BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
Two parents have sued the Palo Alto Unified School District for not placing their sons in higher-level freshman math classes, in a case that could go to trial this month. …
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Good grief! there ought to be a way to deal with this issue without going to court … helicopter parenting has gotten out of control in PAUSD.
What’s the point of suing? Avery Wang and Melissa Anderson’s legal fees probably have exceeded a year or two of tuition in a good private school.
after reading this i actually have sympathy for the PAUSD administrators for having to deal with pushy parents like this … how do you run a math program when you have parents literally threatening to take you to court if you disagree with them about what class a kid should take?
Unpopular opinion but they should be sued. If a kid wants to challenge themselves, what’s stopping them from love of learning? Alternatively, if a kid wants to drop an AP class for the regular lane, what’s stopping the kid? Oh wait. my child tried that. Office admin said that no more spots and to go to get the US history req done at neighboring community college. But my child would have to pay for it. How do you go around having required classes for graduation and forcing children’s families to pay for it and punishing kids for wanting to try rigorous classes? Asinine.
Palo Alto Unified can eat cake. Their teachers are leaving for early retirement, greener pastures, or the teaching profession altogether. The school district was never “for the kids.” They exist to serve a very narrow subset population, never those who are struggling to get by, whether with disability or no disability. Why do you think there’s a track record of families with kids that have IEPs suing?
Omg — PAUSD is holding students back — and not recognizing courses that students have completed — simply because they weren’t taken at PAUSD. Why is that acceptable? Back in the day, schools and teachers were pleased to move students forward who met all the requirements and excelled — now parents and students get bullied by people for simply trying to be placed at their appropriate level.
Suit or no suit, let me add this experience. My son’s math teacher wanted to continue teaching online last April as he had in person and after a few days of doing so was forced to abstain. The spring at Paly was absolutely unacceptable (and not just in math). My son is no star in math, just an average student who needs continuity and wants to challenge himself to pass calculus in high school eventually in order to get into a decent engineering school. Perfectly normal kid, normal parental expectations. He took UC-accredited online math classes this spring and summer, including a class that is usually offered as a PAUSD summer class but this year was not, except to those who had already failed it at Palo Alto high schools. He did well; in fact, the daily continuity worked wonders. He was told in fall that Paly would not recognize any of what he had done. This is in violation of California law, I believe. Rather than engaging in battles, we opted to leave the school and go abroad for the year, which was the best school-related decision I’ve made in a long time. But here’s an interesting sideline. The supposed philosophy behind such PAUSD policies has been to ensure social justice, and the de facto implementation guideline for doing so is to offer as little as possible to everyone, so that no one can be said to be disadvantaged. Thus we were told that Zoom teaching would be hard on socioeconomic minorities who did not have the equipment. (My son had no problems getting a loner iPad for an AP test at the time, but never mind.) The fun part: someone in the district office or at Paly categorized my child as HUR, and as a result, at exactly the same time last spring when Zoom teaching was ruled out, he got an official email from the Paly principal’s office inviting him to participate in Zoom sessions during which he would provide data for said principal’s oh-so-politically-correct PhD dissertation on HURs. As they say in my native language, I heard “my pig whistle”.