In her spare time, whenever that is, Professor Sara Cooper has taken on the modest task of building a footbridge between two nations with icy relations. Cuba is far closer to the U.S. mainland than any of the Hawaiian Islands, but to most Americans, far more a mystery.
The footbridge is a non-profit book press, Cubanabooks, which Cooper launched in May 2010. Cubanabooks today released its second book in this country, a bilingual edition of “Disconnect” — in Spanish “Desencuentro” — by Cuba’s popular Nancy Alonso. Without Cubanabooks, Alonso’s short-story compilation probably wouldn’t have made it across the Florida Straits.read more
Sydney Cambra, who spent her sophomore year at the fledgling Chico Green School, scrambled this week to enroll at another school a week after classes had begun in the Chico Unified School District.
Cambra, who chose Chico High School, was forced to make the switch after CUSD revoked the Green School’s charter and reported it in violation of state law. Representatives at the school subsequently announced it was closing its doors to fall-term students.
Chico Unified School District says the charter high school has violated the Brown Act, California’s open-meetings law. The decision to pull the year-old school’s charter was based also on its failure to become a candidate for accreditation after a spring visit by an accreditation committee, but it was the Brown Act allegations that dealt the hardest blow. Violations of state law trigger a cut-off in funding to charter schools that are run independently but financed by public monies.
It was the first time the school district had revoked a charter since it began chartering independent schools, and the Aug. 17 split Board of Education vote came in a meeting that concluded with a few angry parent outbursts. On Aug. 19, the school district’s attorney, John Yeh, found himself in Butte County Superior Court facing off with a Green School attorney.
But the Green School failed to convince Judge Sandra McLean that she could stop CUSD from reporting alleged Brown Act violations to the state Department of Education. Soon after, Green School Board of Directors Chairman David Orneallas said the school was encouraging its more than 40 students to seek classroom instruction elsewhere for this semester.
But the Green School has yet to fire a teacher or give up the lease on its building. Orneallas said it would file an appeal of CUSD’s decision to Butte County Office of Education as early as Aug. 26. He said the school wants to keep teachers — many of whom have been recently hired from out of the area — on “in some capacity,” and will struggle to make payments on a $100,000 revolving loan from the state of California.
“We do plan to rise like a phoenix from the ashes,” said Orneallas. “We’ve come a long way.”
Chico Green School opened last fall as a Waldorf-influenced school that would make sustainability a central curricular theme. But troubles soon emerged: teachers complained publicly that there were administrative problems, and CUSD sent the school two formal notices that threatened charter revocation if certain conditions weren’t met.
Green School teachers and parents soon became concerned about administrative problems, and some say the matter of student discipline emerged as a thorny issue. Chico Green School had advertised itself as a college-prep high school, but many of the students it attracted were teens who had struggled or failed at other schools.
“I don’t think the administration had anticipated getting the students they did get,” said Cynthia Bryant, the mother of Sydney Cambra. “I agree that discipline was somewhat lacking… they didn’t have a system to deal with much,” she said. But she says the school was changing direction. “They were set to go into this school year with a whole [discipline] policy,” Bryant said.
Bryant recently joined the school’s board of directors and has been speaking publicly, arguing that the school needs another chance. Bryant says her daughter had “slipped through the cracks” at CUSD schools and liked going to Chico Green School.
After enrolling her daughter there, Bryant said she became troubled by the school’s lack of communication with parents. In June, she and another parent called a meeting, and parents voiced their concerns about matters like discipline, homework and communication to administrators. That helped propel the school to change, she said. “I’m not somebody who wants to throw away my child’s education,” Bryant said.
The Board of Education voted 3-2 in favor of revocation, with President Kathy Kaiser and trustees Eileen Robinson and Andrea Lerner Thompson voting in favor. The revocation was opposed by Vice President Jann Reed and Trustee Liz Griffin. But Griffin earlier in the meeting said something had gone “very much awry with this school.” “You had a planning year to put your house in order,” Griffin said. “That time was not well-utilized. There were too many internal struggles going on.
“It’s very, very difficult to have trust and confidence” at this point, she added.
