites.

The increased recidivism rate and the drive to incarcerate more and more for longer and longer walls off opportunity to families on the wrong side of the race and class divide.  Prison policy is job policy, poverty policy, family policy, education policy, and so on.  It took a massive crisis to get anyone to focus on it, but I hope that in the future, we can understand it in these terms.

(OK, done! And if you have something to say about this Dana Point ordinance, then go ahead and go to the city council meeting tonight at 5:00 PM! – promoted by atdleft)

“We are trying to … keep our population comfortable and safe,” she said. “Enforcing immigration law is not a city job.”

That’s what Dana Point Mayor (AND Candidate for AD 73 in 2008) Diane Harkey has to say to The OC Register about a “No-Trespassing Ordinance” that may very well become law tonight in Dana Point. And if Dana Point does pass this ordinance, it will be the third South Orange County city to do so…

But what does this mean? The new law will prohibit day laborers from congregating on private property… But will it really kick all the “illegals” out of Dana Point? Will it solve the problem of all the “illegal aliens” loitering in front of city businesses?

First, it was the Costa Mesa City Council taking federal law into their own hands by voting to deputize police officers as immigration agents…
And now, much of the nation is following. First it was just the Minuteman Project, but now it has become a giant monster.

So what is it about these anti-immigration measures taking off in Orange County, and spreading throughout the rest of California, and being copied elsewhere in the nation? As a native Orange County resident, I live in the middle of all of this…
And I want to examine the issues surrounding local governments enforcing immigration law. Today, we go to Dana Point to figure out whether this “No-Trespassing Ordinance” will really work. Follow me after the flip for more on this latest attempt in Orange County to weed out the undocumented…

So why does Dana Point want to jump on the “NO TRESPASSING!!” Bandwagon? Well, city officials are complaining that local businesses are hurting because of all those “illegals” lingering on their property.

City officials said local businesses have suffered from the presence of loiterers on their property.

“They are getting impacted,” Dana Point Police Chief Mark Levy said.

Day laborers congregate on Doheny Park Road in Capistrano Beach. Levy drove through the area at around 10 a.m. Monday.

“We have a large group of people who are just standing there, just hanging out,” he said. “They didn’t look like they were ready to go to work at all.”

So perhaps Dana Point will enjoy the same success that Lake Forest has had since that city enacted its own “No-Trespassing Ordinance”. Also from OC Register:

For about 15 years, the day laborers in Lake Forest have sparked debate. Critics say they urinate in public, litter, drink in public and harass passers-by.

The Lake Forest City Council in October passed a citywide no-trespassing law stating that a property owner or someone designated by the owner can file a complaint with the Sheriff’s Department if a trespasser refuses to leave the property. No-trespassing signs must be posted throughout the property. Violators can be cited or arrested.

Some property owners around the unofficial day laborer site, on Jeronimo Road, Orange and Cherry Avenues, hired private security to enforce the no-trespassing law.

And the no-trespassing law seems to be working.

Two men were arrested last Saturday during a protest for the right to solicit work on the sidewalk. The security guard warned them to leave the private property, Lt. Jay LeFlore, Lake Forest chief of police services, said. After booking and an immigration check, the protesters were cited and released.

Oh wait! But just HOW SUCCESSFUL has Lake Forest’s ordinance been? So successful that the day laborers moved a few hundred feet and across the city line to Mission Viejo?

Lake Forest property owners and city officials are thrilled that a new ordinance and security guard have greatly reduced the number of day laborers gathering to seek work in their city.

But the workers haven’t disappeared. They’ve gone next door to Mission Viejo.

Day laborers, as a result of Lake Forest’s recent measures, are moving from Jeronimo Road and Orange Avenue in Lake Forest to Jeronimo and Los Alisos Boulevard in Mission Viejo.

So what did Mission Viejo do? They followed through with their own ordinance…
And went a step further. But anyways, can this “Beggar Thy Neighbor” approach to kicking day laborers out of one’s own town (only to dump them on another town) really work?

After all, can Dana Point, Mission Viejo, and Lake Forest really evade the law of supply and demand? If people continue to demand cheap labor to tend to their tropical gardens and clean their olympic-sized pools and remodel their designer kitchens and paint the new master bedroom, then the supply of day laborers will remain. So can the UCI anthropology professor and the Orange City mayor offer valuable words of wisdom?

“The ordinances are just shifting the problem around,” said Leo Chavez, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. “They are moving from one corner to that corner. In reality, it becomes a floating labor supply.”

In the city of Orange, which has seen its share of debates over day laborers, Mayor Carolyn Cavecche said it’s “like squishing Jell-O. You crack down on one area and they move to another.”

And is that UCI Chicano Studies professor onto something as well?

Associate Professor of Political Science and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine Louis DeSipio said the ordinance would not change the demand for day workers.

“These day laborers are there because people in the community are hiring them,” he said.