Diego’s Dudes lunchtime reading club at Felton Elementary School in Lennox. Fourth grade teacher Alex Carrera brings her Chihuahua Diego to class as a mascot to help boys improve reading skills. (Brad Graverson / Staff Photographer)

Not long ago, Alex Carrera was killing time at a yard sale when she spied a book that caught her attention: “The Trouble With Boys. ”

The fourth-grade teacher at Felton Elementary School in Lennox fished a dollar out of her purse and made the purchase.

The message of the book by Peg Tyre jibed with Carrera’s classroom experience: Girls are outperforming boys in academics, and the gap is growing.

Inspired, Carrera came up with the idea for “Diego’s Dudes,” a reading club that involves her, a handful of boys who struggle with reading and Diego, the mascot of the club and the calmest of Carrera’s three Chihuahuas.

This fall, the small group began meeting three days a week, sitting on the floor of the empty classroom while the rest of the boys and girls romp outside during recess. For 15 minutes, the four boys read out loud passages from books of their own choosing while Carrera moderates. (Then they join their classmates for the second half of recess.) As for Diego, well, he tends to just lay on the floor and blink.

“He’s a good listener, and he doesn’t judge,” Carrera said. “He just wants to hear a good story. ”

The voluntary club is merely a drop of medicine in an ocean of need, but it sure made an impression on the SoCal Honda Dealers Association. Recently, the organization selected Carrera among five teachers in Southern California to be honored for Teachers Appreciation Week.

Carrera was nominated for the award by her principal, Scott Wilcox.

“It’s boys, and it’s Hispanic boys and minority boys, who are dropping out of high school,” he said. “You stop kids from dropping out of high school by intervening with something out of the box like this in the early grades. ”

Felton Elementary serves a high-risk population. Nearly 95 percent of the students are Latino; about 70 percent of the students are native Spanish speakers who are still learning English.

One of them is Edgar Vera, a member of the club. At the beginning of the year, Edgar not only felt shy about reading, but he also refused to speak English. Now he’s an eager participant during reading time.

“This club made me think that reading is fun for me,” he told a reporter during a visit. “I learned words and now I like a lot of reading. ”

Another student in the club, Charles Allen, said the group has helped with his comprehension of certain words, like “embarrassed. ”

“I used to say ‘embraced,’ ” he said.

The gender gap in reading is a phenomenon that transcends ethnicity. A 2010 study by the Center on Education Policy found that boys lag behind girls in reading in all 50 states.

Males also are increasingly outnumbered by females on college campuses. It is widely reported that women in the United States now earn 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of all master’s degrees and more than half of all doctoral degrees.

Taking a page out of “The Trouble With Boys,” Carrera decided that the key to getting boys excited about reading – especially those who are “reluctant readers” – is to let them choose the materials.

With this in mind, Carrera was careful to recruit one of her most rambunctious boys, Miguel Tuznoh, to select the books for the group.

“He’s had trouble in the past with behavior,” she said. “He’s considered a leader. I picked up on that, and so rather than using his leadership skills in a negative way, I decided, ‘OK this is going to be my ringleader.’ ”

Miguel shared his criteria for book selection: anything “Gooey, disgusting, worms, sports … ”

“Boy stuff,” Carrera chimed in.

The reading list thus includes books like “How to Eat Fried Worms,” “Tales from the Crypt: Diary of a Stinky Dead Kid” and “The ‘Air’ Apparent: Kobe.”

The group is currently reading a book by Ellen Potter called “Slob,” about a fat kid who is a genius inventor but gets picked on. Carrera suggested that because she is female, she might have been subconsciously out of touch with the kind of selections more appealing to the male gender.

“They want to read biographies, irreverent humor, comic books,” she said. “Girls want to read about superstars. Right now Taylor Swift is big in my class. ”

The boys not only selected the books, but they also came up with the three rules of Diego’s Dudes.

“The only thing I say is ‘Give me three rules that have to do with character,’ ” Carrera said. And so they did.

Rule No. 1: Treat the books and mascot with care.

Rule No. 2: Come to the club meetings on time.

Rule No. 3: Respect our friends when they’re reading out loud.

“Mind you, they came up with that,” Carrera said. “We can’t laugh, we can’t make fun. And you see, they are helping each other out. ”

Next year, Carrera wants to add an element to the program in which male role models come to the class to read out loud to the boys.

“A lot of boys who struggle with reading don’t really have a male role model who they see reading,” she said. “I want to include male role models to come in and say, ‘This is my favorite book. Check it out.’ “

The state-appointed leader of the Inglewood Unified School District was removed after only two months on the job back in December, but still received a $100,000 buyout.