Before the meeting had concluded, Green School founder Kent Sandoe stormed out after shouting at the board, “Shame on you.”
Charter schools, by law, are given more freedom than other public schools, but are also supposed to be held to a high standard for accountability.
For the past 20 years, Fair View High School Principal Bernie Vigallon has roamed his continuation school campus and beyond, busting pot-smokers and herding kids to class. At the end of the school day, he often visited families, sometimes bought them groceries and on one occasion, pulled a student who was missing the critical days prior to graduation from a den of methamphetamine use.
Vigallon, who during his 30-year tenure in the Chico Unified School District came to be known as “Mr. Vig,” retires June 3 as Fair View principal and as director of alternative education for the district. In the latter position, Vigallon built a program that now serves 500 students — kids who suffer from alienation or abuse, who struggle with learning issues, or who became immersed in delinquency or drugs.
Many people believe 63-year-old Vigallon has built Butte County’s most effective crime-prevention program; his legacy is one of the state’s largest alternative education programs in a medium-sized school district.
David McKay, who will move up from the assistant principal position to assume leadership at Fair View, said that many districts run alternative ed out of a “portable or two in the parking lot.”
Chico Unified, like other California school districts, has pared down its budget for continuation schooling as it struggles to stretch shrinking dollars for some 13,000 students. But while some small school districts have virtually eliminated programs, CUSD seems determined to sustain what Vigallon built.
When Vigallon took over Fair View in 1988, it had a graduating class of only about 15 students. Last week, 137 students graduated from the school, where 82 percent of the students are identified as socio-economically disadvantaged.
At the May 25 graduation, senior Shaquaya Henry asked her fellow students how many of them had found their lives changed by Vigallon. Dozens of arms shot up in the Masonic Lodge auditorium. Yet, there are apparently hundreds or even thousands of testimonies to that effect.
Henry, who now plans to become a teacher through the state-funded Rural Teacher Pathway program tailored to youth from disadvantaged communities, said that when she came to Fair View, she was a “habitual ditcher” who “used drugs.”
“I soon learned that failure at Fair View was not acceptable,” Henry said in her speech.
At his last Fair View graduation as principal, Vigallon was introduced as “the Godfather.”
In fact, Vigallon is part village godfather, part inspirational teacher and part tough, charismatic coach. But the paradox is that while Vigallon can steal a stage with his bellowing voice, biting humor and stories of redemption, he shuns praise and shifts the spotlight, whenever he can, to his family, staff, or students themselves.
Vigallon seems to know that the future of the program he built rests not on the force of his personality, but on the staff, district and the community’s willingness to support schools that give teens second and third chances to rise above what are often tough circumstances.
“These kids have the same aspirations as other kids, but their original schools were too big, too fast,” Vigallon said. “We really slow things down. Here, they get to become somebody.”
One of his former students who has become somebody came from a family who was “deep into methamphetamine,” Vigallon said. When she began missing days that were jeopardizing her graduation, Vigallon and the school psychologist paid a visit to her home. They hesitated uneasily outside the house, then knocked and entered.
Inside, Vigallon said there were about 15 “hard-core guys” who didn’t see why the girl needed an education. Vigallon and his colleague were able to escort the girl from the house. They bought her clothes, and at graduation, watched her walk the stage with her classmates. She went to community college and now works with teens in this area.
During his tenure with CUSD, Vigallon opened the Center for Alternative Learning for middle-school students and the Academy for Change for young people who have been expelled from public schools or sentenced to time in juvenile hall. He’s seen students fail at Fair View, but return seven or eight years later to complete work for a diploma through the district’s GED program that he worked to expand.
Without the continuation programs, Vigallon said it’s reasonable to assume that “a segment of these kids who have had a difficult past would end up in incarceration of some sort.”
“There isn’t any other safety net for many of these kids,” Vigallon said. “You can’t compete with a community college student for a job, so what are you going to end up doing? Communities that don’t have these programs have higher crime rates.”
Eliminating alternative ed and paring back music and athletics in California’s public schools, Vigallon warned, will lead to increased demand for services in the juvenile justice system, behavioral health and social welfare.
