HealthyCal.org

Caregivers Resource Center supports residents dealing with Alzheimer’s and other memory impairment disorders

By Melissa Flores

When a loved one starts to show signs of a memory impairment or other brain disorder, seeking out help can be hard for family members.

Mickey, a Salinas woman who asked that her last name not be used to protect the privacy of her loved ones, didn’t know she needed help until she attended her first caregivers support group.

“I thought I had it all under control,” she said. “The first time I went to a meeting, I was in tears. It really helped me. A lot of women think they can do it all.”

Mickey started caring for her 78-year-old father, who has diabetes and had a foot amputated, and her 72-year-old stepmother, who has late-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, four years ago. Her family had agreed that the couple should move from King City to Salinas so that they would have more support. Mickey said when they first moved to Salinas, she and other family members put together a schedule to share the duties. But after a few months everyone else started to get busy and most of the burden fell to Mickey.

Mickey cooks dinner for her father and stepmother, makes sure they take their medications, puts her stepmother to bed, and shuttles them to doctor appointments. She goes from her day job to their home every weekday, and spends the weekends with them. It was at an appointment at a social services office that Mickey first saw a pamphlet for the Del Mar Caregivers Resource Center.

The Center is funded through the California Department of Mental Health, private foundations, government grants and private contributions. They offer services that range from respite care so that a full-time caregiver can get a break away from caregiving; care planning that connects caregivers with resources in the community and helps them to develop plans to share duties with other family members or friends; legal and financial consultation to help with planning for the cost of long-term care or setting up living wills and power of attorney; counseling and support groups; and workshops and training for caregivers.

The services are provided on a low-cost or no-cost sliding scale.

When Mickey first called Del Mar, she connected with Travis Beye, a family consultant. He invited her to a support group and is currently working to sign her up for respite care, which offers caregivers a break from the duties by providing a small stipend for someone else to come in and care for the loved one. She said he was looking at providing respite care one day a month.

Mickey’s family was unfamiliar with Alzheimer’s disease so she said her stepmother’s diagnosis was delayed until it was moderate. She said since the diagnosis, she has done a lot of research on the disorder to understand what is coming, but she said she still struggles with finding resources directly devoted to Alzheimer’s.

The support group has been helpful for Mickey. She said that each month there are different speakers who talk about different issues caregivers can face.

“I’m very glad I made it,” Mickey said. “It helped a lot getting things out. I was angry and had a lot of resentment (at my family) for not helping. I felt it was not fair.”

Caregivers: Call early for help

Like Mickey, Christina Andrade, a family consultant with the Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center, said that families often wait until the care giving duties have become a challenge before they call for help.

“Most call when they are in what we call a crisis,” Andrade said. “We calm them down.”

She suggested that families look into the resources in their community long before they think they need them. In Salinas, there are a variety of support groups as well as other agencies in addition to Del Mar that offer assistance to families dealing with a variety of disorders. She said that it is a good idea for families to get on a waiting list for services so that when they do need them, they will have access to them more quickly.

“Hopefully the two time frames will be about the same,” she said, of when they make it to the top of the list and need the services. “It doesn’t hurt to use services a little bit” so that they are already familiar with them when they become more of a need.

One of the first thing Andrade and the other consultants who work with families in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties offer is a guide sheet on how to get help from other agencies.

“We have a guide sheet that we give to families on using community services,” Andrade said.

The guide sheet acknowledges that it can be stressful and it can take some time for families to connect with the right services. It has simple tips, such as choosing a time to place calls – noting that Friday afternoons are the worst time to reach someone. Del Mar staff members work with caregivers who are caring for a family member who is impaired due to Alzheimer’s Disease, stroke, dementia, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, multiple sclerosis, brain tumors or brain injury, mild cognitive impairments, or other conditions that may cause memory loss or confusion.

Andrade noted that some services, such as funding for Alzheimer’s Day Care programs, were cut in 2009. Caseloads at Del Mar have increased since they too have faced funding cuts. Consultants have less time to do the outreach they used to do, such as visiting doctor’s offices and clinics to promote their services and ask for referrals. They try to get pamphlets stocked in senior centers, social services agencies and other places where families in need are likely to be.

