Hello all,

I hope your holidays are fun. I don’t want to put a damper on your holidaze, but there is some sobering news out there. As a result of the worsening housing crisis, tent cities are springing up. For those who follow how Los Angeles has dealt with the homeless in the past, they used to be able to physically contain them in a small “blighted” section of Los Angeles out of the eyesight of the tourists. Not so true any longer. A tent city has sprung up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, not unlike during the days of the Great Depression.

John Muir Elementary School received news that they are receiving two grants-one from National Educators’ Association (NEA) for $5,000 and one from DonorsChoose (and an anonymous donor) for $800.

The NEA grant is for professional development for math. SFUSD has been emphasizing English Language Arts. As a Reading First school (a curriculum that the District is using at all lower-performing schools), John Muir has received a great deal of professional development in English Language Arts. But the teachers wanted more professional development on mathematics.

Donn Harris, the principal of the School of the Arts, has announced that he will be leaving at the year of the school year to be the principal of the Oakland School of the Arts.

The Oakland School of the Arts was created in 2002. Despite Harris’ remaining at SFSOTA until the end of 2007-08, Donn Harris is listed as OSA’s current director on its website.

The Board of Education meet as a committee on the whole. The agenda stated that it was to discuss student assignment.

But instead the BOE listened to a panel of two lawyers-Goodwin Liu from Boalt Law School and Kendra Fox-Davies, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights-to discuss the recent decision of the Supreme Court. The panel was put together by Christina Wong, staff member for Chinese for Affirmative Action.

The case was on the student assignment plans of the Seattle Public Schools District and Louisville public schools. Louisville wanted to continue their student assignment plan that they had under a consent decree and use race as one of several factors for schools that were overly subscribed.

Allan Berube, a great historian of gay working class life died December 11, 2007 at the age of 61. Allan presented his amazing research on queer labor history in a slide show about the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, CIO (1930s and 1940s) at PAW’s convention in Oakland CA in 1996. He co-led a workshop with Miriam Frank on recording union history at that same meeting and the next day he marched and danced in the streets with our contingent in the 1996 San Francisco June Pride parade. We will miss him deeply and we will honor his contributions as we mourn AND organize.
Below is the obituary from The Windy City Times, by Wayne Hoffman. It can be read online by visiting here: http://www.wctimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=16889

The BOE Budget Committee members of Kim-Shree Maufas, Jane Kim and Norman Yee were updated on the interim budget.

Joseph Grazzoli, CFO, told the committee that there will be a shortfall from federal dollars (called an encroachment) of additional $1.1 million (for a total of $1.6 million) this year in nutrition, $1.7 million in chlid development and $2.5 million for transportation.

Commissioner Jane Kim asked for a definition of encroachment. Nancy Waymack, the Board’s liasion, explained that an encroachment is when a fund that relies on state and federal dollars (such as child development, special education and transportation) spends more funds than the District’s annual state and/or federal allotment for that fund.

Already given discourses might elide the specificities of those with firm locations within already given categories but not to the same degree that they elide the specificities of those of us who are dislocated from such categories. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so not in order to engage in high-spirited celebration or revelry. We do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, eliding, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly. When we choose to live with and in our dislocatedness, fractured from social ontology, we choose to forgo intelligibility: lost in language and in social life, we become virtually unintelligible, even to ourselves. –C. Jacob Hale, “Consuming the Living, Dis(Re)Membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands,” GLQ, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998. p. 336. (Article on pages 311-348.)

Tonight we had a party at SEIU 1021 to celebrate the restoration of the psych beds at SF General. A member who works there came up and asked me, “WTF? The Milk club…What is going on???” Keep in mind that he isn’t a member of the club and shouldn’t know about anything about this. The reputation of the club has gone in the tubes and this week was no exception.

Click here for the full article.

From the Bay Area Reporter:

Last Sunday, a friend, a mentor, Bob Feldman, passed away.

The first time I met Bob Feldman was the day that Supervisor Aaron Peskin swore me in as a Commissioner to the Board of Appeals, a quasi-judicial body. He and Commissioner Frank Fong came to the swearing-in ceremony.

Very quickly, I realized that Bob was special. His kindness, his decency, his commitment to making the Board of Appeals process a level playing field where every day people could “have their day in court.” There are some pretty amazing Commissioners on the Board but Bob truly taught me the most about what it means to hold power and treat people who appear before the Commission with dignity and respect.

I am leaving in a few hours for a three week vacation, but I will leave you with this report on the antics of Gavin Newsom’s pals at Earthlink. The Philadelphia city council called a hearing to get an update on the status of the municipal network Earthlink’s supposed to be running for them. No one from the company bothered to show up.

PHILADELPHIA — Council members seeking an update on the status of Philadelphia’s much-vaunted plan to turn the city into one gigantic Wi-Fi hot spot criticized the network provider’s decision not to send a representative to a Tuesday hearing on the issue.