As a youngster, Vigallon was a poor student prone to fighting who persisted in east Oakland schools because of his love of football. His father, the son of Spanish immigrants, worked in construction, received his first pair of shoes at age 8 and knew nothing about college.
But Vigallon earned two master’s degrees as he became increasingly passionate about working with young people who come from tough, humble and multicultural backgrounds like his own.
A CUSD administrator said Vigallon has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money assisting students. He’s bought bikes, bus passes and food for his students when he felt they needed those things to survive or succeed.
Deputy District Attorney Brent Redelsperger, who heads the juvenile division of the Butte County District Attorney’s Office, said Vigallon’s reference letters for young people are written selectively and therefore, taken seriously.
“The courts have a lot of respect for him,” Redelsperger said. “He has a soft heart, but has been good at knowing which kids were taking responsibility for themselves. We’d take at face value what he said.”
The alternative ed programs are based on goal-setting, accountability and recognition when students achieve objectives. Every year, Vigallon has received a half-dozen or so visitors from school districts elsewhere in the state. In 1997, he was named “Director of the Year” by the California Continuation Education Association.
For 30 years, Vigallon has worked 50 to 60 hours a week, shepherding students while building a program that would survive his departure. In the past seven years, he’s struggled to maintain and grow the program even while losing a dozen staffers to budget cuts. The staff-student ratio, he said, has increased from 20 to 1 to 35 to 1, making the battle against truancy all the tougher.
For three years, the man he groomed to succeed him shared his small Fair View office. During the office-sharing, McKay said he watched Vigallon form “profound connections” with some students, came to understand the value of credibility and learned that some of his boss’s tricks can’t be copied.
“Whenever there was a bad situation, or a near crisis, I found that he had always gotten one in the bank with a person, or with a family, or with a community group,” McKay said. “He’s a master at building and sustaining relationships. Trust is a huge element of Vig.”
But in some ways, Vigallon is enigmatic and inimitable, and on occasion, McKay said “he should be wearing a huge ‘Do not try this at home’ warning label.”
A version of this story appeared in the June 2 Chico News & Review. Leslie Layton can be reached at chicosolnews@gmail.com
Chapman Elementary fourth-graders build California missions
by Leslie Layton
Chico Country Day School’s classroom No. 22 was hopping on a spring morning with 29 fourth-graders on the cusp of greatness. Regan had opened the world’s largest orphanage, Morgen had found a cure for malaria and Alex was a “record-breaking lawyer.”
The charter-school students were completing an assignment that required they imagine themselves 30 years in the future as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Each student was putting together an issue of the magazine honoring his or her future self.
One mile to the east, at Chico’s most diverse public school, fourth-graders at Chapman Elementary were also tackling a hands-on project, but theirs was a fourth-grade ritual, one performed for decades. Each student was building a cardboard model of a California mission he or she had selected and researched.
Both Chico Country and Chapman are public schools running on taxpayer dollars in south Chico. Their differences go beyond the matter of structure – Chapman is a traditional school – and illustrate how the charter movement may re-shape public education by increasing segregation based on class, ethnicity and even ability.
Take a look at the numbers. At Chico Country, less than 1 percent of the student body is comprised of Latinos learning English as a second language. (There were five last spring, up from two the previous year.) The school serves free and reduced-price meals to 125 children (25 percent of the student body qualifies.)
At Chapman Elementary, 52 percent of the students are Latino and Hmong children learning English as a second language. Federal guidelines qualify 92 percent of the students for subsidized meals. “For some of these kids, these are the two meals a day they get,” said Principal Ted Sullivan as he supervised breakfast.
Chico Country doesn’t come close to matching the demographics of the Chico Unified School District, while Chapman, located in low-income Chapmantown, serves a large number of the district’s English learners and disadvantaged students.
Class and ethnic segregation were occurring in school districts long before charter schools appeared, but a UCLA study shows the charter movement worsening the racial, ethnic and class divide in most of the country. And the high number of white students enrolling in Chico-area charter schools was a trend seen throughout California and even the western United States in the study “Choice Without Equity” released last February.
