An effort to use California’s controversial “parent trigger” law to convert a public school into a privately managed charter school failed in Anaheim.
The law was passed five years ago when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor and the state school board was dominated by charter interests. Although heavily financed by the Waltons and other corporate interests, the “parent trigger” drive has succeeded in seizing control of public schools only twice in five years.
“Parents at the school, located in an overwhelmingly low-income immigrant community, failed to collect valid signatures representing 50% of pupils enrolled, as the law requires, said Supt. Linda Wagner. She said the district found that 133 of 488 petitions were not valid because the students had moved away, could not be found in the district records or were not signed by a parent or legal guardian, among other reasons. The district verified 48.4% of enrolled students.
“But former state Sen. Gloria Romero, who wrote the law and now helps parents improve their schools through her new Center for Parent Empowerment, accused the district of manipulating the numbers. The district rejected 12 petitions because those signed could not be reached “after multiple attempts,” according to documents, but Romero said officials never asked petition organizers to help locate them, as she said state regulations require.”
Romero was previously California director of pro-charter hedge fund managers’ “Democrats for Education Reform.” DFER was denounced by the state as a front for corporate interests.
There is something fundamentally undemocratic about letting this year’s (or last year’s) parents to privatize a community institution, built and paid for by the entire community.
Read Virginia Tibbets’ piece on this: http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2015/02/20/parent-trigger-fails-anaheim-elementary-school/
Unfortunately Romero will keep trying and has time to try to buy more signatures. This is very important for Orange County — if she wins, more will follow.
I was at the meeting and by biggest concern is this…I would say all but one parent who supported the trigger and spoke in favor of it stated that they were upset with the district and the lack of programs (unfortunately much of this was due to a recession and lack of funding for schools) however they loved their teachers and principal….do these parents realize and were they informed that by restarting the school they would lose all of those fabulous teachers? That needs to be the message to the parents.
I have been following any “parent trigger” challenges, especially around my community. I find it disturbing how little information is available on Gloria Romero’s group, especially where the group’s funding comes from.
Claims of manipulating data by a leader of the charterite/privatizer movement should be taken with a lot more than a grain of salt.
Please refer to my comment on a thread of this blog yesterday, a response to Steven Perez, in which I include a comment from a thread on an LATIMES article—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/02/20/breaking-news-cortines-says-l-a-cant-afford-ipads-for-all/
The last paragraph of the above posting: “There is something fundamentally undemocratic about letting this year’s (or last year’s) parents to privatize a community institution, built and paid for by the entire community.”
Google this blog for postings and comments about Adelanto, CA and the parent trigger process. It literally defines the phrase “fundamentally undemocratic.”
😎
That’s too bad, as the nation’s first and only charter
conversion instigated by the Parent Trigger
worked out so well for the folks in Adelanto… NOT!…
which the expose (BELOW) from CAPITAL & MAIN
describes in detail how the new private charter
management is “law-breakingly unprofessional”…
the article also details how, given an
opportunity to refute the claims contained
in the article, the charter folks declined,
except to say that it was all just …
“the sour grapes of ‘a couple of teachers who have
been disgruntled,’ ” …
http://capitalandmain.com/features/california-expose/adelanto-report-card-year-zero-of-the-parent-trigger-revolution/
(BELOW is a cut-‘n-paste of the text…
It’s long… ALSO… go to the link to see
a shorter video version of this, with interviews
with those quoted in the article below)
————————————
Adelanto Report Card: Year Zero of the Parent Trigger Revolution
By Bill Raden
October 16, 2014 in California Expose
Throughout 2011 and 2012, the eyes of the education world were focused on Adelanto, a small, working class town in California’s High Desert. A war had broken out there over the future of the K-6 Desert Trails Elementary School and its 660 low-income Latino and African-American students. When the dust settled, Desert Trails Elementary was gone. In its place was a bitterly divided community and the Desert Trails Preparatory Academy, the first (and so far, only) school in California and the U.S. to be fully chartered under a Parent Trigger law, which allows a simple majority of a school’s parents to wrest control of a low-performing school from a public school district, and transform it into a charter school.