Now, the district Kent Taylor left behind is continuing to spiral downward, with teachers and other employees facing the prospect of layoffs and double-digit pay cuts to stave off further financial disaster.

The discrepancy between Taylor’s buyout and the looming pay cuts prompted consternation among union officials this week, when the district held a special board meeting to address issues stemming from the buyout.

“When our people do something wrong, they get fired,” said Chris Graeber, field representative for the classified union representing custodians, clerical workers and other nonteachers. “This guy walks away with 100 grand in his pocket after two months of work. We can’t figure out how this is all adding up. ”

In September, fiscally insolvent Inglewood Unified became the ninth school district in the history of California to be taken over by the state. With expenditures exceeding revenues by some $16 million annually due to plunging student enrollment, the state in October floated the district an emergency loan of $55 million – an extreme measure that required firing then-local Superintendent Gary McHenry and stripping the locally elected school board of its legislative powers.

Around that time, Taylor was thrust into a high-profile, high-pressure situation when California state schools chief Tom Torlakson recruited him from the top job at the Southern Kern Unified School District in hopes Taylor could rescue Inglewood Unified from the financial quicksand.

He was hired at a salary of $16,670 a month, plus $600 every month for expenses, amounting to about $207,240 annually. Two months later, he was pressured to resign for making financial commitments with the teachers union without approval from the California Department of Education.

In mid-March, Taylor took a job next door, as deputy superintendent of the K-8 Lennox School District. Because he’d asked for his $100,000 buyout to be paid off on a monthly basis, he has essentially been earning two executive paychecks for the past three months. The issue came to light this week, when the Los Angeles County Office of Education notified the Inglewood school district that Taylor appears to be employed by two districts at once.

On the one hand, the issue is merely technical. To take care of it, the Inglewood Unified essentially just needs to cut Taylor a check for the balance of what he is owed so it can get him off the books.

But union leaders see the buyout as an issue of fairness. Inglewood’s classified union expects a round of layoffs in coming weeks and the teachers union faces a possible 15 percent pay cut.

“If the state believes (Taylor) made mistakes, why are they taking it out on us?” said Pete Somberg, president of the Inglewood teachers union. “And why are they taking it out on the kids? ”

Asked this week why he was allowed to resign, and why the deal included a $100,000 buyout, state officials were terse.

“The payments he has received were pursuant to his contract,” said a spokeswoman with the California Department of Education in an email to the Daily Breeze. Taylor did not return a call from the Daily Breeze early this week.

The state replaced Taylor with the school finances leader serving directly under him, La Tanya Kirk-Carter. That was supposed to be a temporary assignment until the state found a permanent hire, but it’s been nearly half a year and she remains at the helm.

Now, Kirk-Carter is in the unfortunate position of trying to persuade the teachers to back out of an agreement they’d signed with Taylor; it includes several furlough days but no significant concession on salary or benefits.

That deal, Kirk-Carter has said, failed to save enough money: just $1 million when the district has been deficit-spending by $16 million or more every year.

Teachers union President Somberg says it isn’t the teachers’ fault that Taylor wasn’t authorized to bargain. Inglewood teachers, he added, cannot afford a pay cut.

“We’re already the lowest-paid teachers in Los Angeles County,” he said. (Teachers in Inglewood do enjoy an unusually generous benefits package, though.)

Somberg said he’s been told that if teachers don’t accept a pay cut, the district faces an ominous prospect: running out of money from the state’s $55 million bailout loan before the end of the 2013-14 school year. That could mean dissolution of the district.

“They’re telling the teachers we need to take a 15 percent pay cut, and if we don’t, they’re holding the wrath of God over our head,” Somberg said. “Even though we didn’t mess up – they did. In order to save the district, it’s going to have to come on the backs of the employees. That’s just not OK. ”

The matter of Taylor’s ill-fated relationship with Inglewood Unified resurfaced Monday, when the district held a special board meeting to discuss a few issues, one of which was listed on the public agenda under a litigation header titled “Taylor vs. IUSD.” It turns out Taylor is not suing the district. Instead, the Los Angeles County Office of Education is asking for Inglewood to pay out the remainder of his monthly balance in a lump sum. (However, sources say there is a dispute between Taylor and the district about what he is owed.)

Next door, the Lennox school board is pleased enough with Taylor’s performance to make it official. On Tuesday night, it approved his contract, which codifies his $165,000 annual salary. School board President Marisol Cruz gave a rave review of his performance since taking the district’s No. 2 job on March 20.