The study shows that in Butte County, white students made up 81 percent of the 2008 charter-school population and only 67 percent of the traditional-school population.
“We found that charters were acting as havens for white students,” said Research Associate Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a co-author of the study at the School of Education’s Civil Rights Project. The study brands the charter movement a “civil rights failure,” in part because of what authors sometimes call “white-flight.”
In Chico, the contrasts in class and culture at Chapman and Chico Country are at the heart of the charter-school divide. Throughout the Chico Unified School District, teachers and parents worry that many of the 10 local charter schools are “skimming” – attracting students who are the best prepared and who have parents who can help in the classroom and in raising funds.
Probably most media-consuming Americans are by now familiar with the charter-school fairy tale — the inner-city school rescuing impoverished kids and opening doors to opportunity. But those schools aren’t the norm, and the charter movement, like any sweeping reform, is grounded in a mix of realities and myths.
The 1992 charter-school law was designed to foster innovation, choice and competition by giving the schools the freedom to operate much like private schools. But how competition will improve education for the majority of Chico kids is unclear. Chico Unified serves 82 percent of the district’s students, including those who are most challenging and expensive – most disabled children, English-language learners and students with behavioral problems.
English learners are vastly under-represented at all but one of 10 charters — Nord Country School, located in a farming community on the outskirts of town.
“I do worry that if the trend were to continue, taken to the illogical extreme, one could see where we would be Chico Unified EL [English learners]/Special Ed,” said Bob Feaster, CUSD assistant superintendent of human resources. “In [terms of] diverse groups, we’re kind of going backwards to the old, ’50s, let’s-have-separate-but-equal.”
Added CUSD Superintendent Kelly Staley: “But not equal.”
In a recent interview, Feaster and Staley discussed the inequities in the 1992 charter-school legislation that make it tough for traditional schools to compete with charters. Charter schools can disregard much of the state education code, sidestep union contracts and spend more of their funding any way they wish.
Most Chico charters promote a mission or philosophy attracting a particular demographic. A sophisticated parent can shop for a school that specializes in Montessori or Waldorf or sustainability. And it takes know-how; you won’t find any local agency offering a complete list of public-school options. You hear about them from newspaper, radio, television and movie theatre ads as if schools were breakfast cereal.
For children of parents who don’t own a good car (for transportation), who don’t have the skill and knowledge to shop for a school, or who don’t have the will to cross cultural barriers, school choice is a myth. The parent-volunteer requirements that have been adopted by many charter schools around the country are also a barrier to low-income families, said Siegel-Hawley.
Chico Country Day School (CCDS), the city’s largest charter, provides themed, interdisciplinary education. But it also expects parents to volunteer 50 hours a year at the school.
Teacher Susie Bower is Chico Country’s “Integrated Thematic Instruction” guru. She said she designed the Time magazine assignment to tie in with a class theme of “citizen responsibilities.” But the assignment also provided her students an opportunity to imagine themselves as leaders in a field of their choice.
Fourth-grader Regan paused to consider a reporter’s question. “I’ve learned that really, if you want, you can be whatever… you can open a big orphanage…,” she said. Then, smiling coyly as if she knew she was about to utter a cliché, Regan added, “The sky’s the limit.”
Perception or Problem
Like most successful charter schools, Chico Country has mythic qualities. The school doles out available slots in a lottery that inevitably drives some parents to elation or tears. Its test scores reflect a strong curriculum and contribute to its reputation for academic rigor – even though it’s out-performed on standardized testing by a traditional public school, Shasta Elementary.
Chico Country parents chafe at the perception that their sky-is-the-limit school is exclusive. “I get a little defensive when I hear us called ‘privileged,'” said Shayne Law, president of the parent-teachers organization. “Everyone has the same option. You don’t see Mercedes in the parking lot.”
All Chico parents have the same option Law had – if they know how to enter the lottery and can volunteer. Preference is given to children of staff and siblings of students for the 542 slots. Then, for about 28 remaining kindergarten slots, CCDS runs a lottery on a day that is the hardest of his year, said Principal Paul Weber. About 200 kids end up on the waiting list.