Aside from encouraging families who have not had an official diagnosis to talk with a doctor about the condition to get a proper diagnosis, Del Mar is focused on supporting the caregivers.

“It’s all geared toward the caregiver,” Andrade said. “To giving them what they need to take care of their loved one and themselves.”

Andrade noted that many caregivers experience depression or other medical ailments that are associated with stress. One study showed that 60 percent have some kind of depression.

“They can be grieving the loss of the person and the loss of their own person as it is faded away,” with helping the family member.

She said some people go through a pre-grieving experience as they watch a loved one decline.

“Studies have shown if a person gets four hours total break away they were found to have less depression and less onset of medical issues,” Andrade said, of a need for weekly time off. “We encourage them to ask for help, if they haven’t asked for help from other family, friends or their church.”

She said often caregivers are more willing to ask for help from an agency than from family or friends. A family consultant can help facilitate a meeting with family members to help the primary caregiver enlist more help from others.

“We are directed toward the needs of the caregiver,” Andrade said of the meetings that focus on current needs and potential needs. “A task for people can be to simply come over and mow the lawn twice a month.”

Andrade said that in Monterey County and the Salinas area, there is more funding for respite care than in other communities covered by Del Mar.

“They have a whole other pot for respite giving through the Monterey County Area Agency on Aging,” she said.

Support groups and education are key

Andrade said though there is some funding for respite care, Del Mar’s big focus is on educating caregivers through support groups as well as workshops and training.

The support meetings can be especially helpful because Andrade said that outside family members or friends don’t always see the full extent of a person’s decline. Oftentimes, Alzheimer’s patients or those with other disorders will be on their best behavior while others visit.

“They can be very with it for the visit,” Andrade said, adding that some who are not closely involved with day-to-day care may believe the caregiver is making a bigger deal out of things. “While they visit, ask them to stay and be there for a while.”

She said that around the holidays when families often have visitors from out of town, they often get calls from adult children who are concerned about a parent after spending an extended time visiting.

“They cover up very well,” Andrade said of when someone first displays signs of Alzheimer’s disease. “They can have it for three to four years before it is diagnosed.”

Del Mar offers support to both primary caregivers, who take care of a person’s day-to-day needs, as well as caregivers who have outside help such as a nursing home but who still need to advocate for their loved one’s needs.

“We teach them how to talk to staff,” Andrade said. “They learn communication skills…getting the staff to listen to them and also educating families of rules and regulations.”

The age of caregivers as well as their relationship to the person they are caring for can vary. Andrade has seen an uptick in grandchildren caring for a grandparent in recent years. Many men and women care for a spouse and children care for parents.

Del Mar has also given workshops on placement for families who can no longer care for a loved one at home.

“They haven’t failed as a caregiver,” she said. “This is just the next step.”

She said that once a family member is in a nursing home or other care facility, the family members can become advocates for them.

“I look forward to the meetings,” Mickey said of her support group. “Every time is different, but everything they talk about touches me.”

By Matt Perry
California Health Report

CUTLER–A silver water tower looms over the local middle school just down Main Street from the Family Education Center, two of only a handful of buildings in this tiny community. Downtown Cutler is merely a blip on the radar to anyone driving through California farm country.

Few visitors to this nondescript burg would imagine it as home to one in a series of cutting-edge health clinics that raise the bar on low-cost, community-based healthcare with a sophisticated set of integrated services spanning primary care to alternative medicine and social outreach.

The Family HealthCare Network includes 11 clinics dotting rural Tulare and Kings counties, both agricultural economies in the heart of the central San Joaquin Valley populated heavily by undocumented workers.

A leading state rural health executive says the clinics push the envelope of low-cost care into the future where poor patients are treated holistically.

“There’s an old adage that 80% of a person’s health has nothing to do with the healthcare they receive,” says Steve Barrow, executive director of the California State Rural Health Association. He praises the Family HealthCare Network clinics: “They get it.”