Tiny Adelanto’s turmoil reflects a much larger battle now being fought across America between defenders of traditional public education and a self-described reform movement whose partisans often favor the privatization and deregulation of education. At least 25 states have considered parent trigger legislation and seven of them have enacted some version of the law, including Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas. Though funded by tax dollars, the trigger charter is private, meaning it is not bound by many of the rules and much of the governing oversight or transparency of a traditional public school.
At the end of Desert Trail’s inaugural, 2013-14 school year, a group of eight former Desert Trails teachers hand-delivered a 15-page complaint to the Adelanto Elementary School District (AESD), charging Desert Trails with an array of improprieties and its executive director, Debra Tarver, with unprofessional and sometimes unethical conduct.
Among the most serious accusations are charges that administrative chaos at Desert Trails has resulted in both a stampede of exiting teachers and staff; that uncredentialed instructors have taught in its classrooms; and that Desert Trails had an unwritten policy of dissuading parents of students with special learning needs from seeking special education. The teachers also allege that they had to endure a bullying regime in which, they say, they were continually screamed at, spied on, lied to and humiliated in front of parents and their peers by Tarver and her deputies. Capital & Main spoke with the teachers, four of whom agreed to go on the record for this story. (“The High Desert is a small place and Debbie Tarver has a long reach,” said one teacher who requested anonymity.)
“Not only was it dysfunctional and unprofessional,” says second grade teacher Renee Salazar, a five-year veteran of Los Angeles’ inner-city public schools, “it was law-breakingly unprofessional.”
The teachers interviewed for this story, who were paid about $3,300 a month, claim the school’s extreme miserliness shortchanged teachers and students on basic classroom tools. Over the first year, they said they each spent up to a full month’s salary, and in some cases more, on unreimbursed, out-of-pocket expenses.
“At the start of the year,” recalled kindergarten teacher Bertha Miramontes, “I ended up spending $1,000 because the décor in my classroom, [Tarver] said, was not good enough. I would spend anywhere between $200 to $300 per month to get supplies — writing paper, pencils, construction paper, tissues for my kids’ noses, hand sanitizer, crayons.”
These teachers also say that Tarver, who as executive director of a charter school is paid a salary commensurate to that of a San Bernardino county school district superintendent by both Desert Trails and LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy — a combined annual salary of around $200,000 — ordered the student water fountains shut off for the duration of the bitterly cold High Desert winter, rather than pay for overnight heat to prevent the pipes from freezing.
When contacted by Capital & Main, Tarver dismissed the allegations of cheapness, along with the other former teachers’ charges, with which she said she was already familiar, as the sour grapes of “a couple of teachers who have been disgruntled,” though she admitted that Desert Trails’ budget was stretched thin.
“Last year was the first year of a school start-up. You don’t get all your funding right away,” she explained. “[But] every teacher was provided curriculum and everything they needed to operate a classroom. As a matter of fact, they had more than what my teachers had when we started at my other school.”
That other school is LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy (LEPA) in nearby Hesperia, where Tarver also serves as executive director. It was LaVerne’s impressive record at posting high assessment scores and its “old-school” model of a well-rounded, classical education that put Tarver’s Adelanto charter application at the head of the shortlist compiled by the Desert Trails Parents Union (the name of the Adelanto Trigger faction) and its sponsor, the Gates Foundation- and Walton Family Foundation-backed Parent Revolution.
Charter school critics, however, charge that such schools often raise their test scores by winnowing out special-needs students. Federal law requires all taxpayer-supported schools to admit students with disabilities. Schools are required to carry out an individualized education plan (IEP) for each disabled student, which could include extra tutoring or a placement in a smaller — and costlier — specialized classroom. Desert Trails’ charter application promised to accommodate the elementary school’s estimated 90 special education students by hiring “a Special Education Coordinator, three full-time special education teachers and five instructional aides.” In its first year, however, the Desert Trails Special Ed program consisted of a single teacher, Special Education Coordinator Tina Fryberger, and a sole classroom aide.
“We weren’t allowed to talk about special education to anyone,” third grade teacher Nani Colmer asserted and claimed she taught kids who needed special ed. “I had students that I really wanted to have a shot at some sort of academic success, and they could not get it in my classroom. I wasn’t allowed to talk about special ed except to say, ‘Go see Debbie Tarver.’”
