MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2013
Volume 12 Issue 67
Santa Monica Daily Press
LOCAL ROAD ADVISORIES SEE PAGE 8
City officials scramble to keep employees on job Santa Monica has not laid off workers in 20 years, officials say
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COMMUNITYPROFILES
JUSTIN SARDO
Samohi student starts new charity
BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD
BY ALEX VEJAR
Daily Press Staff Writer
Special to the Daily Press
CITY HALL City officials are working to find ways to hang on to 57 employees who would otherwise be left out in the cold after the loss of the local redevelopment agency and decision to close the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Those that can’t find other placement within the city government and are not ready to retire are getting what help the Human Resources Department can give to prep them to look for work elsewhere, according to an information item released by HR officials. Any job losses would represent the first time that Santa Monica has had to let fulltime staffers go in two decades, despite the economic collapse in 2008. That stability is part of what makes Santa Monica special, both as an employer and as a place that provides top services to its residents, said City Councilmember Kevin McKeown. “Job stability has long been a lure helping us hire the very best workers for city jobs, and it is only because the state raided our redevelopment funds that we find ourselves having to print up pink slips, which we haven’t used in over 20 years,” McKeown said. That’s almost unheard of in California, a state that shed 1.4 percent of its state and local government workforce between June 2011 and June 2012 alone, according to a report by the California Budget Project. That was over twice the rate of the nation as a whole. At the same time, California’s private sector put on jobs quicker than the rest of the nation, with a 2.7 percent increase compared to the 1.8 percent seen across the country. Santa Monica avoided becoming just another negative statistic until it became clear in December 2011 that its redevelopment agency would join the nearly 400 others across the state on the budgetary chopping block. By Feb. 1, actions by the governor, legislature and California Supreme Court brought about the end of redevelopment agencies and the Department of Finance began taking back money held by those agencies that had
SAMOHI In many ways, Justin Sardo is a typ-
SEE JOBS PAGE 10
ical 16-year-old student. He runs cross country and track for Santa Monica High School, and until this past year, even played a musical instrument. But looking a little deeper, he is anything but typical. He is so dedicated to his sport that he runs 50 miles every week, and also mentors younger kids to become runners. His musical instrument was a bassoon, a rare choice among other teens his age. Maybe this kind of individuality is what led him to start his own charity, Pocket Change, on the campus of Samohi. Sardo says he doesn’t care about change, and is always trying to get rid of it. He figures if others feel the same, then why not empty our pockets for a good cause? Alex Vejar editor@smdp.com
SEE CP PAGE 9
SARDO
Teachers flip for ‘flipped learning’ class model CHRISTINA HOAG Associated Press
SANTA ANA, Calif. When Timmy Nguyen comes to his pre-calculus class, he’s already learned the day’s lesson — he watched it on a short online video prepared by his teacher for homework. So without a lecture to listen to, he and his classmates at Segerstrom Fundamental High School spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble. It’s a technology-driven teaching method known as “flipped learning” because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for home-
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work — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice. “It was hard to get used to,” said Nguyen, an 11th-grader. “I was like ‘why do I have to watch these videos, this is so dumb.’ But then I stopped complaining and I learned the material quicker. My grade went from a D to an A.” Flipped learning apparently is catching on in schools across the nation as a younger, more tech-savvy generation of teachers is moving into classrooms. Although the number of “flipped” teachers is hard to ascertain, the online community Flipped Learning Network now has 10,000 members, up from 2,500 a year ago, and training workshops are being held all over the country, said executive director Kari Afstrom. Under the model, teachers make eightto 10-minute videos of their lessons using laptops, often simply filming the white-
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board as the teacher makes notations and recording their voice as they explain the concept. The videos are uploaded onto a teacher or school website, or even YouTube, where they can be accessed by students on computers or smartphones as homework. For pupils lacking easy access to the Internet, teachers copy videos onto DVDs or flash drives. Kids with no home device watch the video on school computers. Class time is then devoted to practical applications of the lesson — often more creative exercises designed to engage students and deepen their understanding. On a recent afternoon, Kirch’s students stood in pairs with one student forming a cone shape with her hands and the other angling an arm so the “cone” was cut into different sections. “It’s a huge transformation,” said Kirch, SEE LEARNING PAGE 9
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