“He gets things done, and fast,” she said, noting how Taylor swiftly made two important hires – fiscal director and the food services director. “If the board wants to get something done, we give a directive, and he tells us how to get there. It’s very clear, it’s very transparent and I love it. ”

Still, the sentiment apparently isn’t unanimous: the Lennox board – currently a fractured body – approved Taylor’s contract on a narrow 3-2 vote, with board members Juan Navarro and Angela Fajardo dissenting.

All of the libraries in the Torrance Unified School District’s 17 elementary schools are run by parent volunteers. Parent volunteers Cathy Shinozaki, right, and Laura Hamano, back left, check out books to students at Lincoln Elementary School. (Sean Hiller / Staff Photographer)

In an instant, the library at Lincoln Elementary in Torrance went from calm to semi-chaotic as the students of a first-grade class spilled in for their weekly visit.

In a 30-minute flurry of activity, the kids sought help from the three women in the library to locate, check out and return books – as well as to settle up on any nickel-a-day late fees they might have owed.

At one point, a little boy looking for a book about grasshoppers grabbed the hand of a library lady named Amy Ota as she was helping another student.

“Hi Mom,” he said.

She turned around and smiled.

“Hi sweet pea. ”

In the Torrance Unified School District, it takes a village to run an elementary school library.

For decades, all of the libraries in the district’s 17 grammar schools have been entirely operated by parent volunteers.

It’s a unique setup. Although tough economic times have left most area school districts bereft of the full-on certificated librarians who operate on the same plane as classroom teachers, the vast majority in the South Bay still employ technicians or special-projects teachers to run their elementary school libraries. (Library technicians also run the show in the middle and high schools of Torrance Unified.)

Contrary to what most might think, the grass-roots library system in Torrance’s elementary schools isn’t the product of the latest statewide budget crisis. Rather, it’s a tradition that began more than 20 years ago in Torrance, when the libraries of most elementary schools in the district were boarded up – victims, perhaps, of that era’s great recession.

At the time, Torrance school board member Terry Ragins was a PTA member at Yukon Elementary. She was among the first group of parents to breathe life back into the mothballed libraries.

“This was an area where (the PTA) saw a dire need and came forth and said, ‘This is a void that we can fill,’ ” she said. “They’ve filled it so ably over the last 20 years that we’ve never revisited it. ”

Perhaps because the libraries were closed, the district was able to get around a law prohibiting paid employees from being supplanted by volunteers. If the jobs didn’t exist at the time the volunteers started doing the work, then paid employees were not technically replaced.

It’s a distinction that makes Mario Di Leva, executive director of the Torrance teachers union, a little uneasy.

“We totally value volunteers, parent volunteers and community volunteers, and only want that to continue,” he said. “However, we need to define those roles when it crosses into the gray zone of doing unit work. ”

He added: “If all of a sudden you have all the neighborhood dads mowing (school) lawns on Saturdays, it would put some people out of work, and there would be no guarantee the lawns will be mowed. ”

It is perhaps for this reason that many of the elementary school libraries in the Los Angeles Unified School District are unmanned. There, the last wave of budget cuts swept away the technicians in all but a fraction of the elementary schools, said LAUSD spokeswoman Gayle Pollard-Terry.

She added that the law precluding volunteers from supplanting those jobs prohibits parent volunteers from assuming those duties. Rather, that work is performed by the classroom teachers who take their classes to the library.

In Manhattan Beach Unified, the district has been blessed to have a mighty fundraising arm in the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, which provides funding for paid media specialists to serve in school libraries. Those specialists also manage small crews of volunteers.

District spokeswoman Carolyn Seaton said there are educational benefits to having a paid staff member who can give the children a kind of customized library experience. She specifically mentioned such a specialist in Manhattan Beach who makes a point to know the main interests and reading levels of each child, so as to better pair them with a book accordingly.

“When students develop love affairs with particular genres or authors, it influences their ability to read and write,” she said.

At Lincoln Elementary in Torrance, parents even did much of the grunt work involved with a library renovation a couple of years ago. (The project was bankrolled largely by the school’s corporate partner, Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center.)

Ota said she climbed a ladder and helped repaint the walls, which were once a bleak brown and are now a sunny yellow. She also went around town comparing notes on pricing for carpet. The school eventually went with a vendor who lived down the block. “It wasn’t very inviting,” she said of the old library. “It was really kind of dirty and neglected.”

Ota says she was happy to do the work, inspired in no small part by a principal she admires.

“She makes you want to do more for the school,” Ota said of Katherine Castleberry.

Some library volunteers wouldn’t stop coming if you paid them to. Laura Hamano’s three children all are in their 20s, but she still shows up to the Lincoln Elementary library every day to perform her duties.

