May 20, 2010
SERVING LOS ANGELES COUNTY WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE
Vol. XXX, No. 1180 FIRST COLUMN
King, Belafonte, Willie Mays Honored by Major Leagues BY JOE KAY AP BASEBALL WRITER
CINCINNATI (AP) — Willie Mays says it was all worth it. The Hall of Fame outfielder was honored with one of Major League Baseball’s Beacon awards on May 15 as part of its annual Civil Rights weekend. Mays recalled at a luncheon that he experienced prejudice when he broke into the big leagues, and he had a standard response. “You have no idea what I had to go through,” said Mays, now 79. “You have no idea what they would call me. But the more they called me, the farther the ball went. “They knocked me down, I got up, I hit it farther. Every time they knocked me down, I hit it farther. I was very positive.” Tennis player Billie Jean King and entertainer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte also received Beacon awards for their lifetime work toward equality. Baseball
officials also emphasized their efforts to try to get black youths interested in baseball again. Mays was the last of the three to get his award and told stories about the discrimination he faced at the start of his 22-year career with the Giants and the Mets. He went into the Hall of Fame in 1979. “Did I go through all this? Was it worthwhile? Yes, it was worth it to me,” Mays said. “It’s worth it. Believe me when I tell you that.” King remembered the climate in the 1950s when she started playing tennis as a 12-year-old. “I knew something was wrong with our sport — white shoes, white socks, white balls, white people,” she said. “It’s good, but where is everybody else?” King spent much of her record-setting career — 20 Wimbledon titles, 39 Grand Slam championships, a three-set win over Bobby Riggs in a 1973 “Battle of the
See BEACON AWARDS, page 5
PAC-10 WIN — University of Southern California’s Ahmad Rashad celebrates after winning the 100-meter dash May 16 during the Pac-10 track and field championships in Berkeley, Calif. Rashad won two titles to lead the men’s team to a second-place finish while the women’s team placed fourth. Rashad pulled off his third career double as Pac-10 100-meter and 200-meter dash champion, becoming the first conference male athlete to win either event three times since the events went from yards to meters in 1976. First he won his third Pac-10 100-meter dash title with a time of 10.20, making it five 100-meter dash titles in the last six seasons by a Trojan runner. Rashad also won the event in 2007 and 2009, and in the process on May 16, defeated Oregon’s Ashton Eaton, who took second and was trying to become the first Pac-10 male athlete to win four individual events. AP Photo by BEN MARGOT
Schwarzenegger Lays Out Bleak California Budget BY JUDY LIN AP WRITER
AP Photo by TONY TRIBBLE
LEGENDS — Beacon Awards honorees Willie Mays, left, Billie Jean King, center, and Harry Belafonte wave to the crowd after the Major League Baseball Beacon awards luncheon May 15 in Cincinnati.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on May 14 called for eliminating California’s welfareto-work program, one of the deep cuts he proposed to close a $19 billion budget deficit in the coming fiscal year. Slashing the welfare program would affect 1.4 million people, two-thirds of them children. In releasing his revised budget plan, the Republican governor laid out the most severe cuts to health and welfare programs since the state tumbled into recession nearly three
Low-Income L.A. Schools Looking for Lost Gifted Kids BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some city schools with lowincome and minority students are putting new emphasis on finding gifted kids, and the search is proving fruitful. Under an initiative overseen by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and launched by the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, four city schools last year began testing nearly every second grader for exceptional abilities. The search is turning up students like Emariye Louden, who was debating subjects with his mother virtually since he could talk and knew a slew of birth dates, phone numbers and spelling words by age 4. In 2008, the district determined that there were no gifted kids at 99th Street Elementary, Emariye’s school. Under the new program, school psychologists discovered 13. The school is 75 percent Hispanic and 25 percent black. Nearly half are still learning English and nearly all are poor.
The partnership hopes to give the students the specific nurturing they need, and to demonstrate that neglected schools have extraordinary kids too. “It’s allowed us to ramp up our expectations for children,” Angela Bass, the nonprofit’s superintendent of instruction, told the Los Angeles Times for a recent story. Bass said that at many schools, “we’ve missed the fact that our children are really talented. We need to make sure our teachers know that, our parents know that, and our students know they are gifted.” The newly discovered students will get additional activities in their current classrooms, bigger campus projects, discussions with scientists and field trips to museums like the Getty Center. “In the second grade Emariye now has something not everybody has,” said Emariye’s mother, Tynesha Warren, a medical assistant. “And it’s going to follow him for the rest of his life. It could expand
his life and open doors. It gives him the opportunity to be noticed.” L.A. Unified Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines said that along with “insidious racism,” a chief reason why gifted black and Latino students have gone unnoticed is that most of the district’s effort to find and cultivate extraordinary students has been aimed at creating incentives to stay in L.A. schools for middle-class white and Asian students deemed likely to leave for other districts or private schools. Districtwide, white and Asian students make up 39.4 percent of students designated as gifted despite making up just 12 percent of the students enrolled. The positive results of early searches will bring an expansion of the program. Cortines and his chief academic officer, Judy Elliott, have ordered that all second graders be tested starting next year. Schools receive no additional funding from the state for designating students as gifted.
years ago. He said cuts to government services over the past few years have done away with the “low-hanging fruit.” “We now have to use the ax to eliminate some of those programs,” he said. The Republican governor announced his revised budget plan for the fiscal year that begins in July, as the state’s 12.6 percent unemployment rate ranks among the highest in the nation and tax revenue remains low. In April, personal income tax was $3 billion less than projected, which wiped away earlier revenue gains. The state’s general fund spending will be $83.4 billion for the new
fiscal year, which the administration says brings government spending to 1998 levels after adjusting for population and inflation. The deficit accounts for more than 20 percent of all projected spending. Among the options Schwarzenegger presented is eliminating CalWORKS, the state’s welfare-towork program. The program provides a maximum $694 monthly cash assistance for families and helps single mothers with child care and job training. The governor and Republican lawmakers have vowed not to raise taxes, as the Legislature did last year, ensuring that spending cuts See CALIF. BUDGET, page 6
NEWS IN BRIEF THE SOUTHALND Police Commission Fails to Publish LAPD Abuse Reports (AP) — The Los Angeles Times says the city Police Commission has failed to make public its findings on at least 240 police use-of-force incidents, including more than 20 when a person died. The Times says the commission promised four years ago to publish its decisions but hasn’t done so in all cases. Unreported cases over the past five years include at least 46 in which police shot someone, and at least a dozen where the commission ruled an officer acted improperly. Commission President John Mack blames staffing shortages and called on the commission’s new inspector general to address the problem.
Analyst: City of L.A. Needs to Cut 1,000 More Jobs (AP) — The top budget analyst for Los Angeles is recommending that another 1,000 jobs be eliminated to close the city’s budget deficit. The plan recommended by Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller would be on top of 761 cuts already proposed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Miller says the mayor’s budget plan is counting on revenue that has not yet materialized — leasing 10 city parking garages and borrowing against future parking meter income. Miller says borrowing against parking meter revenue should be a last resort, while the garage leases will not be finalized until later in the year. The city faces a projected $492 million budget deficit for the next fiscal year. See BRIEFS, page 4
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