To our friends at BCS:
The process of pulling together the annual facilities offer is a long one, and involves plenty of paperwork. Every Feb 1, LASD provides a "Preliminary Offer" to BCS to cover the facilities we will provide for the coming school year. Most years, that offer can run 30+ pages, with additional schedules and attachements balooning that even further.
Last year we made available a section of turf known as "the patch". (It's the soccer field on the western edge of the BCS campus.) This year, in our preliminary offer, we made a mistake that said the patch was not part of the offer. I understand that this caused quite a bit of upset in the BCS community. I received some phone calls, as did members of the LASD adminstration. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why people were upset- we were providing the patch in 2011-12, just as we did in 2010-11. Randy Kenyon and I met with members of the BCS Board today to review the preliminary offer, and we were equally confused when they said that the offer didn't include the patch.
It turns out that in preparing our preliminary offer, we used an old draft document from a prior school year, where BCS didn't have use of the patch during the day. The mistake flowed through to the document we shared on Feb 1st. Let me be clear: It has always been the intent of LASD to include full use of the patch in our preliminary offer. I apologize for the unrest it caused in the BCS community.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions on this matter.
Thank you for acknowledging a mistake has been make by LASD. We're all human, and mistakes do happen. So, when will LASD be submitting a "Revised (and corrected" Preliminary Offer so the BCS community can understand what LASD really intended to offer in the Preliminary offer? AS it stands now, we don't know what the "sharing agreement" in this year's prelim offer intends for use of the soccer field.
ReplyDeleteUpdate: LSAD delivered an updated preliminary offer to BCS earlier today. It includes the corrected schedule B, and addresses a few typographical errors, etc. in the original document.
ReplyDeleteThe preliminary offer remains a starting point for the discussions, and I believe we'll continue to meet with the BCS board members to discuss this offer as we move through the process.