What is PEF?

On Wednesday, I invited the pasadenaschools.info email list to surf over to my BOE opinions on this blog. Readers will recall that in my summary of current BOE election leanings, I alluded to at least two of the three seats having candidates with close affiliations to PEF.

Drawing this correlation, elicited comments from "neal" (no last name provided) and sparked a thread on pasadenaschools.info.

Both discussions are highly recommended reading.

Tip: Yahoo Groups threads can be traversed chronologically by clicking "next message" and "prev message" at the top and bottom of each post, or you may use the thread "tree" at the bottom of each message to hop around.

Some BOE feedback

Some people are shy. Some people may have conflicts of interest. Whatever the reason, here are some worthwhile comments from people who emailed me but requested anonymity:

Anon: Why is being a current PUSD parent more important than being a public school parent, in general. Just being a PUSD parent doesn’t make you qualified to be on the Board. I think that you need a solid understanding of the education field, otherwise, you just become another bureaucrat telling teachers how they should teach. Don’t you think that it’s beneficial to have a background in education, as well as thorough understanding of the complicated social issues in Pasadena?

Me: True being a current PUSD parent in and of itself is not enough, but still it's a heavy plus for me. Proves a commitment to these schools and this community. Especially Harrison whose last 2 kids of 5 are almost through with high school.

Debating BOE over lunch with Isaac

So Isaac Garcia, Steve Gerow and I went to lunch on Yesterday and compared notes. Here are our early returns:

Isaac
Seat 2: Mastromatteo (very involved PUSD parent)
Seat 4: Bibbiani (incumbent; often a dissenting voice)
Sear 6: Martinez (community leader with a diverse perspective)

Jeremiah
Seat 2: Mastromatteo (very involved PUSD parent)
Seat 4: Harrison (very involved PUSD parent; associated with PEF)
Sear 6: Martinez (community leader with a diverse perspective)

Steve
abstained

Capsule summary of discussion:

Picking three for PUSD BOE

So March 6th, Altadena, Sierra Madre and Pasadena vote for three new PUSD BOE memebers.

League of Women Voters lists the candidates for seats two, four, and six, although the candidate information is pretty sparse there.

PEN (Pasadena Education Network) has been collecting and publishing information for a month already, and despite their election info presentation being a bit crude, the information is very comprehensive, so worth suffering the mashup of pdfs and awkward html. (In fairness, their web site has come a long way in the last couple years and at least the Microsoft Word docs are all been published as pdfs these days).

Update, Tuesday, Feb 13: I just visited the PEN website, and they have created a nicely updated election info page. The old content is still there for now, but you can see the new content by visiting the homepage or going to www.penfamilies.org/election

Texas kids trained to swarm

I read the article quoted at the end of this post in this morning's paper. Inexplicably, it elicited a kind of primal emotional response from me, much stronger even than the stories of the Amish school or any of the seemingly endless tide of stories of sociopaths/terrorists victimizing innocents.

I think this story in particular caused a notable emotional reaction in me because it underscores how numerous almost imperceptible shifts in reality have combined over time to the point where people are now beginning to train children in our civil society how to fight a gunman.

Whether the idea that our neighborhoods in the U.S. are more dangerous is real or imagined (aside: I am skeptical), there seems to be a shift in society's acknowledgement of (dare I say, obsession with) the fact that the world is a dangerous place. What I have always found irritating about typical media hype and irrational fear is the implication that innocence equals weakness, which this article does not. Somehow we generally think of an adult, and generally a man, when we think of the stereotype of "hero". So this story hits me from two sides. I feel righteous pride at the thought of innocents pooling their power to overcome evil, even as I balk at the thought of them having to be concerned with such things, which, while frightening, are unlikely to an extreme.

Lion Kill

Neighbors may recall a post in January with pictures of deer and a concern being discussed about the ever tamer deer attracting mountain lions.

Well, last night I got the email below via the neighborhood email loop (you can subscribe here).

So on our way out to dinner (yum) this evening we stopped at the trail head to see what kind of kill it was David had seen. We easily found the carcass of a young doe.

Sure looks like the work of a lion to me. I took a few pictures with my phone. Note the wide shot where you can see Norah standing just off the road through the trees. That's where the carcass is.

------ Forwarded Message

Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:37:16 -0700
Subject: mountain lion kill

Today we found a fresh mountain lion kill about 50 ft off the road across the street from my house at the top of Tanoble Dr. It is right by the trail head for the crest trail. Please be careful if you are hiking in the trails!

David Lewis
Tanoble Dr.

------ End of Forwarded Message

The Pine Fire

Yesterday the huge column of smoke rising to the North West, just beyond the ridges had us curious and concerned, but we weren't able to find any reports about a local incident. As of this morning, InciWeb still has no listing of what the Pasadena Star News is calling the Pine Fire. The Star News has a slide show and video of the fire.