“She told us, ‘Do not tell your parents that there’s any special education testing or assessments available,’” echoed Renee Salazar. “’Do not even talk about special education or testing for any of your scholars. If that ever arises, send them to the office, I will talk to them.’”
Tarver denied this. “Everything is done legally and accordingly as special ed is supposed to operate. The teachers are responsible for following a child’s IEP if the child has an IEP. A teacher, and that’s anywhere, cannot diagnose if a child has a disability unless that child has been tested.”
Miramontes said she was told by one parent that Desert Trails staff advised her that her bipolar-diagnosed and severely ADHD, five-year-old twin “would be better served elsewhere.” Miramontes described the kindergartener as prone to extreme rages that included punching, biting, throwing classroom furniture and, on one occasion, trying to scale the playground fence and run away. Eventually he was put in Fryberger’s Special Ed classroom, from where he was then “mainstreamed” into Miramontes’ class for an hour each day during lunch. But the violent tantrums continued and began to trigger outbursts in the child’s twin sister, who was one of Miramontes’ regular students.
“The [children’s] mom would come in my class,” recounted Miramontes, “and she would say, ‘This is what I deal with every day at home.’ She was like, ‘I need help. I’m asking for help from this school and they’re not helping me. I don’t know what to do.’”
According to Miramontes, things came to a head when, during one of the rages, the five-year-old struck school registrar Janice Dominguez. Miramontes never saw the child again but says that she was later told by the disbelieving mother that Desert Trails’ behavior specialist, Anthonie Etienne, requested that she remove her son from the school. When the mother repeatedly asked if the boy was being suspended, she said that Etienne would only reply, “No, he’s not being suspended. He just can’t come back to school.” Etienne has since left Desert Trails and was unavailable for comment.
However, Fryberger confirmed to Capital & Main the outline of Miramontes’ account, but both she and Tarver adamantly denied that the child — or any children — were requested to leave Desert Trails last year.
“That’s false,” Fryberger countered. “Upon discussion with the parents and staff members, [the] mom was in agreement that [her son] would need a more suitable environment to meet his needs. So this was not our decision as far as telling him that he wasn’t welcome or anything. This was a decision that mom thought was best for her kid.”
The teachers say that the parents of at least two other students were also persuaded that their children would be better served elsewhere.
The most telling outward sign that all was not right at Desert Trails, however, may be its startling turnover in administration and teaching staff. During its first year, teachers say, the charter lost a principal (Don Wilkinson) and a director (Ron Griffin) — both before the Christmas break — its vice principal, six classroom teachers and its behavioral specialist. In addition, only nine of Desert Trails’ first-year teacher roster — or 33 percent — are returnees this year. Desert Trails’ charter promises “less than five percent annual employee turnover.” And, teachers say, Desert Trails seems to be running true to form for the 2014-15 year, with four teachers jumping ship as of this writing — including two from the kindergarten level.
Tarver, who refused to discuss administration turnover, claimed the school’s overall staff retention, which includes uncredentialed classroom aides and office workers, was 92 percent. She attributed teacher turnover to the recovering economy.
“You have over 10,000 [education] jobs that opened up in the state of California,” she insisted, “whereas a lot of schools — not just mine, but many schools — have had a turnover because people wanted to move closer to their home base. . . . That has been the case in every school district, not only in the High Desert but all over California.”
At Desert Trail’s somewhat smaller but demographic twin, Adelanto Elementary School, 16 out of 21 teachers managed to find their way back this year, making for a roughly 76 percent teacher retention rate during the period of economic recovery.
The former Desert Trails teachers characterize the abundance of public school teaching jobs not as their reason for leaving Desert Trails, but as a means of escaping what they say became an increasingly unbearable and capriciously erratic place to teach.
“We were always getting conflicting information from our superiors,” Salazar said. “I was told by multiple different supervisors what things were okay to do. Second grade was told, ‘Do not use Treasures,’ which is the core reading curriculum. It includes phonics, spelling, grammar, writing, components of social studies, science and all of your reading and reading comprehension strategies. So for months at a time, we improvised; we used other support material, we tried to hit every standard to the best possible way that we could without using that curriculum. And two months later, Debra Tarver comes in and says, ‘Oh my god, why aren’t you using Treasures?”
