The Weekly Newspaper of Torrance Herald Publications - Torrance, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hawthorne, Lawndale, & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 5, No. 4 - January 22, 2015 Inside This Issue Business Briefs....................2 Certified & Licensed Professionals.....................10 Classifieds............................4 Crossword/Sudoku.............4 Police Reports.....................9 Politically Speaking............5 Real Estate.........................12 Sports....................................6 TerriAnn in Torrance..........8 Weekend Forecast Locals Put on Their Dancing Shoes Christian Wolf, executive director of Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation, will be dancing in “Dancing with the South Bay Stars IV,” in competition with eleven other dancers for a prize which goes to charity. He is pictured here with Larisa Bates, his dance partner. For more photos and information, see page 12. Photo by Brian Singer/Singer Media. District Moves Forward with Program Improvement Plans By Cristian Vasquez Despite the cancelation of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) reports by the state’s Department Forecast Realty Knows Property in the South Bay By Laura Sorensen Real estate in the South Bay can be tricky to navigate. Those looking to buy want the perfect home in a great community, a house which meets their price point as well as has the right type of amenities nearby. Each community has its own feel and budgetary concerns, property laws and other quirks. It’s always best to find someone to help navigate through the maze: someone who is an expert on local real estate because they know the area by heart. Forecast Realty, owned by Roger Hart, has made local knowledge its bread and butter for decades. Forecast Realty has been in business for 34 years, having first opened in 1980. Hart kept the business small to midsize through 1991, employing about 50 real estate agents, but in 1991 moved to his current location at 2420 Carson Street and downsized. “In real estate you have about 10-15% of agents making 90% of the money,” he said, so it didn’t make sense to have so many people in the office who weren’t bringing in sales. Currently, he has an operation that is mostly family: he has three sons and they have all joined him in the business, as well as two of his daughters-in-law. He also has four agents who have been with him for many years. Hart values a companionable working environment and highly trained agents, so he has spent time training each agent himself to meet his standards. Forecast is not a strictly residential or strictly commercial real estate business. Hart says that in the years he’s been in business, he’s done a little of everything, See Forecast Realty, page 2 of Education, the Torrance Unified School District will move forward with its plans to remove its Program Improvement designation. “Like many other districts we receive funds to support low-income families; that is what Title I is all about and as a district that is in Program Improvement again, like many others in the state, we are in a position where we are to be looking at our progress with the programs that we have in place in relation to supporting students,” TUSD Director of State and Federal Projects Ben Eagan said. Egan, who spoke to the school board during the Tuesday, Jan. 20 meetings, outlined plans by the district to work directly with parents at the different schools in the district that have been designated Program Improvement. Funds from Title I are designated to schools and local educational agencies [LEAs] that do not meet the department of education’s Adequate Yearly Progress [AYP]. In addition, Title I is financial assistance to schools and district with high concentrations of lowincome families. Said schools are identified as Program Improvement [PI] through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA]. “We have low-income students in all of the schools in our district but just the concentrations exist a little bit greater in the schools that were designated Title I schools,” Egan said. However, the standardized test used by the state to determine progress is no longer being applied as a measuring standard [Standardized Testing and Reporting]. As of the 2013-2014 school year the state adopted state has adopted the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress [CAASPP] test, which leaves TUSD in a peculiar position. “At this point our fate is frozen since we don’t have standardized data, which was the determining factor for entering Program Improvement and for those changes to happen, so we are sort of stuck,” Egan said. “We were closing that gap and that was all based on the STAR test which doesn’t exist anymore so we aren’t going to be able to close it completely. We don’t know what the See School, page 9 Friday Sunny 73˚/52˚ Saturday Sunny 76˚/52˚ Sunday Mostly Sunny 78˚/53˚
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