Fiercely devoted to their motto “We provide quality healthcare to everyone in the communities we serve,” the clinics provide essential medical services to the farm laborers who are the backbone of California’s rich agricultural economy. Staff members including “promotoras,” or health advocates, also reach deeply into the community to assist with mental health, child care, housing, employment, education, teenage counseling, even relationship issues.

“Using a pure medical model isn’t going to get you very far,” says Harry Foster, president and CEO of the network, headquartered in Visalia. “Health has a lot to do with the spiritual, mental, and body that (create) a healthy organism.”

In rural Cutler, many undocumented farm workers once lived in shacks with dirt floors until the network partnered with local enterprises to build a farm worker housing facility right next to the health clinic.

“Moving them in to that kind of housing dramatically improved their health just in and of itself,” says Foster, who left hospital administration to work for the network the last 29 years.

In the midst of underserved communities, the clinics provide traditional medical services including primary care, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology.

But it is the additional services that set the rural clinics apart: mental health, chiropractic care, alternative medicine. nutritional advice, reproductive counseling, and a wide variety of other services.

“It’s all related to health,” says Lupe Vasquez, clinic manager of the Cutler site, which also serves neighboring Orosi. “If you need help, we’re here.”

Sheryl Jones is typical of patients who visit the clinics. In the past 10 years she has used a vast array of services including pediatrics, dentistry, psychology, stress management, weight management, nutritional counseling, even homeopathy (which employs highly diluted tinctures as cures).

The mother of five adopted boys with special needs, Jones says it would be impossible to take care of her family otherwise.

“It would be awful,” she says. “I usually see someone there about once a week for some sort of service, whether it’s a class or the counseling or the dentistry, something.”

In 2010, the 11 clinics served more than 100,000 different patients with over half a million appointments. About 95% are Latino; most are undocumented farm workers or their family members.

The network employs nearly 700 people. Most of its clinical workers are bilingual.

First established with a single clinic in 1976, the network’s model is to knock down barriers to health access, including transportation.

“The individuals who live in those communities walk everywhere,” said Janet Paine, director of marketing and grants development.

In response, the networks share four vans to help transport patients to clinics or between clinics.

Money is often a huge obstacle.

“Our capitalistic system doesn’t work for people in Mexico – or most people in Latin America – because they have a hard time trying to ‘buy the idea’ of paying for healthcare,” says Foster.

The clinics operate on a sliding scale for those with no healthcare coverage. Many patients will pay $20 a visit. Some of them will pay nothing.

Tulare county trumpets itself as the second-highest grossing agricultural county in the United States – with over $5 billion in production last year – but it is also home to the some of the highest rates of poverty among seasonal Latino farm workers, most of them undocumented Mexican immigrants.

One Latina in her 50’s (who preferred anonymity) has visited the Cutler clinic over 100 times in the past five years with her husband and four children. She suffers from diabetes, while her husband is also being treated for high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Her children have visited frequently for colds and flus, also receiving vaccinations. The family depends on the shuttles provided for transportation.

Each facility has a staff member dedicated solely to its Patient Assistance Program; in Cutler this is administrator Elizabeth Flores.

Flores estimates that about three-quarters of Cutler’s patients use the assistance program, particularly for diabetes and hypertension.

“I’ll do my research until they get the medicine they need,” smiles Flores, who spends her day sourcing free of low-cost medicines and products, including nebulizers, inhalers or prescription drugs – using in particular the website www.needymeds.com. “When somebody tells me no, it makes it exciting for me.”

Flores’ biggest success story was helping a pregnant 39 year-old woman who had insurance that wouldn’t cover the needed prescription ursodiol. Flores fought with the insurance plan. The patient got her medicine.

Barrow says the clinics overcome a common complaint: low-cost rural or urban community clinics are typically outdated, dreary, and depressing.

“Their clinics offer state-of-the-art, culturally sensitive, quality care,” says Barrow. “From what I have seen around the state in other rural areas they match up well to even more well-financed clinical settings in more affluent areas of rural California.”

“We strongly believe that having a nice place to go contributes to people feeling better,” agrees Foster.

The network has applied for federal status as an accredited “Patient-Centered Medical Home” – an innovative concept that uses a holistic, culturally appropriate model.