“It’s fun, and I get to know the kids,” she said after the students had left on a recent morning, while checking in a stack of the books they’d left behind: “Cinderella,” “Aladdin,” “Monster Trucks,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid. ”

She also enjoys watching them grow up, through their elementary years and well after, seeing as how she occasionally bumps into a former student in a grocery store or other public place.

“Sometimes they come over and say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Hamano – you remember me?’ ” she said, “and they look totally different, since they are in high school. “

San Pedro High School English teacher David Crowley was honored Monday with a surprise party and equipment donation from Honda. Crowley has been teaching at the school for 12 years, is instrumental in the school’s Gay Straight Alliance Program and started a Glee club. Crowley shows hi surprise as he walks into a classroom full of people waiting to honor him. (Steve McCrank / Staff Photographer)

San Pedro High School English teacher David Crowley was going about his business Monday morning when he was told there was a distraught student in the multipurpose room who badly needed his counsel.

Crowley didn’t think much of it. After all, he’d been the adviser of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance since founding the club 12 years ago – his first year working full-time at the school. Being there for kids who felt like outcasts was second nature.

But when he entered the room, he was greeted by a small swarm of news cameras and a cheering crowd of students, faculty, friends, family and a handful of young adults in blue T-shirts bearing the Honda logo.

“What’s going on here?” were the first words out of his mouth. He repeated the question at least once before taking a seat in the front row and getting his answer.

Crowley is among five teachers from San Pedro to Simi Valley being honored for Teachers Appreciation Week by the SoCal Honda Dealers Association. The association is recognizing one teacher per day through its Helpful Honda program, a seven-year-old campaign of community goodwill that includes other events such as surprising people with complimentary roses on Valentine’s Day and paying for gas at the pump when prices skyrocket.

Monday was the day for Crowley, who’d been nominated by his principal, Jeanette Stevens.

“Thank you for being a catalyst for change,” she told him, prompting more cheers.

In addition to starting theGay-Straight Alliance, Crowley this fall helped students launch a glee club, a singing club at a school bereft of a choir due to budget cuts. He also became San Pedro High’s first-ever social media teacher, creating the school’s Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitter feed.

He organizes an overnight retreat with students involved in a program called Advancement Via Individual Determination – known better as AVID – whose main purpose is to prepare disadvantaged students for college.

But fellow teacher Anthony Saavedra said those accomplishments only scratch the surface of Crowley’s abilities.

“When it comes to the controversy of testing, Dave’s motto is ‘Bring it on,’ ” he said, speaking into a mic before the audience. “His students consistently do well. ”

As Crowley sat down in the front row, still dumbfounded by the attention, a student holding a mic on stage began singing a song, ABBA’s “Thank You for the Music.” It crescendoed to include a chorus of kids. Crowley dabbed tears as he watched, and somebody brought him a box of tissues. At some point, Crowley’s 10-year-old son, Caden, sat in his lap.

Other students later took the mic to express their appreciation.

“You care for students – you understand,” said Jesse Gonzales, a junior with a streak of green in his long hair, shredded blue jeans and painted nails. “That’s very hard to come by these days. ”

Aundrea Fizer, a sophomore, said that thanks to the glee club and Crowley, school no longer feels scary to her.

“I’ve opened up to new people, met new friends – I never thought I’d have something like this,” she said.

In addition to the accolades from students and colleagues, Crowley was awarded $5,000 worth of gear from Helpful Honda that included several iPads, a karaoke machine, a digital camera and a MacBook computer.

“Gosh – I don’t think I’ve ever felt this appreciated,” said Crowley, a tall and slender man with wispy blond hair and dark-framed eyeglasses.

Crowley still remembers the first meeting of the Gay-Straight Alliance. Students crowded around the door – not to go in, necessarily, but to see who was going in.

“The first meeting was met with a lot of curiosity,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds of kids showed up. I think they wanted to see who was gay. ”

Crowley had actually been coming off a tough week. Due to the school’s declining enrollment and his place on the faculty seniority list, Crowley had just been informed he is due to be displaced next school year.

Because the school’s headcount is expected to shrink by about 230 students, he is among six teachers slated for reassignment to other schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “This is my home. ”

Asked what it takes to be a good teacher, Crowley said it is important to talk to kids, not at them.

By this, he means treating them more like colleagues than underlings.

For instance, Crowley has a method for discussing classroom rules on the first day of school.