But while parents may not see themselves as privileged, many outside the school do. The charter school’s 15-member board of directors includes prominent Chicoans – a former police chief, business owners, professors, attorneys.
Chico’s Angela Lopez stumbled upon Chico Country while searching for a new school for her son, who until the middle of the last school year was a Chapman fifth-grader. But the boy was having trouble with another student, and eventually came home with a minor knife wound to his arm.
She had often walked by Chico Country, which is four blocks from her house. “I always thought, ‘That looks like a nice school,'” she said. She asked about transferring her son there. There was a mid-year opening and the boy was admitted.
At first her son complained there were only a couple of other Hispanic kids at the school, Lopez said, but then he adjusted. She said he’s with “rich kids” who seem nice. A single parent of eight children, she hasn’t yet been able to fulfill the volunteer requirement, but considers herself fortunate.
Latino parents are largely unaware of charter-school options, she said. “They live by a school and want their children to go there because it’s close. I’m really happy I found out about that school.”
The earliest charter proponents wanted to give parents like Lopez a choice in schools. Charters, they thought, could help close the achievement gap, particularly in large cities where inner-city schools were failing impoverished communities. In the 1980s, the charter movement gained traction as conservatives saw a chance to weaken powerful teachers unions and bring deregulation to public education.
The result is a charter law that states there should be “expanded learning experiences” for the “academically low-achieving,” but doesn’t provide an enforcement mechanism to the school districts that authorize charters. State law says charter schools should plan to reflect the diversity of the district authorizing their charters.
Last winter, Chico Unified asked Chico Country for a “stronger commitment” to increasing diversity after the charter school petitioned to renew its charter and open a high school, according to a CUSD report. Chico Country re-submitted its charter petition with several new measures aimed at diversifying its lottery pool. The charter school said that within the next two years, it will hire a bilingual outreach coordinator.
The ability of charter schools to limit their size and control their make-up – while public schools must accept everyone who walks in the door — is one of the wedges that divide communities like Chico. Weber dismissed rumors that charter schools sometimes screen out difficult-to-serve students by re-directing them, and described the selection process parents themselves go through.
“We tend to get parents who are a little more active,” Weber said. “Everybody looks at a school in terms of whether it’s a good fit for them. Someone who comes in and says, ‘I want diversity’ might feel they can’t get what they’re looking for here, whereas someone who values art and music might like [the school].”
Perhaps because they’ve slashed salary costs, charters often offer electives, smaller classes and teacher training. Chico Country says its pay scale mirrors that of Chico Unified, but the cost of a teacher, in salary and benefits, is on average $20,000 less. CUSD — either because it has many older teachers and/or a superior benefits package — spends an average $85,000 per teacher.
As the school district works to stave off insolvency, it’s increasing class size, cutting electives and laying off teachers. It’s lost more than 1,900 students in the past 12 years, costing it millions in state funding. CUSD wants its 586 teachers to take a pay cut, but negotiations with the union are stalled.
Parents like mom Jeanne Greene face the kind of stark choice — diversity or electives — described by Weber. Greene chose a non-charter school for her daughter, Rosedale Elementary, because it offers Spanish Two-Way Immersion, and with that program, a second language and diversity. Some of her friends send their children to Chico Country.
“They have great programs, great test scores, and all the extras, like music and art,” Greene said of the charter. “And when you get your kid in through the lottery, it really is like winning the lottery; that’s how they perceive it. But it’s white-, white-, white-bread America. It’s so skewed ethnically and racially it doesn’t represent the population, not even of this city.”
For years, Chico Country distributed fliers in Spanish and Hmong, and recently began setting aside some lottery preferences for the diverse Barber Neighborhood where it’s located. Weber pointed out that by law, the school can’t give preferences based on race or ethnicity.
Research on charters has shown mixed results, that some are great and some are terrible. Yet both the Obama Administration and the state are under the charter-school spell. An indication is the amount of money poured into charter-school planning grants. The California Department of Education awarded more than $48.5 million in federal funds to 101 new schools during the last fiscal year, according to its website.