Adam Marks, a physicians assistant in Cutler, says the network is already a long way down the road toward the designation.

“Our organization is providing a lot of the services that make a medical home successful,” says Marks. “Now it’s about coordinating those services in the best way to keep our patients healthy.”

Foster says becoming an official medical home will help speed adoption of electronic resources that allow patients to access their records online and track custom programs for diabetes, weight loss, cholesterol and other conditions.

Already designated a federally qualified health center (FQHC) in 1989 – which pockets the network 8% of their budget in federal funds – the medical home designation will help the network serve patients with more electronic resources, including telehealth – providing health services electronically.

In March, the clinics implemented electronic health records (EHRs) which allow the clinics to share health records.

With millions of California’s 7 million uninsured expected to get some form of insurance in 2014 under the federal Affordable Care Act, the network is already positioning itself for further growth. By June of 2013 they will have a new dental facility and four new clinical settings in the two counties. Urgent care centers are currently being considered.

What can healthcare reformers learn from the low-cost Family HealthCare Network model?

“Where they’re going is the traditional American way,” says Foster, “which is just going to leave a lot of people out, and drive costs up. There is a much more cost-effective way of proving quality healthcare.”

Playwright Josefina Lopez reads her poetry at Boyle Heights history night.

By Robin Urevich

Former San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen has created a small oasis for readers in LA’s Boyle Heights, a working class neighborhood that just a year ago, could have been described as a book desert with few purveyors of the printed word.

Kipen’s combination bookstore and lending library is called Libros Schmibros, a nod to the community’s mostly Latino residents and the Jewish immigrants who settled there in the early part of the last century. It opened its doors in a small storefront on the same day the local library announced cuts in hours, which have since been restored, Kipen said.

Kipen last worked as director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he encouraged reading nationwide. In Boyle Heights, he’s still evangelizing.

“Readers live seven years longer than non-readers,” he said. The statement is open to question, but Kipen said he hopes to someday convince his epidemiologist brother to conduct a study to prove it.

Meanwhile, on a recent Friday afternoon, he appeared to be hedging his health bets by snacking from a party tray of leftover baby carrots, celery sticks and cherry tomatoes.

“Want a nosh?” he asked as he tapped on a laptop.

Kipen grew up on LA’s west side and when he returned home last year, the self-described transit geek checked out one of the LA Metropolitan Transit Authority’s newest rail lines to East Los Angeles.

He liked the friendliness of Boyle Heights and its mom and pop shops.

“You can walk to get what you need and never set foot in a chain store,” Kipen said.

Pollution from a maze of freeways and crime are still issues, but Kipen argued the violence has been somewhat tamped down.

Kipen’s business card seems to underline the joy of his Boyle Heights find with a quote that reads, “Los Angeles is like your brain. You only ever use 20 percent of it, but imagine if you used it all.”

He settled into an apartment behind what is now the shop and moved his collection of some 7,000 volumes into the storefront to sell and lend.

Boyle Heights residents can buy books for $1. Others pay half the cover price. Every book in the store is available for lending, usually for three weeks. No fines, but donations for late returns are accepted.

After reading of the shop’s opening in the LA Times, musician Ry Cooder stopped by with four boxes of mysteries, Kipen said.

The bookstore still seeks donations, especially Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, who Kipen says are among the most sought after authors. HP Lovecraft is also a favorite.

So are books that teachers commonly assign to high school and college students.

To Kill a Mockingbird is huge, said Andrew Vazquez, a teacher who’s looking for work, and one of four volunteer staff members. Spanish – English and French- English dictionaries are also popular, he said.

A special collection, including some first editions and review copies studded with Kipen’s post-it notes, is stored in a glass-enclosed bookcase.

A pop-up version of Libros Schmibros is now selling and lending books at the Hammer Museum in Westwood near UCLA, where Kipen was asked to set up shop last month as artist-in-residence. With a dwindling supply of affordable books in that community, Kipen reports that business is brisk. He has been held over until November 5.

In Boyle Heights, Libros Schmibros’ décor – traditional Mexican folk art paper cut-outs and Japanese lanterns – reflect some of the neighborhood’s ethnic roots.

