Robert Payne, Seat 7, LACCD
Writer / Researcher/ Instructor
PayneForLACCD@gmail.com
Will our graduates succeed in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual world in which corporations recruit without regard to national boundaries?
The Los Angeles Community Colleges now advertise the reopening of classes with billboards and the direct mailings of class schedules to students. I received a catalog for Los Angeles Mission Collage. On the cover of the catalog, they promise success. Do the long term earnings of students show success? See the research published by the New York Times:
I want to change those numbers.
Thank you for this opportunity to ask for your vote. I hope you will support a progressive candidate who is not part of the political regime dominating the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District. The abysmal numbers shown by the New York Times research reveal the failure of instruction and a failure of their promises.
I have the experience and the qualifications for this position. I was a boy from Pacoima who attended a junior college, I then went on for advanced degrees at universities. I understand the needs of students who need help. I was one of them.
I have worked as teacher in high schools. I attended special education classes in the evenings to better help the troubled youth I taught during the day. (Those night classes led me to understand the concept of Learning Modalities. As Trustee, I will advocate the testing of all new students, young and older, before they begin their classes. I know from my own education and life the value of learning how to learn.)
After working in the high schools, I worked as a professor at colleges and universities, civilian and military, United States and foreign. I have taught at LA Mission College in the District.
Outside of education, in my graduate school years, I worked feature films as a technician as I struggled to sell screenplays. I failed. I went on to write 21 novels and put a novel on the New York Times Paperback Bestsellers List. I used money from those novels to launch my own non profit with the indigenous Mayans of Guatemala. Then came my years in the high schools, colleges, and universities. I now direct documentaries and continue writing.
From my own life, and the lives of the students in my classes, I know the value of education.
From Pacoima, to a Best Seller List in the New York Times, to work designs and projects in the villages, towns, and cities of many nations, education opened all my opportunities. At this difficult time in our nation, I want all others to achieve what is possible. That is why I confront the overwhelming wealth and political power of the incumbents on the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.
At a cost of one million dollars, the faculty political regime hired my opponent Garbriel Buelna to vote as they tell him. Buelna attends the meetings of Democrats, then sends out mailings as a Republican with his face grinning next a ranting Donald Trump. Buelna will obey any dictate of the faculty and administration, try any trick on the voters to advance his political vanity.
Buelna and Trump. Republicans. How can we trust a 'Democratic' Trustee who works with that gangster Trump?
Buelna supports continuation of 40% of classes completely on line. This is and will continue to be a failure and open to fraud. Yet this is the faculty demand -- and he will obey.
Buelna supports more money and priviledges for tenured faculty. I want equal pay and health care for the adjunct faculty, who teach more than 70% of the classes. The State of California funds the colleges based on enrollment and classes, the adjunct faculty works for that money, the tenured, retired-in-place faculty gets the money.
There are many other programs I would support. If elected, I would advocate 100% solar power of the facilities, more environmental innovations on the campuses, and more critical review of designs and costs of contracted building or renovations.
You have a choice:
Support an incumbent hired to rubber-stamp faculty and administration contracts. A hired politician who uses his position to extort funding to advance his political career.
Or:
Support me, Robert Payne, and vote for an independent voice not corrupted by the faculty political regime.
I have world experience. I know what confronts students. I will not use the position to get a ticket to Sacramento. I will work only for the students, the innovative faculty, and staff, the District, and the community.
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