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San Pedro High School teacher Ida Lanza is creating an "Italian for Spanish Speakers" class next year. It's a unique curriculum that's being supported by CSU Long Beach.

San Pedro High School has partnered with a nearby university on a curriculum that may not surprise some people: teachers are using students’ Spanish-speaking skills to speed their progress in Italian and French classes.

Observers say it’s a big deal in a public school system that’s done little to nurture the heritage language skills of Latino students.

The method is in evidence bright and early at San Pedro High. On a recent morning at 8 a.m., 11 students walked into advanced placement Italian. Teacher Ida Lanza believes that’s not too early for a good aria. She plays a century-old recording of “Vesti la giubba,” sung by Enrico Caruso. Then she plays the same song sung by Luciano Pavarotti.

The debate is who’s the best opera singer, ever. No contest, Lanza tells her students. Caruso cries through song, she says, and listening to him makes her want to cry too.

The students have immersed themselves in Italian by cooking and eating Italian food and taking summer trips to Italy. They’re preparing to go to the Music Center in downtown L.A. to see a production of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in Italian. With the libretto on each desk, teacher and students talk about the opera’s star-crossed lovers.

Each has different reasons for taking the class. Twelth-grader Nick Amalfitano said Italian’s in his cultural DNA.

"I think my parents’ parents and before that all came to [San] Pedro, worked on fishing boats, were all fishermen, and that’s what I do now," he said. "I enjoy fishing just like my grandparents."

Most of his classmates, though, aren’t members of San Pedro’s old Italian families. All but three of the students in the class are sons and daughters of Mexican or Central American parents. More than two-thirds of the high school’s student body is Latino.

Students Alex Romero and Luis Villalobos have stuck with Italian for four years partly because of its similarity to the Spanish they learned from their Mexican and Central American parents. Just look at the libretto of “La Boheme,” they said.

"'Dolcemente,' that’s 'sweetly,' and in Spanish it’s 'dulcemente,'” Romero said. “Or 'amici,' it’s similar to 'amigo,'” Villalobos added.

Teacher Lanza reminded them not to get too comfy with the similarities.

"Basically a Spanish speaker can understand 80 percent, 85 percent of what I’m saying in Italian," she said. "But yeah, there are words here and there. The one that all my Latino students love is the word 'burro,' because in Italian 'burro' means butter, that you put on your bread. And a 'burro' in Spanish is a donkey."

One scholar says California public schools take a "subtractive education" approach to Latino students like these. That is, treating students' native or heritage language as a liability to mastering English. Italian teacher Lanza treats students’ Spanish as an asset.

She’s creating an "Italian for Spanish Speakers" class next school year.

"If I can do the Italian for Latino students, they could really advance more quickly. We could do two years in one,” Lanza said. She said she believes that would boost students’ advanced placement college credits, along with the rest of their academic achievement.

At the other end of the L.A. harbor, at Cal State Long Beach, French professor Markus Muller opens a university classroom door to a beginning Italian class to show how it’s already working.

Venezuela-born instructor Violetta Pasquarelli Gascon effortlessly shifts between Italian, Spanish and English. Cal State Long Beach won a $100,000 federal grant to train high school and college instructors in this method, called “inter-comprehension.”

Cal State Long Beach Italian Studies Chair Clorinda Donato and professor Markus Muller say Europeans have done this for a long time.

"Let’s say I’m a Spanish speaker, or an Italian speaker, and I say, 'Markus, que tal? Como estas?' Let’s say he’s a French speaker — he can answer me in French," Donato said.

"'Je vais bien,'" Muller replied. "So we basically understand the other person speaking in their mother tongue, [and then] we answer in our own mother tongue."

That, she said, opens comprehension between people who don’t speak the same mother tongue. And that can lead to understanding — in business or pleasure.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

California State University Chancellor, Charles Reed, right, discusses the effects of past budget cuts. Reed announced Thursday that he’s retiring after 14 years in the university system.

California State University Chancellor Charles Reed announced Thursday that he’s retiring after 14 years in the university system.

In a statement, Reed said he’s proud to have overseen the largest public university in the nation as it grew by 100,000 students and issued a million diplomas. He’s also proud of Cal State’s programs to recruit and retain more black, Latino, Native American and military veteran students.

The heads of the University of California and the California Community Colleges, along with Assembly Speaker John Perez, praised Reed’s performance on the job.

But California Faculty Association president Lilliam Taiz didn’t join that chorus. She said Reed concentrated on approving raises for the university’s top executives while instructors weathered pay cuts and students coped with soaring tuition.

The new chancellor, Taiz said, should regard the job as a public service position, not the equivalent of a corporate CEO.

Charles Reed will stay on until the Cal State Board of Trustees picks a new chancellor. 

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/KPCC

Chinese chicken salad with three sides is served to Tustin public school students through a new, federally funded after-school supper program.

Amid all the bad news about budget cuts to public schools there is a bright spot: More money is now available for free and subsidized school meals, and not just for school breakfast and lunch.

For about a decade, federal grants allowed schools to serve after-school snacks like juice and crackers. But youth nutrition advocate Matt Sharp says educators had concerns about the program.

“Which is that the amount of snacks are too small, too few, driving some students to run off campus to purchase much less healthy options from vendors outside school gates or convenience stores,” he said.