Sometimes called LA’s Ellis Island, authors and documentarians have taken a closer look at the neighborhood in recent years. On a Saturday evening in October, some of them were at Libros Schmibros’ Boyle Heights history night, one of several store events that link the waves of immigrants who settled there in the last century.

Playwright Josefina Lopez, who runs a local theater and whose “Real Women Have Curves” was made into a 2002 coming of age film set in the neighborhood, led off with a poem about her own childhood in Boyle Heights.

George Sanchez, a USC professor told stories that could show up in his upcoming book on the neighborhood. One was about a 73-year old African American woman who had learned of his work and presented him with a couple of grocery bags full of letters, a record of her daily World War II-era correspondence with Japanese American former classmates at Roosevelt High School who were suddenly shipped to far-flung internment camps.

There had to be a back story, Sanchez told the audience, because as the parent of a teenager at the time, he knew no one that age would write so many letters without a compelling reason.

It turned out that when the woman was in middle school, she was a shoo-in to be elected student body president. But her principal insisted she withdraw from the race.

She was certain it was because she was Black, but agreed to pull out anyway. Her Japanese-American classmates were not so accepting, and boycotted the vote in solidarity. The letters were a way to return the favor.

Richard Nieto, who graduated from Roosevelt in 1957, was among several attendees who remembered the neighborhood and his multi-ethnic friendships with nostalgia.

“We were all poor but we didn’t know it until we went to college,” Nieto said.

“Boyle Heights used to be one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city. Now it’s one of the least diverse,” said Boyle Heights Historical Society president Malissa Strong.

That’s one reason the book shop caught the eye of customer Shawn Gamez, part of the community’s Latino majority who was browsing on a Saturday afternoon.

“This Jewish guy opens the bookstore. He has the balls to do it,” Gamez said, noting the tension he’s sometimes felt when venturing into other parts of the city.

Gamez, 29, is something of a regular now, along with his six-year-old daughter.

“For me, it’s nice in that kids get curious. Not a lot of kids read anymore.”

And, Gamez said adults also stand to benefit from the books and culture the store brings.

“I would like to see people get wiser in communities like this. If people get wiser, it might change things.”

By Genevieve Bookwalter

Ken Moore brags about the water quality in Kerman, a Fresno County city of nearly 14,000 surrounded by farmland.

While other Central Valley towns report infamous water problems with nitrates and chromium 6 contamination — issues that include infant deaths, birth defects and cancer — Kerman’s water only needs chlorine added to kill bacteria before it flows through city pipes, said Moore, Kerman’s Public Works Director.

But that situation soon could change as California considers tightening laws regulating chromium 6, a known carcinogen that is an industry pollutant but also occurs naturally in groundwater around the state.

While the amount of chromium 6 in Kerman water now is about half of what California allows, a public health goal released in July recommends an amount thousands of times less than that to protect public health.

As a result, Kerman and as many as one-third of the state’s water agencies could be forced to retool their water treatment strategies, according to state figures. Those improvements, Moore said, could come at significant cost.

In Kerman’s case, Moore said he’d have to install the town’s first drinking water treatment plant.

“That’s dramatic. It’s really ridiculous,” Moore said. “We’d have to vote no.”

California in July released a new public health goal for chromium 6, a carcinogen made famous in the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich for contaminating water and causing cancer in those who drank it in the San Bernardino County town of Hinkley.

A public health goal is the recommended drinking-water limit for chromium 6. It is set to ensure water customers who drink two liters each day for 70 years will not develop cancer. A public health goal is a recommendation, not an enforceable limit, but lays the groundwork for developing that limit, state officials said.

California’s current chromium 6 limit in drinking water is 50 ppb. The new goal is .02 ppb. Kerman’s readings hover around 25 ppb, Moore said.

In Hinkley, power company PG&E was accused of contaminating groundwater with chromium 6 after it dumped the chemical, which was used to fight corrosion, into unlined ponds there. PG&E settled for $333 million in 1996.

