If you were scratching your head last night trying to find a meeting for DELAC, the school district’s advisory committee on English-learning students, you weren’t alone. On the district’s website, the meeting was posted for the Harold J. Ballard Parent Center on Congress Street — but the meeting was nowhere to be found. I spent a half hour knocking on doors at the Ballard Center along with Patricia Jimenez, a parent and new committee member who had been directed to the center today by a district contact. We finally ran into a custodian who told us meetings wouldn’t be held at the center until November, when renovations to the auditorium were complete, and recommended that we call the district office in the morning to find out where the meetings would be held in the meantime.
If a committee member and a journalist can’t find a public meeting about one of the school district’s biggest issues — how to teach English learners — how the heck is your average parent supposed to? Especially if they don’t speak fluent English?