State Aid

The House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a $26.1-billion package of state aid that would help keep nearly 140,000 teachers nationwide on the job and continue extra funding to provide healthcare services to low-income households during the recession. The final vote was 247-161, largely along party lines. The legislation now heads to President Obama's desk for his signature. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had called lawmakers back from their August recess to vote on the bill after it advanced from the Senate last week.

When Jackie Morgan MacDougall and other parents learned that their Saugus Union School District received the least state aid of any district in the county, she said they had to act. With the state contemplating deeper aid cuts, MacDougall and others began circulating petitions to create an education foundation — a nonprofit organization in which community members raise funds for teacher grants, instructional equipment, extracurricular activities...

Gov. Bill Owens announced $600,000 in state aid to help the town of Granby recover from last week's bulldozer rampage by an armed man that virtually destroyed half a dozen buildings and badly damaged at least six more. State officials also said they would help people who lost their jobs -- if not their workplaces -- with a "fast-response team" developed to help employees laid off from major corporations.

On Wednesday, 28 seventh- and eighth-graders at Tucson's Mansfeld Middle School followed their familiar routine. They walked into Room 306, sat at their desks and greeted teacher Rene Martinez. But the class they'd known the day before had vanished. No longer can the students discuss Chicano perspectives on history. And no longer can Martinez teach Mexican American studies. After the Tucson Unified School District board voted late Tuesday to suspend the controversial classes to avoid losing more than $14 million in state aid, the students' world shifted.

Although a site has yet to be selected, Ventura County supervisors have agreed to apply for $40.5 million in state grants to build a juvenile justice detention center. Submission of the grant application to the state Board of Corrections will mean that the county agrees to pay $25 million of the project's estimated cost of $65 million. It also pledges to staff the facility, which could require hiring up to 98 additional probation officers by 2010.

A year after voters approved a $145-million bond measure, the Santa Ana Unified School District is under fire for moving so slowly to design construction projects that it has lost the chance to get millions of dollars in matching state funds--and could lose millions more. The missed opportunities are pitting angry board members against each other and getting parents riled. "There were some bureaucratic and administrative bungles along the way," board member Audrey Yamagata-Noji said.

The White House was calling. Not the Oval Office White House with some important pronouncement. This was the Media Relations White House, a group of staffers that oversees the ebb and flow of the more mundane events staged near the mansion's West Wing, where the press hangs out.

Federal and state aid to city governments has declined to the lowest level since 1967, providing only about 20 cents of every municipal revenue dollar in fiscal 1986-87, the Census Bureau said. By contrast, in the mid-1970s, federal and state aid to city governments rose to a high of 32 cents of each dollar in city revenues. According to a new Census Bureau report, federal aid to cities in 1987 amounted to 5 cents of each dollar in revenue and state aid provided another 15 cents. Federal revenues peaked at 13 cents in 1978, while state revenues reached 22 cents per dollar in 1975, the bureau said.

In his first public comments on the issue, Gov. George Deukmejian on Friday rejected San Diego Mayor Maureen O'Connor's assertion that he needs to be educated about the city's worsening drug and gang problem. The governor also lightly upbraided O'Connor for going public with a dramatic proposal for increased state aid for the city without first running it by him.

Threatened with a loss of millions of dollars in state aid, the Southern California Rapid Transit District set itself the goal Thursday of reducing absenteeism among bus drivers by nearly 20% over the next three years. And, despite months of critical public scrutiny of the RTD, the board gave General Manager John Dyer a vote of confidence, unanimously approving a 5.3% raise that will boost his annual salary to $119,000.

In the parking lot of a closed Pasadena restaurant, a handful of tea party volunteers huddled under a tent to escape a sudden downpour of rain. They were there to gather signatures to repeal AB 131, or the California Dream Act, which gives illegal immigrants access to state financial aid at public universities and community colleges. The rain smudged their signs, they were shouted at by a driver who called them racist, and the turnout was lower than they'd hoped. But they were undaunted.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday granted illegal immigrants access to state financial aid at public universities and community colleges, putting California once again in the center of the nation's immigration debate. But he vetoed a measure that would have allowed state universities to consider applicants' race, gender and income to ensure diversity in their student populations. Deciding the fate of 50 education-related bills, the governor also rejected an effort to make it more difficult to establish charter schools.

Sacramento native Shawn Lewis knows the value of student financial aid. The son of a struggling single mom, Lewis says he never would have been able to attend UC Berkeley without the $24,000 in annual state grants and private scholarships he receives to pursue his political science degree and dreams of law school. But Gov. Jerry Brown is now considering whether to sign landmark legislation that would extend state financial aid to illegal immigrants who are college students. And that makes Lewis anxious.

Mike Pitts is no economist, but that hasn't kept the retired small-town cop from taking a prominent role in a quixotic campaign to push the U.S. monetary system back to another century. Pitts, a South Carolina statehouse representative, introduced a bill in April that would make gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. Similar efforts are underway in more than a dozen state capitals, fueled by Tea Party support and antipathy toward the federal government. The ultimate goal is to return the nation to the gold standard, in which every dollar would be backed by a fixed amount of the precious metal.

Reporting from Sacramento -- State lawmakers Wednesday advanced measures that would allow undocumented university students to apply for financial aid, would help police monitor use of social networking websites by sex offenders and would end the fingerprinting of food stamp recipients. Legislators also moved on bids to preventBell-style financial scandals, pension "spiking" and disruptive picketing at military funerals. The bills were among more than 200 passed by the Senate or Assembly and sent to the other house.

The vast fruit fields, picturesque farmhouses and rolling foothills of Tulare County mask an ugly reality: Nearly a quarter of the population in this Central Valley agricultural hub lives in poverty, and one in three residents receives state aid — the largest proportion in California. With the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown slashing billions of dollars in government services to help balance the state budget, few places will feel the effects more deeply. Local officials fear that when roughly $8 billion in budget cuts take effect, some as early as July 1, the poorest residents will tumble into homelessness.

School officials are trying to figure out how to live with a $750,000 cut in state aid without harming academic programs. Gov. George Deukmejian last month vetoed $86 million in the 1986-87 budget for Urban Impact Aid, which has been provided to districts with high percentages of welfare-dependant or transient families, and bilingual students. About 35% of the Inglewood district's approximately 16,000 students are bilingual, and about 25% are from families that receive welfare.

State transportation authorities have sent two powerful signals to Los Angeles County transportation planners in recent days that they are serious about providing substantial financial aid soon for commuter rail projects in the Southland. First, in unveiling proposed guidelines scheduled to be adopted in early December for the distribution of $1.

California's budget crisis has eased a bit, thanks to a South Carolina man grateful to the state for helping him 46 years ago. Dennis R. Ferguson wrote a check for $10,000 to the state treasury Nov. 23 as "repayment for what California did for me" when he was laid off from his aerospace engineering job in 1964. Ferguson, a 74-year-old retired computer programmer who lives in the Atlantic coastal community of Fripp Island, S.C., said the four months' worth of unemployment benefits he collected after losing his job with Douglas Aircraft allowed him to re-train for a new career in computers.