“We were all getting really stressed out,” confirmed third grade teacher Rachel Garvin Villarreal. “There were so many mixed messages from the different parts of administration, and having so much changeover in administration, you never quite knew who your boss was, and you didn’t get the guidance that you wanted.”
“They just told lies to cover themselves over and over and over again, and they contradicted themselves left and right,” said Nani Colmer. “So many things were done in defense of things that they did in the past, and then we paid the price for it.”
One of those lies appears to involve teacher credentialing.
The state’s education code is explicit on credentials. Section 47605(l) requires that “Teachers in charter schools shall hold a Commission on Teacher Credentialing certificate, permit, or other document equivalent to that which a teacher in other public schools would be required to hold.”
However, the online database of the state’s Commission on Teaching Credentialing (CTC), indicates that for 2013-14 Desert Trails kindergarten teacher Elfie Landa didn’t receive a preliminary Multiple Subject credential until July 24 of this year. (Landa left Desert Trails during the current term.) And the database turns up only an emergency, 30-Day Substitute Teaching Permit (issued March 21, 2014) for Honey Welker, a third grade level teaching lead last year, who took over Colmer’s third grade classroom mid-year.
Tarver refused to confirm or deny that she used uncredentialed teachers in the classroom last year, and instead insisted repeatedly that Desert Trails passed a credentialing audit conducted by the Adelanto Elementary School District last April.
Then there is the matter of the composition of Desert Trails’ five-member board of trustees.
As with the publicly elected school board of a traditional school district, which sets the policies that the superintendent must then carry out, the independence of a charter school’s board is a critical check and balance —a guarantee that the voice of parents will be heard and respected by the school administration.
The school’s former teachers who publicly question the Desert Trails board’s autonomy said they were long suspicious of the secrecy that seemed to surround it, noting that, unlike most charters, neither its composition nor its meeting minutes could be found anywhere on the school’s website.
When asked by Capital & Main, Tarver volunteered the board members’ names, adding that the membership was on record at AESD. She also added an unequivocal denial when asked about teacher suspicions that its members were employed by either Desert Trails or LEPA, which Tarver also runs.
However, not only is board member Latrice Brown listed on LEPA’s own website staff roster as a “parent liaison,” but an online search of LEPA’s federal 2012 IRS Form 990 tax return revealed that two Desert Trails board members are listed as LEPA company officers — Marnella Mayberry as president and Ruby Ford (who also works as a tutor at both schools) as vice president.
Also Read: High Noon for Parent Trigger?
What mostly angered the ex-Desert Trails teachers, however, was what they characterized as the cumulative betrayal of the education promised to the parents and children of Adelanto.
Renee Salazar said she was drawn to Desert Trails by Tarver’s sales pitch about unlimited resources and classroom freedom, and the opportunity to innovate curriculum.
“For a while, at least, we had that,” Salazar said. “But all that changed after the winter break when the school began ramping up for the spring assessment testing. We had a director that was telling us, ‘You can create your own curriculum.’ We were told there wasn’t going to be a test-prep focus. But from February on, there was.”
Salazar said the pressure fell heaviest on the second grade, which the administration considered the “giveaway year” — the grade that could usually be relied on to bring in a high score and help raise the school’s overall Academic Performance Index. The second grade class of 2013-14, however, was measuring as low as kindergarten level for math and language arts.
“We were told, ‘You have to get their test scores up,’ Salazar remembers. “Our vice principal was told, ‘If their test scores don’t come up, you won’t have a job.’ So they sat all of second grade down and said, ‘You’re no longer allowed to teach writing, you’re no longer allowed to teach social studies, science — anything else. No P.E. You’re only to [teach] language arts and math. This is the schedule that you’re to do it on, these are the only materials that you’re allowed to use, this is how you’re to do it.’”
One thing on which the two sides do agree is that Desert Trails did post test-score gains.