A year and a half ago, a boost in the federal allocation expanded that snack into a meal. The goal was to tackle two problems: rising childhood obesity and families’ growing inability to buy healthy food.

The Tustin Unified School District is the first in Southern California to offer students supper after school. A third of the schools in that district, including Marjorie Veeh Elementary, currently serve an after-school meal.

On one afternoon, after-school worker Ashley Walden handed out meals on campus after the final bell rang. They flew out of a cooler as a pack of hungry elementary school kids snatched them and went to sit with friends.

“We have some graham cracker, we have fresh orange slices, milk, and Chinese chicken salads,” she said. On other days she serves pizza, ham subs, or Caesar salad, and the district’s working on getting teriyaki chicken bowls.

Walden said the meal offers barely enough fuel for the mega combustion engine that is a child’s body.

“They come in the morning and they have, sometimes they have a snack in nutrition, but that’s at 10 in the morning, and then at around 11:30 or 12 they’ll have their lunch but they only have about 20 minutes to eat so by the time they come to us at 2, 2:30, they’re already hungry again,” she said.

Fifth grader Ayleen de la Cruz took a final gulp her milk. She’d finished everything else, and was ready for the learning that continues after school.

“When we get out of snack we usually go to homework," she said. "And from homework we go to catch, and from catch we usually do activities like math blast, and science, and sometimes reading."

De la Cruz said a typical dinner at her house is hamburgers, or hot dogs, or pasta. She calls it junk food.

The school’s principal, Ryan Bollenbach, said the afternoon meal the school provides is the last some students will eat during the day. “Some might get a dinner at home, others might eat breakfast tomorrow at school. It would not be this quality. It would be Del Taco or some other fast food, low cost, unhealthy option,” she said.

Veeh Elementary serves about 100 suppers a day. Federal officials estimate that new allocations will make it possible for public schools to distribute 21 million meals in the next three years. During that time, other Southland school districts will join Tustin and offer after school meals.

Federal subsidies for California school meals are expected to grow by $107 million next fiscal year, says nutrition advocate Matt Sharp, but it’s not enough to carry out schools’ principal mission.

“The after-school meal program is just a small component, a valuable component, but the real challenge and weakness is making sure adequate after-school enrichment are available for at-risk youth,” Sharpe said.

Money for those after school programs and programs during the school day comes from Sacramento, however, and lawmakers don’t expect to stop cutting the budget in the foreseeable future.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy speaks during a press conference at South Region High School #2. Deasy says he believes LAUSD has "an incredibly strong application" should the district choose to apply for a Race to the Top grant.

For the first time ever, individual school districts may apply for the Obama Administration’s highly competitive Race to the Top grants — and that could mean good news for Los Angeles Unified.

LAUSD has wanted the money, but it couldn’t get the respect. Just last year, Gov. Jerry Brown refused to support its joint application with public school districts in Long Beach, San Francisco and Sacramento. 

A change in the rules means districts that want their reform policies to line up with the Obama administration’s may compete for grants up to $25 million on their own. 

The requirements are the same: programs must target low-income students and must factor those kids’ progress into teacher evaluations. 

That’s been a major point of tension so far. Unions, including United Teachers Los Angeles, have opposed including student test scores in job performance assessments. 

But without that, federal education secretary Arne Duncan’s made clear that districts don’t stand much of a chance in the competition for grants.

"We need the whole team — the [superintendent], the head of [the school] board and [the] union leader — doing this really important work," Duncan said. "And [when] folks are at each other’s throat, we think it’s probably not the best investment for us to make. So that local buy–in and commitment to reform is very important in terms of who we’re going to fund."

LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy expressed confidence that the district’s fourth attempt will be the charm.

Deasy told KPCC’s Larry Mantle that L.A. Unified has already launched "transformational reforms" this year, and that he predicts they'll make for "an incredibly strong application." 

The federal government plans to award $400 million to as many as 20 districts throughout the country. 

The Education Department plans to finalize application rules by July, start accepting them in October and announce the grants in December.

James F Clay/Flickr

LAUSD will pay a school district manager $200,000 in cash and benefits to settle sexual harassment allegations against a former superintendent.

The Los Angeles Unified School District will pay a school district manager $200,000 in cash, along with lifetime benefits, to settle sexual harassment allegations against a former superintendent.

It started two summers ago when senior LAUSD facilities manager Scot Graham accepted an invitation from then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines to spend the weekend at Cortines’ Kern County ranch.

Graham says Cortines made inappropriate verbal and physical advances, but Cortines has since said that what happened was "consensual spontaneous adult behavior."

Two months ago, nearly a year after Cortines retired, Graham’s lawyer told the school district he planned to file a sexual harassment lawsuit.

"The board concluded it was the best use of the district’s resources to resolve it early with probably less expense and less disruption to the district," said district lawyer Linda Savitt.

Graham agreed to retire at the end of the month. He’ll receive the $200,000 settlement from LAUSD’s general fund.

The three school board members who voted against the settlement said the district should have fought the allegations in court.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that a lawsuit was being settled; the claims were settled before a suit was filed. The story also previously said that Scot Graham was visiting Cortines with Graham's male partner, but the visit with the male partner happened previous to the alleged harassment visit.