With four new charter schools opening this month in Chico, competition amongst schools for the students who bring in per-pupil state funding is fierce. The new Chico Green School promised each student who enrolled an Apple iPad reader, and said it would be one of only five schools in the nation to base its curriculum on digital materials.
Two Philosophies
By segregating students, whether or not it’s intentional, charter schools can more easily adapt their curriculums to student needs.
Principal Weber has been working on a petition for a new charter school based at Chico’s Boys & Girls Club called PACE — Partnership to Advance Community Education. The plan is to take strategies that have been successful at Chico Country, but tweak the program for students who may have different academic needs and parents who work long hours.
The club, Weber said, offers a chance to develop a program that has “more emphasis on basic skills and tutoring during an extended school day. The way we work with parents would be different, too.”
Weber responded to critics who say that school segregation by academic level is disadvantageous, particularly to students who are struggling.
“You can’t teach everybody the same way,” Weber said. “I don’t know the answer, but I do know that it doesn’t do anybody any good to have Jimmy and Sally — who have really different needs — in the same room. Wouldn’t it make sense that you’d develop different programs?”read more
When Shannon Anderson asked the police who were on the porch of her Orland home why they planned to arrest her, an officer radioed the question to headquarters.
It was a recent March Monday, and Anderson had answered the door in her shorts, t-shirt and socks, hardly expecting to be greeted with handcuffs. She was shocked by the one-word response that came back over the Orland police radio: Truancy. Then, the 37-year-old mother of four was booked into Glenn County Jail in Willows on a $10,000 warrant.
Anderson soon realized she had been arrested in connection with her dispute with the Orland Unified School District over her youngest son’s attendance record. Her 8-year-old son Logan suffers from asthma, the cause of most of his 24 absences this school year. Anderson has only been able to persuade the school to excuse 14 of the absences, even though she says that in many cases the district nurse agreed Logan should go home.
The charges that had been filed against her were serious and distressing. There was a felony forgery charge based on the allegation she had altered a doctor’s note. There was a charge she had violated the education code by failing to get her child to school. And the charges were also filed against her husband Jamie, who was arrested and jailed the following day after posting bail for his wife.
Another Orland couple, Anthony and Cherrie Hazlett, face the same charges; arrest warrants for both the Andersons and Hazletts were issued Feb. 18, according to court records. All four Orland parents deny altering or forging doctors’ notes in an effort to get their children excused from school.
Their harsh treatment has sown fear in this farming town west of Chico on Interstate-5. There are rumors of parents who want to disenroll their children from the public schools and parents who worry they, too, could face charges. The Andersons’ attorney, Helen Duree of Orland, said she had spoken with a parent who feared that keeping a sick child home could mean arrest.
“This is a reign of terror over parents and their sick children,” Duree said March 24.
Attorneys argue that the felony charge filed against the Andersons and Hazletts doesn’t fit the alleged crime — that of doctoring the doctor’s notes.
Furthermore, the California education code section 48293 cited by the district attorney’s office as “failure to send child to school” clearly calls for fines for the first, second and even third violations. And the Andersons contend the Orland school district made little effort to work with them over the perceived truancy problems.
In a March 25 phone conversation, Glenn County Assistant District Attorney Dwayne Stewart declined to comment on the cases. Asked why he had filed felony charges based on a penal code section designed for evidence altered for legal proceedings, he said, “Come to court to find out.”
Some parents believe a truancy crackdown is underway, driven by worry over state funding tied to student attendance. But Orland Unified School District officials deny there’s any such crackdown. “My interest is making sure kids are safe and in school,” said Superintendent Chris von Kleist.
The Orland school district employs a truancy officer and requires doctors’ notes after a student racks up 10 absences, von Kleist said. And this year, it began requiring short-term independent study for students who are removed from school for winter trips of five to 10 days to Mexico or elsewhere, helping students stay up on work and helping the district maintain state funding tied to attendance, school officials said.
