Upfront
Local news, information and analysis
Gun control events to be held this weekend Palo Alto, East Palo Alto will host candlelight vigil, rally and gun buyback by Gennady Sheyner and Ranjini Raghunath
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dvocates for gun control are hoping to raise the issue’s profile this weekend as various local cities and community groups host events aimed at getting guns off the streets. A candlelight vigil is planned for
Friday, Feb. 22, in downtown Palo Alto. On Saturday, a gun-buyback program will take place at East Palo Alto City Hall while a rally is scheduled at Palo Alto City Hall. Gun control has come to the forefront across the nation following the
Dec. 22 killing of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and President Barack Obama’s identification of gun control as a major priority during his “State of the Union” speech earlier this month. In San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has proposed laws banning hollow-point ammunition and requiring police notification any time someone buys 500 or more rounds of ammunition.
Earlier this month, Lee wrote a letter to the Palo Alto City Council urging the city to support similar legislation. “The Newtown tragedy has reinvigorated the national gun control debate and inspired many to ensure that we are doing all that we can do to keep citizens safe,” Lee wrote. “I have personally committed myself and my administration to pursuing all avenues to keep guns and the
most deadly forms of ammunition out of ill-intentioned hands.” Politicians aren’t the only ones stepping up. Volunteer groups have been popping up in the Palo Alto area to urge greater gun-control efforts. Several will hold events this weekend, coinciding with the gunbuyback event in East Palo Alto. “We really need to end gun vio(continued on page 12)
EDUCATION
District moves to correct civil-rights violations Bullied student granted residential placement as second federal investigation surfaces by Palo Alto Weekly staff
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Veronica Weber
Mike Lanza, author of “Playborhood,” jumps on his children’s trampoline beside their play house. He and his wife looked for months to find a neighborhood where kids play outside rather than follow a heavy schedule of organized activities.
YOUTH
Menlo father takes child’s play seriously Bucking the norm, Mike Lanza seeks to foster neighborhoods where children play outside by Chris Kenrick
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ith resources to buy a nice house in Palo Alto or Menlo Park and expecting their first child, Mike Lanza and Perla Ni beat the bushes for a single feature that was critical to them — a home on a street where kids play outside. They would drive around neighborhoods on weekend afternoons looking for “kid debris” and knocking on doors to ask residents whether children played outside. “It’s almost impossible to find,” said Lanza, a tech entrepreneur who, since that experience more than eight years ago, has made
it his life’s work to promote unstructured neighborhood play for kids — his own and others. “And the real-estate industry was no help at all.” Lanza, author of “Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play,” will speak Monday, Feb. 25, in an evening event at Cubberley Theatre sponsored by Friends of Preschool Family. He will discuss ways parents can promote neighborhood play and help kids develop into “active, meaningful adulthood” through playful childhoods. “One way to characterize my
life is that I’m applying entrepreneurship skills to my kids’ childhood,” said Lanza, who launched a series of tech startups before turning his professional attention to child’s play. Lanza grasped early in his quest for a neighborhood with street life that he was bucking the cultural norm, a norm he believes has been turned upside down since his own fondly remembered youth in Pittsburgh, Penn. “Now, there are a lot of neighborhoods with a lot of kids, and (continued on page 10)
Palo Alto middle school special-education student whose complaints of bullying and harassment led to a federal civil-rights investigation and a scathing reprimand of the school district received approval last week from the district for placement in a residential facility. According to the student’s family, Superintendent Kevin Skelly personally approved the placement in a meeting Wednesday, Feb. 13, the day after a school board meeting in which he and board members apologized for mishandling the case and heard other parents relate emotional stories about bullying and a lack of response by the district. Skelly and the district have been on the defensive since the revelation two weeks ago that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) had conducted a months-long investigation in the fall of 2011 and that Skelly had failed to inform the board of the investigation’s conclusions or the settlement agreement he signed on behalf of the district last December. (See article in the Feb. 8 edition of the Weekly.) Documents show that the investigation was completed and conclusions known to district administrators last April, and then eight months passed before a final settlement was reached with the government. During that period, according to the family, the district repeatedly refused to consider moving the child to a specialized alternative school in spite of a doctor’s assessment that returning to the middle school would harm the student. School board members learned about the Office for Civil Rights conclusions in the case and its
criticisms of the school district’s handling of the case only after the Weekly article was published. Formal OCR investigations leading to resolution agreements are quite unusual, according to data provided by the Department of Education in Washington. Nationwide, during the last four years, of more than 1,500 complaints of disability discrimination by school districts only 21 cases, including the bullying case in Palo Alto, were the subject of investigations and resolution agreements. The others either were deemed unfounded or were resolved through informal mediation. When apologizing to the board at its Feb. 12 meeting, Skelly said he had been “embarrassed” by the findings in the report. He pledged to share such news in the future. But the next day, after an inquiry from board member Melissa Baten Caswell, Skelly acknowledged there was a second case investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for which he signed a settlement agreement on Sept. 28, 2012. Skelly then emailed the entire board informing them of the second case and of the settlement agreement. “I sincerely apologize that, once again, some of you have been taken by surprise by press inquiries involving another OCR case,” Skelly wrote. “My only explanation for why this, and the other OCR resolution agreement on the bully case, were not shared with you immediately is that entering into these is something new for me and my direct reports. We have not had complaint cases go this far in my (continued on page 8)
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