“I just stare at them,” he said. “After a while, I go, ‘What are the rules? I mean, there’s a lot more of you than there are of me. So you guys could easily kick my butt if you wanted to. So I guess we better figure out how we’re all going to get along.’ And then they start suggesting rules, and then I slowly guide them to the ones that I’m OK with. “

Students in Loyola Marymount University’s new business-incubator class demonstrate their product proposals to business professionals who critique their business plans. Students who invented Revita Ink pitch their product and business plan. (Steve McCrank / Staff Photographer)

A miracle drink to cure hangovers. A cream that brightens the color on tattoos. An ergonomic shovel. A website that cuts the humble car salesman out of the deal.

In addition to dreaming up these inventions, students in Loyola Marymount University’s new business-incubator class created the prototypes.

The lab kicked off in January, and officially wraps up its first-ever semester next week.

“We don’t do much theory, we don’t do much lecturing, we don’t do too much documentation,” said the professor, David Choi. “We just work. ”

LMU’s College of Business Administration has long been home to one of the nation’s premier entrepreneurship programs. A regular presence on the best-of lists of such magazines as BusinessWeek and Princeton Review, the 40-year-old entrepreneurship program has always offered courses that educate students on the basics of launching an enterprise.

What’s different about the incubator lab is that it requires students to not only create a business plan, but also build a prototype and test it in the marketplace.

As a result, the line between classroom project and real-world sales pitch can be a little blurry. But that’s the appeal.

“I get to pursue my business model while pursuing my master’s degree, which is the coolest combination of all,” said Stephen Walden, a 23-year-old MBA student. He is the creator of the ergonomic shovel – an idea that hit him like a shock-wave of back pain while he was shoveling dirt at his parents’ home in San Diego a couple of years ago.

The design has already netted him $12,000 in prize money from a contest at San Diego State University, where he won first place. The idea is simple: equip the shovel with an adjustable central handle that better enables a person to use the appropriate muscles when heaving a load of dirt, snow or whatever payload you please.

Walden is among the students who has gone so far as to pony up thousands of dollars for a patent. For these students, the class is really only the beginning of a journey they hope will rocket them to entrepreneurial stardom.

On Thursday, the class had its culminating event: a mock sales pitch to a group of area business leaders – Choi jokingly refers to them as a panel of “mean old men” – who capped every presentation with a flurry of tough questions.

One presenter, Brandin Cohen, was so unnerved he had to calm his nerves with a nip of courage. Producing a bottle of liquor, he poured himself a shot and gulped it down in front of the group before launching into his spiel with a business partner, Hayden Fulstone.

In truth, the stunt was part of their pitch for a debaucherous business plan: a drink meant to cure hangovers.

“Your last hangover is here,” Cohen announced, while handing out bottles of their product.

Called M2, the rehydrating drink comes in a plastic bottle and tastes a little bit like lemonade, a little bit like Gatorade, and a little bit like Emergen-C vitamin powder.

They developed the brew after a fast-growing trend brought to their attention a void in the market. From coast to coast, they say, hung-over partiers have found an underground remedy in an unlikely product: Pedialyte.

They believe most of these revelers would much prefer to cure their pounding headaches without having to make that embarrassing trip to the baby aisle. Already selling the product on a trial basis is the El Segundo Athletic Club and a cycling center called Fit On Studios in Manhattan Beach. They are presumably selling the product for its rehydration qualities. The entrepreneurs also hope area bars will get on board for the hangover purpose.

The mean old men were intrigued, but skeptical.

If Pedialyte already has the remedy, what’s to stop them from marketing the product that way?

“It’s embarrassing,” Cohen said of having to buy baby food, though he admitted that same question sometimes costs him some sleep.

Another student, Jason Silbeberg, opened his presentation for a website with a photo of Danny Devito portraying a duplicitous car salesman in the 1996 movie “Matilda.” “Let’s talk about the car salesman,” he said. “We want to get rid of them. No more car salesmen, no more haggling. ”

Silbeberg’s product, a website called NabThat, would allow users to shop for new cars in a way similar to how people currently find hotels or flights using priceline.com, where travelers find their deals by naming their price.

Silbeberg has already raised $100,000 for the product and had serious conversations with dealerships in Beverly Hills and elsewhere.

Student Nolan Simons dreamed up the idea for the tattoo cream. Called Revita Ink, it not only revitalizes the skin, but brightens the tattoo, he says. (Fun fact: 23 percent of all adult women in the United States have a tattoo, as do 19 percent of all U.S. men, according to them.) In a slide presentation, he showed photos of a woman sunbathing.

