3/9/10: Still no March passes
Trip leaders and teachers, we are sorry: we still don't have the passes for our remaining March trips, and can't offer a definite time of arrival.
According to MTA staff in Transit Education, only one employee in the headquarters building, "Martin," is authorized to issue the passes. They would prefer that Martin not be contacted directly, and indicate that he has not yet furnished passes to them.
Teachers with upcoming trips for the end of this week and weekend, you'll be e-mailed individually, once more. Again: we're sorry.
3/2/10: MTA passes are late for March
Although this news page doesn't ordinarily delve into the nuts and bolts of month-to-month trip planning, it is a likely place for worried teachers to check in case of problems. We do have a problem this month, so, without further ado:
The MTA passes -- generally referred to as "the pinks" by those who travel with them -- are late for March, for reasons unknown. If you were expecting them this week, you can stop checking the school mail box. They won't be there.
All trips will proceed as planned. We'll cover transit costs for the trip this Friday, and, if necessary, also for the big LACMA tour coming up next week, and for subsequent trips.
If you have a March trip, please check your e-mail for more information.
1/7/10: Happy New Year !
Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Joyce Wang, at far left in the shot below, and her colleague Elena Salazar, in the photo at right. Both teach at Ninth Street Elementary in downtown's Central City East neighborhood. In 2009, both also qualified as teacher-trip leaders: teachers who receive gear and funds to lead TransitPeople outings on their own.
Last December, Ms. Wang decided to try something a bit different: a series of every-Friday-after-school trips to the Central Library, to allow her students to check out books and return books checked out the Friday before. She traveled as the solo trip leader on December 4 and December 11. Ms. Salazar joined her on December 18. Both plan to return in the months ahead.
This warrants a public huzzah or two. Some school libraries are quite good, but none expects to be compared seriously to the childrens' lit department of LAPL Central, merely the largest public library in the second biggest city in the country.
Consider the vital stats: a quarter of a million titles for little people, the largest collection of fairytales west of the Mississippi ... and, as if all that weren't enough, a twenty-three station computer lab just for visitors aged eleven and under. If your aim is to cultivate literacy in children, you'd be hard pressed to pick a better place to do it.
The Central Library is a long trek for many schools, but not for Ninth Street: the bus ride for Ms. Wang and Ms. Salazar was all of ten minutes long each way aboard the 26/51/52 line. Several teacher-leaders at San Pedro Elementary also have short, one transit bus rides to LAPL Central, and have booked repeat trips to check out and return books, as has teacher-leader David Navar of Winter Gardens in Montebello Unified, to the East Los Angeles library.
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In late 2004, thanks to a referral from Public Counsel, attorney David Schack of K&L | Gates generously provided pro bono help in establishing our teacher-leader program. Amy Lee of Miramonte was the first to qualify, in 2005: that's her, in the shot, below with a brace of students next to the aerospace museum.
The rest, as they say, is history. The program got off to a bit of a slow start, but began to grow more rapidly in 2007. Today nearly four dozen teachers at fourteen schools have completed qualification. Some lead trips occasionally; others, much more frequently. (While on vacation, Maria Miranda of Miramonte once led five trips in a single month, to allow multiple classes from her school to take end-of-year excursions.)
As 2010 gets underway, it's obvious that this program is going to remain an important part of what we do in the future. Last year, teacher-leader led trips accounted for roughly sixty-three percent of the total of 4,150 children chaperoned. If you've wondered why few newer evaluations have appeared on the testimonials page, well, that's why. It would look a bit odd to ask a teacher-leader to grade her or his own skills as a chaperon.
California is in much poorer financial health in 2010 than when our program began. Many or most schools have eliminated all field trip funding. Children are coming of age with no school visits to the Aquarium, no visits to the Central Library, no visit to the Natural History Museum.
If we want to make our trips available safely to as many children as possible, the teacher-leader program looks like a good way of doing it.
In the months ahead, you may see some other changes geared to maximizing the number of children we can serve. Stay tuned.
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And finally, no start of the year news posting would be complete without a shout-out to the people who supported us in 2009:
• the David Bohnett Foundation, through their Fund for Los Angeles program.
• the Lark Ellen Lions -- for the eleventh year in a row.
• and, of course, everyone who contributed to our April Transit Race!