In Fresno County in 2006, PG&E settled for $335 million in a similar chromium 6 pollution case in Kettleman City.

The state has labeled chromium 6 a carcinogen since 1987, said Sam Delson, spokesman with the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Chromium 6 was included on that year’s list of chemicals identified by Proposition 65, which prohibits them from being dumped into drinking water and requires notification if they are sold in products.

But pressure for a lower chromium 6 limit grew after the Erin Brockovich movie and increased media attention focused on the carcinogen, Delson said. In 2001, the state began creating the public health goal that was released in July.

Now the issue passes to the California Department of Public Health, which is tasked with creating a legal, enforceable chromium 6 limit in drinking water. While the public health goal considers only the well being of water drinkers, the “maximum containment level” also takes into account the cost and effort new regulations would require of water companies.

Ralph Montano, spokesman for the Department of Public Health, said it could be another four years before that limit is finalized, a timeline typical for these types of reviews.

Up to two years, he said, likely will be spent researching what new chromium 6 limits would require from water companies, among other issues. The second two years would be spent holding public meetings, soliciting comments and developing the final rule.

“That is the same process that any other kind of change would have to go through as well,” Montano said. Arsenic, for example, went through a similar process before its legal limit was revised in 2008.

Those supportive of reducing chromium 6 limits acknowledge the new legal standard likely will be higher than the goal of .02 ppb.

“While an ideal enforceable standard would be .02 ppb, Environmental Working Group recognizes the costs on utilities to purify water after pollution, whether from natural or industrial sources,” said Renee Sharp, director of Environmental Working Group’s California office. The environmental group focuses on public health and has been an advocate for tighter chromium 6 limits.

However, “to be health protective, the legal limit would have to be significantly lower than 50 ppb, and as close to .02 ppb as feasibly possible,” Sharp said.
Sharp recommended concerned water agencies contact the state for help with additional or improved treatment facilities.

A bill by Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno, and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown this month could make that easier. It allows communities to apply for full funding from the state to pay for water treatment improvements that customers can’t afford.

But Moore said his district operates with more money than many of the smaller Central Valley towns, and therefore has a hard time competing for grants. He’s also frustrated after the company about 10 years ago paid to dig new wells to meet the state’s stricter limits on uranium.

Depending on where the new chromium 6 limit lands, “it would drive up the cost of water in this town dramatically,” Moore said. “What they can’t do is put everyone out of business.”

Students, parents and community supporters rally at California Endowment's LA headquarters.

By Robin Urevich

In Los Angeles, a change in the city’s daytime curfew law is on the City Council agenda. The law is aimed at keeping kids in school, but activists have waged a two-year battle against it, saying it’s punitive, discriminatory and counter-productive.

For years, students who were on the street after classes started, even those who were rushing toward school, faced a $250 fine. Their parents were forced to miss work to attend court hearings.

In Boyle Heights, Roosevelt High School senior Angela Herrera said police descended on a Carl’s Jr. restaurant where she and more than a dozen students had stopped for breakfast one morning last October.

“It was scary…I thought someone was trying rob Carl’s Jr.,” Herrera said.

Herrera said she and her classmates weren’t skipping school; classes had been delayed because of college entrance testing, but she said the officers wouldn’t listen to their explanations.

“They blocked the exits. It was like a raid,” said Matthew Hernandez, also a Roosevelt senior who was there that morning.

Herrera and Hernandez said they were held for more than an hour, then packed into police cruisers and delivered to the dean’s office where they were ticketed.

Roosevelt High School senior Cinthia Gonzalez said if she was running late, she sometimes stayed home rather than risk being caught on the street after the school bell rang.

“I would tell my parents that I’m sick,” Gonzalez said.

“To us, it seems ironic. How do you expect students to go to school when they’re afraid [they’ll get a ticket]?”

Students like Gonzalez, Herrera and Hernandez, along with teachers and community groups, rallied and petitioned against the ticketing policy. Herrera and Hernandez fought their tickets in court and won.

Now both the LA Police Department and the LA School Police have stopped aggressive ticketing near school campuses.

“Student attendance is not a criminal justice issue,” said City Councilman Tony Cardenas, who is leading council efforts to change the law.