“This is a 30-year-old person, and her skin is looking beautiful,” he said, drawing unintentional chuckles for the implication that 30 is old. “The reds are popping, the greens are popping, the skin is looking young. ”

After the event, one of the “mean old men,” a very nice man named Michael Schoettle, said he enjoyed the event, but hesitated when asked if any of the products seemed viable.

“As an angel investor, I’m much more skeptical about early-stage companies, and so I think they are all very optimistic about the numbers,” said Schoettle, a member of TechCoast Angels. “It’s a much slower ramp-up than they were projecting. But there was energy and there was creativity and the ideas were original. “

Timothy White, the new chancellor of the California State University system, introduced his folksy brand of leadership Tuesday to the Dominguez Hills campus in Carson, where he wandered about and chatted up students, professors and janitors alike.

At one point, the 63-year-old former president of the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education even kicked off his shoes to gamely take a stab at performing the most rigorous of break-dancing moves: the backspin.

White, the seventh president of the nation’s largest university system – and the first who is the product of it – seemed genuinely at ease while shooting the breeze with students, even as a swarm of media cameras captured his every move.

“How are you going to make the world better?” he asked Evelyn Murillo, a junior in an anthropology class that was abruptly interrupted by the entourage.

“I want to become an FBI agent,” she answered shyly.

“You know, there are some amazing opportunities in the FBI,” White responded. “You use your brain, so it’s rewarding. And it’s steady. The work will never run out in today’s world. ”

Cal State University’s new Chancellor Timothy White visited Cal State Dominguez Hills Tuesday to meet with faculty and students. (Steve McCrank / Staff Photographer)

When he took the reins in December, White assumed the top job on the heels of the retirement of his polarizing predecessor, Charles Reed, who endured heavy criticism during an era that saw simultaneous tuition hikes for students and salary increases for incoming university presidents. The strife led to union strikes on the part of faculty and hunger strikes on the part of students. Rightly or wrongly, Reed was characterized as out of touch.

Perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from the acrimony, White set a certain tone in November when he requested a pay cut. The move shaved his salary from $421,500 to $380,000.

In keeping with that tone, White on Tuesday stressed the importance of staying in touch with the students and faculty he serves.

“I started college in 1966, and since that day – until I started this position – I’ve always been on a college campus, either as a student or a post-doc or a faculty member or administrator,” said White, who earned his bachelor’s at Fresno State, master’s at Cal State Hayward and doctorate at UC Berkeley. “So I’ve always had the intellectual life around me, the student life around me. Now I’m in an office that doesn’t have students. ”

White, of course, enjoys a luxury that his predecessor didn’t have: the November passage of Proposition 30, a statewide tax hike that essentially stopped the financial bleeding that sent tuition rates soaring.

It’s a blessing that he doesn’t forget to count.

“I think there is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “(Prop. 30) allowed us to start investing in things that matter. … Voters in California have said enough is enough. I’m willing to pay more taxes. It may not help me personally, but it does help society.”

Still, he stopped short of making any guarantees that tuition won’t rise again after 2013-14.

“We can certainly commit to it this year and for next year,” he said. “What I want to be careful of is to not lock ourselves into financial economic boxes that we can’t get out of. ”

White seemed to make a good impression on students. On Tuesday, he was sought out by a female student who’d heard about his break-dancing stunt in which White, following a flash mob organized by the university’s dance department, allowed himself to be coached on how to perform a backspin.

After effusively shaking White’s hand and having a brief chat, 46-year-old Yvette Lee explained her enthusiasm to reporters as White – his salt-and-pepper hair still mussed up from the backspin stunt – walked into a classroom.

“Having a real person who is so important taking the time to walk through – he’s interested,” she said. “He’s really interested. ”

Also impressed with White so far is Dave Bradfield, head of the faculty union at Dominguez Hills.

“It’s a positive change in style, and I hope there’s a change in substance as well,” he said.

Palm scanner in the cafeteria at Hawthorne Middle School lets students log in as they get food, showing the cashier the students ID and account stutus. (Brad Graverson / Staff Photographer)

In the James Bond movies of the 1970s, heroes and villains used palm scanners to gain access to secret rooms.

This futuristic piece of technology has come to the Hawthorne School District, but for a far less glamorous purpose: to boost the number of students who can get through the lunch line on time, thereby reducing the number of students who go through the day hungry.

“We just want to make sure every child has access to our meals,” said Anna Apoian, the district’s food services director. “If they have food in their bellies, they are going to perform better in the afternoon. ”

The project is happening on a trial basis at Hawthorne Middle and Ramona Elemenary schools, where students – once they reach the front of the lunch line – place a hand on a digital reader in the shape of a palm.