Students classified as “Hispanic” or “Latino” are more than 50 percent of enrollment at Orland schools, and about 58 percent at Fairview Elementary where Logan Anderson was attending. Between 15 and 20 percent of town residents are usually below the poverty line.
Orland Unified School District makes four to five referrals to the district attorney a year for truancy, but von Kleist said he doesn’t remember parents being jailed or charged with felonies in the past.
The Sacramento Valley Mirror has reported, however, on the case of an Orland parent who was arrested and jailed two years ago. Bud Watson was charged with a misdemeanor, and though the charges were dismissed in court, he spent $12,000 on his case, the Mirror says.
Shannon Anderson said her Kafkaesque tale began the morning of Jan. 11. Two of her sons — Logan and 11-year-old Dustin — were sick. Both were vomiting, and Dustin was sneezing and coughing. Anderson took the boys to see the district nurse, who refused to excuse either boy.
Dustin attended school for the next few days, becoming progressively sicker, until he was diagnosed with pneumonia, Anderson said.
Because Logan continued vomiting after they left the nurse’s office, she took him to the office of Orland doctor James Corona. She was given a note on which someone in the office wrote, “sick with flu,” Anderson said. She provided a copy of the note during a recent interview at her kitchen table. She is accused of altering the date and diagnosis with white-out; she denies any such tampering.
The doctor, Corona, has himself become the center of dispute. He has denied seeing Logan that morning and refused to give the Andersons or even their attorney Logan’s medical records. Duree says Corona told her he was acting under instructions from the district attorney’s office. “The parents can’t get their own child’s medical records,” Duree exclaimed. In an earlier interview, she suggested perhaps he had been “intimidated by a government office.”
An uneasy Corona returned a call to this reporter and said he hadn’t seen Logan in 2010. “I have nothing to do with this situation,” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Public defender David Nelson, who’s representing the Hazletts, questions the logic of requiring doctors’ notes. Many of Orland’s families probably find it difficult to get and pay for doctor visits, he pointed out. “Poor families may or may not have health insurance,” Nelson said. “And good luck getting an appointment on the day your child’s sick.
“Since when have we taken child-rearing away from the parents and given it to the schools?” Nelson said.
Cherrie Hazlett, who has pleaded innocent, said in a brief telephone interview that she has legitimate doctors’ notes for her children’s absences, though she may not have turned all of them in swiftly because she herself was sick. Cherrie Hazlett is a homemaker and her husband a printer for a Marysville newspaper; they have three children.
The felony charges are based on Penal Code 132 making it a felony to offer altered or forged evidence in court. A conviction can result in a prison sentence; they’re the kind of charges that “ruin lives,” said public defender Nelson.
As a child with asthma, Logan Anderson can be covered by the American Disabilities Act, attorney Duree said. The school district should have worked with the Andersons on a “504” she added, producing a study plan for a child with a disability. “This is a nice family struggling with a sick child. Having them arrested in front of their kids is way beyond the pale. The DA went way overboard, concocting charges that don’t apply.”
In November, Shannon Anderson signed an Attendance Intervention Program (AIP) contract used by the district. She said she was told then she’d be prosecuted if she didn’t sign the contract. The contract warns that another unexecused absence will make her child a “habitual truant.”
Shannon Anderson said that when she signed the AIP contract, she hoped she’d be able to get any needed excuses from the district nurse and save on the $20 copays for doctor visits. She and her husband said they’ve filed for bankruptcy twice because of medical bills. Shannon Anderson is a homemaker and her husband a supervising diesel mechanic who works in Chico. Their four boys have college ambitions, but the parents have recently had to pour their rent money into bail bonds.
The Andersons and Hazletts, meanwhile, have each pulled two children out of the public schools and placed them on a privately-run home school program. Shannon Anderson wonders whether the district attorney’s office assumed the parents would stay quiet because they lack resources or sophistication. “I think they wanted to make an example of us. They thought we wouldn’t fight back,” Anderson said. “They thought they had two sets of parents who were goons.”
Leslie Layton edits ChicoSol. A shorter version of this story was also published in the March 25 Chico News & Review.