Cardenas said he was alarmed when he learned about the large number of truancy tickets issued to kids of color. Latino and African-American students got 88 percent of the nearly 50,000 so-called truancy tickets issued by LAPD officers between 1994 and 1999 even though the two groups combined make up 74 percent of the LA Unified School District population.

The LA School Police Department issued 16 percent of its truancy tickets to African Americans, who comprise nine percent of LA Unified School District students. No such tickets were given to white students, said Laura Faer, an attorney with Public Counsel, who has represented ticketed students in court.

She said some citations were literally handed out at the schoolhouse door by waiting police officers. Faer noted that low-income students are more likely to be cited because more of them walk or take the bus to school than wealthier kids.

Cardenas said the curfew law revision that he’s proposed is problem solving oriented, not punitive. He expects the council’s public safety committee to take up the matter later this year.

Now, ticketing is down but tardiness remains a big problem, said Ben Gertner, principal of Roosevelt’s school of communications, new media and technology, one of seven small schools within the school.

Each day last year, about a fifth of his students arrived late, effectively delaying the start of class for everyone, Gertner said.

Tardy students also cost schools money. Those who come more than a half hour late are considered absent, and the state doesn’t reimburse schools for their attendance.

“I’m very glad that we’ve moved away from criminalizing tardiness,” Gertner said. “But I feel it’s important that the people who led the effort to make the change be involved in creating something effective in its absence.”

Cardenas pointed to an ongoing series of meetings between school administrators, court and city officials to develop alternatives to punitive tardy policies. They point to the neighboring Alhambra Unified School District in LA County and Baltimore City Public Schools as models the LA Unified School District might adopt.

LAUSD administrator Nancy Franklin said the district has been moving toward less punitive disciplinary policies since 2005.

So-called school-wide positive behavior support—focused on getting to root of students’ problems, not punishing them—is official policy, Franklin said. An independent evaluation released this month notes the program shows signs of success. But the new systems might not be in place in every school, Franklin said, because making change in the nation’s second largest school district is achingly slow.

The efforts are part of a statewide movement to reverse zero tolerance disciplinary policies that call for automatic suspensions for offenses like fighting and police involvement for some rule breaking.

Last month, a sea of green T-shirted students from across the city rallied at the California Endowment’s Los Angeles headquarters where they were linked by videoconference with similar gatherings in Sacramento, Fresno and Oakland.

“Push Back Against School-Push Out” was the message students wore on their shirts, as they and their allies both denounced harsh disciplinary policies and celebrated victories, like the one students won in Los Angeles.

Cinthia Gonzalez stepped to the podium to explain how Roosevelt students had fought back.

But later she noted that much remains to be done to keep kids in school.

“Our schools are built to look like prisons,” Gonzalez said. There are cameras in the hallways. It makes you feel like it’s a hostile environment.”

She wants to change those things because, she said, “For us, education is the only way out.”

By Rosa Ramirez

Police take an oath to protect and serve. But some parents and local residents say they don’t feel any safer having cops in schools.

Since the lethal shooting of 20-year-old Raheim Brown in January by an on-duty Oakland Unified School District police sergeant, some community activists and residents have questioned the role of the police on school grounds. Some parents are even calling for the dismantling of the district’s school police force.

“I don’t want police in my son’s school,” said Oakland resident Sheri Morer, during a recent board meeting. And she’s not alone.

College student Jabari Shaw, who has four children, including three boys who attend Oakland public schools, fears his children are at higher risk of being harassed by school police for fitting a specific profile: male, low-income, energetic and African American.

“Look at them, they fit the description,” said Shaw recently at the Oakland Unified School District building. “They have dreadlocks and they’re black. So, they’ll be targets eventually if we don’t get the police out of our schools.”

But Troy Flint, spokesman for the school district, said police are there to protect students, teachers and other school personnel from crime that happens on campus and the surrounding areas. And at a time when Oakland Police Department has downsized due to budget cuts, having school police on school grounds is even more critical.

A 2009 National Crime and Delinquency Council report showed that only about 40 percent of students in Oakland public schools reported feeling safe at school.