Using technology similar to that of a TV remote or Nintendo Wii video game, the device manufactured by Harris School Solutions takes an image of the vein pattern below the skin. This, in turn, calls up information about the student that is pertinent to the cafeteria cashier: a photo of the student, the balance on his or her account and whether the individual should avoid any foods due to allergies.

The devices – currently used only by eighth-graders at Hawthorne Middle and fifth-graders at Ramona – have given some people the heebie-jeebies.

A handful of parents have exempted their children from using them, and one precocious pupil at Hawthorne Middle School refuses to scan his hand because he considers it too “Big Brother. ”

Apoian assures that there is no nefarious information-gathering scheme at play. She takes pains to note that the technology does not store any images of the palm. Rather, it simply connects to a five-digit ID number that students for years have been punching in on their own, thereby calling up all of the same information.

The hope is that the second or two saved by the palm scanner for each student will add up to precious minutes.

At Hawthorne Middle School, cafeteria workers have long been puzzling over how to stretch those precious minutes.

Long slowing the flow of the lunch line there has been the school’s relatively small cafeteria and oddly designed campus, which is bisected by 129th Street, forcing many kids to cross the street at lunchtime.

Recent renovations to the cafeteria have significantly boosted the rate of students served daily, from about half a couple of years ago to the current 65 percent.

But Apoian’s goal is to get the school on equal footing with another middle school in the district, Prairie Vista, where nearly 80 percent of the students are served daily.

“We’re competing with ourselves,” she said.

The school’s principal, Rudy Salas, is all for trying anything that gets kids through the line more quickly.

“We don’t want kids to be thinking about food when they should be listening to a lecture or engaged in a classroom discussion,” he said.

(At Ramona Elementary, the point of the pilot project is to determine whether the scanner does an adequate job of reading small hands.)

So far, Apoian isn’t sold by the palm scanners. But her complaints are technical, not philosophical. After all, her staff uses facial recognition software at the time clocks to eliminate the possibility that one employee can punch in for another and to streamline accounting procedures. The system works like a charm, she says.

But with the palm scanner, the line has been held up too many times because the scanner wasn’t recognizing a hand, compelling students to re-register on the spot, she said. And too many times the hardware has crashed.

“The keypads are faster at this point,” she said. “We just want people to know we are trying everything we can.”

Still, she plans to give the new technology a fair trial during the remaining couple of weeks of the pilot period.

Most students, meanwhile, seem like they could take or leave the palm scanner. Sixth-grader Royian Williams has had trouble getting her lunch on time when she goes through a special lunch line for kids getting paninis.

“It’s a long line – people love the paninis,” she said. “By the time I sit down and start eating, it’s time to leave. ”

As for Big Brother? It doesn’t concern her in the slightest.

“If they want the line to be quicker, they should do it for all the grades,” she said.

While a student at Animo Leadership High School in Lennox, Diana Rivera was accepted to several CSU schools. But she decided to go to chef school with the idea that she could get a job within a year. The Hawthorne resident enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena. Rivera’s original debt for the yearlong program was 50,000, but over time it has swelled out of control to 80,000. Now, she has a part-time job as a cooking instructor at the South Bay School of Cooking. (Steve McCrank / Staff Photographer)

After graduating with honors from Animo Leadership Charter High School in Inglewood, Diana Rivera had no shortage of options.

That spring, congratulatory acceptance packets from three California State University campuses had landed in her mailbox.

Related story: Culinary programs at community colleges explode in popularity thanks to TV chefs

But Rivera – who is now 25 – decided to go another route.

Inspired by cooking shows starring celebrity chefs such as Jacques Pepin and Julia Child, Rivera enrolled in a Pasadena school then known as California School of Culinary Arts, now called Le Cordon Bleu.

“I’d always enjoyed cooking, and thought it was kind of like an artistic outlet,” she said. “I wanted to explore it more. ”

She took out a $50,000 loan, which was co-signed by her stepfather, who works as a mechanic. Over the course of the next two years, that debt would balloon to $82,000. Despite the associate of occupational studies degree she’d earned at the college, finding a job that paid more than $10 to $12 an hour proved elusive.

Soon enough, a not-so-congratulatory kind of letter started landing in her stepfather’s mailbox.

“They sent letters saying they are going to put him in jail, because the loan is in his name,” she said.

Rivera is among 1,300 former students who in 2008 sued the for-profit school, claiming it essentially tricked them into paying sky-high tuition – as much as $42,000 for the 21-month associate degree program – by touting misleading job placement statistics.

“We believe the school tried to convince people it made good, sound economic sense to go to that school, and we believe that the school knew it wasn’t true,” said Ray Gallo, one of the two attorneys representing the students at Le Cordon Bleu.

