MONDAY, APRIL 15, 2013
Volume 12 Issue 133
Santa Monica Daily Press
SAFE AT HOME SEE PAGE 3
We have you covered
THE AT FULL STRENGTH ISSUE
Officials take deeper look at filming policies BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
CITYWIDE If the city of Santa Monica had a page on the Internet Movie Database — better known as IMDB.com — its credentials
would be longer than most working actors, many of whom live or work in the city itself. Be it Pacific Park’s Ferris wheel in the 2011 action movie “Battle: Los Angeles” or the Santa Monica Airport in disaster film “2012,” the city by the sea has been the face
of and home to a number of the entertainment industry’s most recognizable film shoots, but like so many big Hollywood stars, the city has something of a reputation as a diva. Santa Monica may look good on film, but
location managers find it difficult to work there, citing excessive regulations and stricter requirements than anywhere else in Los Angeles County. SEE FILMING PAGE 10
Dems backing gun control and Prop 13 reforms
Instruction of students learning English bleak CHRISTINE ARMARIO
JULIET WILLIAMS
Associated Press
Associated Press
MIAMI Duna Lopez started school in Miami last fall not knowing a single word of English. The 8-year-old girl from Barcelona, Spain, with dark blond hair was placed in the Coral Way Bilingual K-8 Center, the nation’s oldest bilingual school. For half the day, she receives classes in Spanish; it’s English for the rest. During language arts, she gets pulled out with three other new arrivals for extra help on grammar and phonics. After seven months, she’s one of the most active participants in class. “In five months, like that, I learned it,” she said. Duna’s success is exceptional, but the language challenge she faced is increasingly common across the U.S. educational map. Nationwide, nonwhites are expected to become a majority of the population within a generation, and schools are at the cutting edge of that historic shift. School-age children who speak a language other than English at home are one of the fastest-growing populations. Their numbers doubled between 1980 and 2009, and they now make up 21 percent of school-age kids. There were 4.7 million students classified as “English language learners” — those who have not yet achieved proficiency in English — in the 2009-10 school year, or about 10 percent of children enrolled, according to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Department of Education.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. California Democrats
MESSY JOB
Morgan Genser editor@smdp.com Former Los Angeles Dodger and current president of the Samohi Alumni Association Tim Leary led a beach cleanup on Saturday with other Viking alumni.
SEE ENGLISH PAGE 9
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adopted resolutions on Sunday affirming many of their biggest political goals, including changing California’s landmark property tax limitation law, Proposition 13, supporting more gun control legislation and imposing a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for oil. Delegates to the party’s annual convention also urged President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and affirmed their support for California’s environmental quality law, known as CEQA. Gov. Jerry Brown, a fellow Democrat, and the state’s legislative leaders have said they want to make changes to the four decade-old law this year. The Democratic resolution on CEQA said “there have been recent attacks on the integrity of this law that would compromise, dilute and diminish its effectiveness.” Critics say the law intended to protect habitat and reduce air pollution is being used well beyond its intended purpose and instead is employed by unions, activist groups and even rival developers to delay or stop projects they don’t like, often at great legal expense to developers. The law has been amended virtually every year since it was signed in 1970. Brown has called reforming CEQA “the Lord’s work.” He is on a trade mission in China and did not attend the convention or record a message to the more than 2,000 delegates who met to plan the party’s agenda for the coming year. On the landmark tax limitation law, Proposition 13, Democrats approved a resoluSEE DEMS PAGE 8
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