Bassett Unified School District

Responding to parental protests, the Bassett Unified School District will reinstate several school bus routes it eliminated last summer to cut costs. The board said it will spend an additional $150,000 per year to lease or buy two more buses. In June, the district consolidated bus stops and eliminated several routes to trim its $450,000 transportation budget. Parents complained that the action endangered their children by forcing them to walk along busy streets and through unsafe neighborhoods.

The tiny Bassett Unified School District, facing a budget crunch, will close its 17-year-old Police Department. The Bassett school board voted 4 to 1 Thursday to dismantle the department, which includes four full-time and three part-time officers. Board member Lizet Angulo dissented. Newly appointed schools Supt. Robert Nero said the move will save the district at least $350,000 from its $32-million budget. The district must pay more than $1 million in debt in each of the next 20 years.

Linda Gonzales has been named superintendent of the Bassett Unified School District. Gonzales, 44, has been with the district since 1989 as assistant superintendent of instruction. She graduated from Chapman College, earned her master's degree from San Diego State and her doctoral degree from Claremont Graduate School. Gonzales replaces Ronald Raya, who left to become superintendent of the Bonita Unified School District.

School board member Della R. Rios resigned from her seat Monday, saying that she has been called to the ministry to help battered women. "I have been called to ministry to help battered women all over the world. I am a born-again Christian, I am a woman of God," she wrote Supt. Don Samuels in her resignation letter. Rios, who has served nearly five years on the board, also wrote that after four years of placing children first, the board has recently become mostly interested in politics.

Three San Gabriel Valley teachers are among 10 outstanding teachers in Los Angeles County school districts to receive Jaime Escalante Mathematics Teacher awards. The award, sponsored by the L.A. Educational Partnership, recognizes outstanding teachers who motivate their students to excel in mathematics.

Bassett Unified School District's 227 teachers will receive a one-time bonus from the district's first-year allocation of $686,000 in state lottery funds. The Board of Education promised teachers half of the lottery money during salary negotiations last year. The bonus will be 4.9% of teachers' wages, equaling about $1,500 for those earning $31,000 a year. Supt.

Ronald P. Raya has been named the new superintendent in the Bonita Unified School District. Raya, superintendent in the Bassett Unified School District, will assume his new position Jan. 1, with a $97,000 annual salary. The Bonita district serves 9,839 students in La Verne and San Dimas. Before coming to Bassett in 1985, Raya worked as assistant superintendent for the Placentia Unified School District for six years, and worked in the Santa Ana Unified School District.

The Bassett Unified School District awarded contracts without bids, failed to keep records and lost supplies during the past two years because financial controls were ignored, according to an auditor's report. The auditing firm Vavrinek, Trine & Day Co. reported that more than $19,000 worth of supplies were removed from a warehouse without any record of their removal. Several employees were granted special access to the warehouse, school officials said.

Bassett Elementary School will be closed at the end of the school year as part of cost-cutting measures approved by the Bassett Unified School District board. The district, faced with a budget crunch caused by declining enrollment, will save $100,000 to $150,000 with closure of the old school, officials said. About 400 displaced students will be reassigned to Sunkist and Irwin schools.

The Bassett Unified School Board is reviewing possible legal action against a corporation it created last year to oversee more than $11 million of school construction. The board voted Monday to establish a special litigation committee to conduct the review against the Bassett Unified School District Financing Corp. because it refused to release funds for construction, said school board President Brenda Johnson. "These are public funds. This is unbelievable," Johnson said.

The Bassett Unified School District awarded contracts without bids, failed to keep records and lost supplies during the past two years because financial controls were ignored, according to an auditor's report. The auditing firm Vavrinek, Trine & Day Co. reported that more than $19,000 worth of supplies were removed from a warehouse without any record of their removal. Several employees were granted special access to the warehouse, school officials said.

When someone set fire to Brenda Johnson's Volkswagen Beetle, she took it as a sign she was doing something right. Johnson assumed that the 1996 arson was just one more price to pay for her crusade to improve the beleaguered schools of Bassett, a poor, unincorporated community about 20 miles east of Los Angeles.

The Bassett Unified School Board is reviewing possible legal action against a corporation it created last year to oversee more than $11 million of school construction. The board voted Monday to establish a special litigation committee to conduct the review against the Bassett Unified School District Financing Corp. because it refused to release funds for construction, said school board President Brenda Johnson. "These are public funds. This is unbelievable," Johnson said.

The school board, which recently agreed to pay Supt. Linda Gonzales $180,000 to resign, has reduced the amount of the buyout to $150,000. The board voted 3-2 Tuesday to amend the buyout contract of Gonzales, who earns nearly $100,000 a year. Among those voting for the buyout were Toni Giafoglione and Alfred Cobos, Gonzales supporters who were ousted from office Nov. 4. Their successors, who will take office next month, have said they will seek to remove Gonzales.

The Bassett High School student who was nearly barred from graduating because he depicted the principal as a dictator has a new cause: He's running for the school board. Joe Neal, who turned 18 in June, has filed candidacy papers for a seat on the Bassett Unified School District board. Citing free-speech concerns, a federal judge ordered school officials to allow Neal to graduate.

A petition to recall a Bassett Unified School Board member that contains thousands of signatures has been reported stolen after a break-in at the La Puente campaign headquarters of the recall group, authorities said Thursday. Curt Hettinger, who is coordinating the recall drive against board member Brenda Johnson, told sheriff's deputies about the purported theft at the strip mall office of the group known as Bassett Parents for Our Children.

A group trying to recall three Bassett Unified School District board members received a big F from the county on their petitions. The registrar-recorder's office rejected the papers because of grammatical errors. Copies of the recall petitions submitted to the registrar for approval had mistakes in capitalization, punctuation and syntax, said spokeswoman Grace Romero, and were disallowed on that basis. Recall proponents must correct the errors and resubmit the papers within 10 days.

The Bassett High School student who was nearly barred from graduating because he depicted the principal as a dictator has a new cause: He's running for the school board. Joe Neal, who turned 18 in June, has filed candidacy papers for a seat on the Bassett Unified School District board. Citing free-speech concerns, a federal judge ordered school officials to allow Neal to graduate.

The battle over whether Joe Neal graduates tonight may not be over yet. School officials signaled Wednesday that they will resume their bid to discipline the Bassett High School senior for distributing fliers portraying the principal as a dictator.

Four years after prodding the Department of Justice into a civil rights investigation of the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District, Manuel Maldonado is still worried that his eight kids are being shortchanged in their education because they're Latino. One year after bureaucrats nixed a plan for Maria Calzada and 59 other parents to volunteer at a school in the Bassett Unified School District, Calzada remains angry that she is being ignored.