“We had 47 percent of our scholars who [rated] proficient and advanced,” Tarver said of the California Standards Test results for 5th grade science, “and we only had a 15 percent rate of those that were below and far below [state standards], which is a huge difference from the 30 to 40 percent that school had for the past 10 years.”
More comprehensive, schoolwide scores, she said, wouldn’t be released by the school for another month.
For the ex-teachers, it is a tarnished achievement that came at the terrible price of shattered morale and the stability and consistency that underpin a quality education.
“It wasn’t the holistic, well-rounded education that they were promised,” Salazar asserted. And [teachers leaving] is difficult. It’s hard on the scholars and it’s hard on their families.”
At least one parent who spoke to Capital & Main on the condition of anonymity agreed.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” this parent said. “I feel like so many teachers have left. There’s been, like three principals that left, and every time you ask somebody about it, they just make it seem like it’s no big deal. But when kids are in school, consistency is important.”
“When teachers are able to stay multiple years,” Rachel Garvin Villarreal noted, “they become part of that community and make an even stronger, healthy school culture that over time grows. . . . And even though we had invested so much, I guarantee you, we would have invested so much more.”
“We’re not trying to get even,” Miramontes said of the teachers’ complaint. “We just really care about those kids and just want the best for them. I mean, they don’t even have soap and paper towels in the bathroom! Kids deserve better than that.”
Using the parent trigger’s restart model has failed miserably in every instance. That’s really the only one that Parent Revolution supports because all the other models allow the school and the teachers to remain with the district.
The restart model hasn’t worked because established charter schools do not want to take over low performing ones. In the case of Desert Trails in Adelanto, a high performing charter took over and the result was a mass exodus of former students to other local public schools.
Gloria Romero and Parent Revolution are only interested in taking public schools out of the system and turning them over to private hands. If they can’t do that, they’re much less interested in pulling the trigger.
From:
http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2015/02/20/parent-trigger-fails-anaheim-elementary-school/
This is interesting.
At the school board meeting where the trigger was denied, the anti-Parent Trigger parents, in sworn affidavits, testified—under oath and under penalty of perjury—that they were “were coerced with gifts of after-school tutoring and iPads for their signatures. These affidavits were delivered to the trustees this evening.”
The pro-Parent Trigger folks responded with “11 affidavits from petitioners who swore they did not offer any gifts for signing.”
If the 11 petitioners providing the affidavits denying the accusation include some or all of thos named by the parents as the ones who offered gifts… then there can be only one conclusion.
Somebody’s lying.
Here’s another interesting tidbit:
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“Then it was noted that there was no separate document added to the petition identifying the option for restart which, according to the law, must be established when the petition is turned in. It was also found that the Spanish version of the petition did not include information about the restart, so the Spanish speaking parents were not alerted in the petition about the consequences of signing.”
———————————————–
Hmmm… unlike the offering gifts stuff, this accusation not a disputable, “he said-she said” point of contention. The Spanish version of the petition is on paper, in black’-n-white, as they say. Either it includes all legally required details—i.e. your public school could very well be privatized—or it doesn’t. And the Spanish petition apparently doesn’t.
But it ain’t over yet…
————
“Even as those about rejoiced this decision, it was noted by Board President, Bob Gardner, that the petitioners have 60 days to make corrections and the district has 25 days after that to make their decision.”
I love the right-wing, pro-privatizaion slant of O.C. REGISTER’seditorial board’s take on these events.
This may as well be a press release that PARENT REVOLUTION dictated to them.
Note the corporate reform, privatizer jargon used… “defenders of the status quo”…
O.C. REGISTER Editorial Board:
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“The first attempt at pulling the parent trigger in Orange County was never going to be easy, as defenders of the status quo have attempted to make ‘school choice’ a disreputable phrase. But Palm Lane is a school – one of many – in need of real reform. We hope it will be a catalyst for other Orange County parents to take control of their children’s educational futures.”
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There’s not the slightest semblance of balance or objectivity—i.e. like including the details mentioned in the K-12 News Network coverage (in the above post):
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/school-651705-parent-parents.html
Could we please bring back the days when we had a free press in this country?
As with the O.C. REGISTER’s editors, the anti-union, pro-privatization journalists all seem to be reading from the same script in their use of corporate reform jargon.
