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MONDAY, APRIL 28, 2014
Volume 13 Issue 138
Santa Monica Daily Press
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Obama: Reported comments by team owner ‘racist’ JULIE PACE AP White House Correspondent
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia President Barack Obama said Sunday that comments reportedly made by the owner of a U.S. pro basketball team are “incredibly offensive racist statements,” before casting them as part of a continuing legacy of slavery and segregation that Americans must confront. “When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don’t really have to do anything, you just let them talk,” Obama said when asked to respond to the reported comments from Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling. Obama’s description of the controversy as part of a larger historical context is the latest example of his continuing willingness to expound on matters of race in his second term. After avoiding much mention of race relations during his campaign to become the first black president and in his first term, the president last summer offered a person-
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Paul Alvarez Jr. editor@smdp.com Kids play tug of war during the fifth anniversary of the Annenberg Community Beach House on Sunday afternoon.
Low-income and minority students trail wealthy peers BY DAVID MARK SIMPSON Daily Press Staff Writer
CITYWIDE More than 87 percent of Santa Monica kindergarteners are proficient in literacy, up from 76 percent in 2012, according to the 2014 Youth Wellbeing Report Card. Literacy is worse among low-income and minority kindergarteners, according to the study, and that gap widens by third grade as reading scores drop across the board. In third grade, only 67.7 percent of
Santa Monica students are proficient in the language arts. City Hall built the report card with data from Santa Monica’s youth to evaluate school achievement, physical health, social skill, and mental health. The first report card was released last year. More than 92 percent of Asian and white Santa Monica kindergarteners are proficient at reading compared to 77 percent of Latino kindergarteners and 70 percent of black kindergarteners. By third grade nearly 80 percent of white and 87 percent of Asian students are profi-
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A few California cities start water waste patrols FENIT NIRAPPIL Associated Press
cient in language arts but proficiency drops to 53 percent for black third graders and 43 percent for Latino third graders. Math scores are up among eighth graders as is the graduation rate at Santa Monica High School, and the number of kids who report feeling safe at school. Still, a quarter of middle-schoolers report feeling unsafe at school and four in 10 seventh and ninth graders say they’ve been harassed at school. Girls are more emotionally ready for
SACRAMENTO, Calif. Steve Upton thinks of
SEE SCHOOLS PAGE 11
SEE WATER PAGE 7
himself more as an “Officer Friendly” than a water cop. On a recent sunny day, the water waste inspector rolled through a quiet Sacramento neighborhood in his white pickup truck after a tipster tattled on people watering their lawns on prohibited days. He approached two culprits. Rather than slapping them with fines, Upton offered to change the settings on their sprinkler systems.
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