“The officers are assigned to specific schools and worry about those schools rather than the entire neighborhood,” he said. “They provide a greater level of security.”

In addition, the district has a number of intervention programs to help students resolve conflicts.

“I can guarantee you that we have more behavioral mediation programs” than other school districts, Flint said.

It has been a particularly tumultuous time for the Oakland school district’s police force.

Brown’s family and others had called for an independent investigation of the shooting. Instead the school district had an internal investigation, which concluded that no district policies, practices or regulations were violated. Later in August, then-school police chief Peter Sarna retired at 41 amid accusations that he made racial slurs against an African-American colleague. The district tapped into Sgt. Barhin Bhatt, the highest-ranking member of the school police department and the officer who shot Brown, to lead the 16-member police force.

“They sent a message that a black life doesn’t count. That you can do anything and nobody will say anything about it,” said Philip Byers, a community organizer with the Black Organizing Project, a program of the Center for Third World Organizing. “There’s no caring, no compassion for what happened to Raheim Brown and his mother. It was basically a slap in the face.”

“There’s a lack of transparency around the role of the police engagement with students,” said Jackie Byers, director of the Black Organizing Project. “A real kind of block around parents and students being able to find out how accountability happens even within the district and the school board.”

School police programs started in the United States in the mid-1950s, but didn’t gain prominence until the 1990s in response to highly publicized school shootings, such as those in Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky and Columbine High School in Colorado. Now, approximately 35 percent of elementary, middle and high schools in the country have school police officers.

The Oakland school district created a security division in 1957 made up of two officers to protect school property. The officers patrolled the buildings and responded to burglary alarms. The division began to grow and officers began to take more law enforcement responsibilities in the two decades following. In 1983, the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, the agency that trains law enforcement officers from school police to sheriff’s department, certified the division as a full-service police department.

Richard Reed, assistant director of administration at POST, said school police officers must have additional training to work with students in addition to basic training. All officers are required to have 24 hours of continuous training every two years, he said.

Reed said his agency conducts regular audits to ensure departments are meeting the standards. A 2009 POST audit showed that Oakland school police department was in good standing. A second audit is scheduled for 2012.

Little research has been done on the effectiveness of school resource officers, or school police, in providing a safe learning environment for students and educators. At least one researcher has identified a “school-to-prison pipeline” as a result of having police officers in schools, according to the article, “Police at School: A Brief History and Current Status of School Resource Officers.”

During a 2005 labor dispute with school police, the school district told the state’s Public Employment Relations Board that in the “few years of having an independent police force actually reduced and worsened services to school sites and reduced the safety of the students in general.”

Aside from 16 sworn officers, the district counts 79 security officers that report to the police chief, Flint said. Officers are assigned to specific schools and can respond quickly if there needs to be, for instance, a lockdown because of a problem happening in the school or vicinity.

“It’s important for Oakland schools to supplement crime prevention with our own special dedicated officers,” he said. “That’s particularly true since we need rapid and immediate response.”

Some are skeptical.

“Police will most likely arrest the students and that puts them in the system. There’s a chain reaction,” said Leslie Phillips, a long-time Oakland resident. “The high school students don’t feel comfortable having police on campus.”

Phillips said having police in schools makes students feel unsafe, and in certain situations, it becomes the first contact students have with the juvenile justice system for incidences that in the past would have merited a talk with the principal, a counselor, or a call home to parents.

The school district has had three police chiefs in two months. On Sept. 2, Lt. James Williams of the Oakland Housing Authority became third person to lead the small independent police unit.

During a special school board meeting on Sept. 7, Superintendent Tony Smith introduced Lt. Williams.

“We’re very happy to welcome him and very thankful to the Housing Authority for their partnership,” Smith said.

Jackie Byers of BOP said it’s going to take more than changing the leadership of the school police to mend the relationship with the students and parents.

“This had just come at the tail end of where there was a murder of a young black man by a high ranking police officer who was then named as the next in line,” she said. “Which tells us that as an institution the school district is not in a position to hold itself accountable in any kind of way. And it’s time for the community to play that role.”