Take the case of the L.A. Times’ Jason Felch, a married-with-children, 40-something paragon of the Fourth Estate who last year was fired in disgrace for slanting a piece due—his editors claimed in their public press release on the matter—-to having sex with a college student source on another story… but hey… that’s … well… another story.
Where was I?
Any-hoo, in 2010, Jason was one of the writers behind out a bogus series promoting the evaluation of teachers based on the discredited VAM methodology. This included a database of 6,000 teachers’ VAM scores. Since it was publicly available on the L.A. TIMES’ website, it led one elementary school teacher, Rigoberto Ruelas, committing suicide.
Well, shortly after publication, Jason went up to U.C. Berkely to appear on a panel to defend this abomination. In the video below, panelist Richard Rothstein spends several minutes eviscerating VAM in great detail.
In response, Jason will not deign to address even one of the Rothstein’s arguments. The only rejoinder ol’ Jason can muster is that Rothstein must be one of those …. you guessed it…
… defenders of the “status quo.”
It’s the old “false dichotomy” fallacy. You either support VAM, or you’re part of the evil, dreaded “status quo.”
It’s quite a comical exchange, as Jason tries to put words in Rothstein’s mouth in order to shoehorn his prepared talking points into the discussion, while again, refusing to address the relevant criticisms to VAM and his L.A. TIMES series.
Rothstein, however, quickly catches onto this shabby trick, then jumps in and prevents Felch from doing so.
(CAPITALS within the dialogue are mine, Jack)
00:36:20 –
————————————————
————————————————
ROTHSTEIN: (finishing up after several minutes) “… VAM … focuses to distort the curriculum… to distort the teaching… in order to focus on test scores… to focus on the techniques of test-taking…even if VAM was a perfect measure of teachers’ effectiveness, it would only be a perfect measure of a teachers’ ability to get high scores on low quality tests. That is what we’re incentivizing… (blah-blah-blah)”
MODERATOR: (to FELCH) “I’m going ask you respond to everything that everyone has said.”
FELCH: “No, I won’t… I’m not going to try to respond to every uhhh… critique… I’ll just make one important point.”
—-(turning to ROTHSTEIN)
FELCH: “You seem to be arguing that our (the L.A. Times’) diagnosis that there’s a problem in public education in this country may be ill-founded, and that THE STATUS QUO IS FINE.”
ROTHSTEIN: (correcting FELCH) : “That’s NOT what I said. I didn’t say THAT! I didn’t say ANYTHING LIKE THAT, so if you’re going to get a response, I’m going get one to what you just said.”
FELCH: “Let me say THIS then. Let’s just say you DID say that- ”
ROTHSTEIN: (laughing & exasperated) “BUT I DIDN’T!”
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And then later, after acknowledging but not refuting the critiques, Felch returns to using the loaded term “status quo”:
00:38:52
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FELCH: “… what we don’t talk about are the limitations or the error rate of principals’ evaluations, (with principals) sitting in the back of a classroom for fifteen minutes once every five years. THAT’S THE STATUS QUO that is in many schools in the state, and all over the country…”
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“… for fifteen minutes once every five years…”???!!!
Sweet Jesus!
Where does he get this drivel? The Gates’ Foundation? Did he bother to interview even one of LAUSD’s 35,000 teachers in an attempt verify this? Any one of us would have set Felch straight… after we ceased laughing.
No, Jason, that is most certainly NOT the quote-unquote “status quo” in traditional, unionized, public school teacher evaluation…. especially not in LAUSD. Principals and other administrators can and do walk through our classes uninvited and without warning all the ding-dong day, and, based on what they see, give criticism and direction that must be followed, under penalty of being written up or evaluated negatively.
I doubt this will be the end for this school any more than it was when Parent Trigger parents at Desert Trails in Adelanto were shot down time and again.
Parent Trigger is a convenient misnomer.
It is even more egregious than letting a group of parents, who may not be involved in a school a couple of years in the future, decide to privatize a public institution. As we have heard in many parent trigger situations in California, in Anaheim last week, parents reported they had been completely misled about the petition and teachers were demonized as thugs for communicating with parents.