The case against Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena is ongoing, and the school has had some vindication. About a year ago, a judge denied Gallo’s attempt to obtain class-action status, a school spokesman pointed out.

“The decision shows the allegations of some former students should not be considered representative of the experience of all students, the majority of whom we believe are satisfied with their education,” said Mark Spencer, the parent company’s director of corporate communications.

But the suit illustrates how lofty expectations in the culinary arts world often clash with harsh reality.

Gallo lays much of the blame on the table of the TV cooking shows.

“It glamorizes the profession – cooking is a manual job that doesn’t pay well,” he said. “Some people may get to be managers, and, depending on the size of the company, may be highly compensated, but that is not the majority of people who have anything to do with food preparation for a living.”

As for the for-profit school, it has taken a beating in the courts and in the press over the years.

Le Cordon Bleu is actually a limb of Career Education Corp., which runs a nationwide chain of 17 culinary academies whose collective enrollment nearly doubled from 2008 to 2010.

A class-action suit against the same company’s San Francisco location ended in 2011 with a $40 million settlement from the school. (Gallo represented the students in that case, too. ) In that suit, about 8,500 students received reimbursement payments of up to $20,000 each.

And the company’s Portland locale – Western Culinary Institute – was the target of a class-action suit in 2009 that, like the Pasadena case, is ongoing.

In the past couple of years, Career Education Corp.’s culinary programs have dialed it back on tuition, by about 10 percent. (At $37,850, the school’s 21-month associate degree program is still about 10 times as expensive as those offered at the community colleges.)

Meanwhile, enrollment has gravitated back to earth, to 8,500 from a peak two years ago of 13,000.

That’s not to say the school doesn’t have satisfied graduates. One is Julie Valenta Kiritani, a student in her 40s who has long worked in restaurants.

“My knife skills are way, way better than they were,” said Kiritani, who is chasing a dream to open a fast-casual restaurant that would specialize in pancakes and sushi. “I learned about sauces, baking, pastries, buffet service, catering services, and different cuisines from all over the world.”

Spencer, the company spokesman, noted that the quality of the school’s instruction is not in question.

“As with any school, the instruction we provide affords opportunity, but is no guarantee of personal success,” he said.

Rivera maintains that that isn’t the message representatives from the school told her stepfather before he co-signed her loan.

“They said, ‘She can be a personal chef, she can work in a high-end restaurant,’ ” Rivera remembers. “In reality, only the chef gets good pay, and there’s only one chef per corporation. “

Pizza-making station at Los Angeles Harbor College’s Culinary Arts program. Foreground, L to R are: Chazy Parra and Ayden Davis. (Brad Graverson / Staff Photographer)

It was 2006 when the pilot episode of “Top Chef” aired.

At the time, the now-overcrowded culinary arts program at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington didn’t exist. The three-story, $40 million culinary arts complex at Los Angeles Mission College in the San Fernando Valley was but a blueprint. Nationwide enrollment at a group of 17 for-profit culinary schools owned by the company Career Education Corp. had yet to explode.

Is there a link between the blazing-hot popularity of food TV – led by “Top Chef” – and the booming market for culinary arts classes? Students and instructors alike say without a doubt.

Related story: Degree from expensive Pasadena culinary arts school no guarantee of a job

“It brought a business and industry to light that was pretty much behind the kitchen door,” said Steve Kasmar, chairman of the culinary and baking program at Los Angeles Trade Tech, home to the oldest continuously running culinary arts program in the nation. “They did glorify it. ”

Regardless, in just three years, the annual student load of the culinary curriculum at Los Angeles Mission College has more than doubled, from 250 to 600. And that’s not just because of the fancy new facility, which boasts seven spacious kitchens, each of them equipped with cutting-edge video technology a la the cooking shows. The surge is also happening at Trade Tech in downtown Los Angeles and Harbor College – the two other schools with culinary programs in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Both of those schools have multimillion-dollar kitchen remodels in the pipeline, largely to accommodate the onrush.

“I’m packed with more than 60 kids per class – the cap is supposed to be 25,” said Giovanni Delrosario, who runs the 5-year-old program at Harbor College. “We have 90 more students on the waiting list. It’s phenomenal; I’ve never seen anything like it. ”

Although the stampede for these classes is no doubt largely the product of an intangible trend – the term “gourmet” is becoming so ubiquitous it can even apply to ketchup – the food entertainment craze is a clear contributor. The popularity of TV cooking shows began heating up in the mid-2000s and reached a boiling point in 2012. (Soon after hitting an all-time high, ratings for the Food Network cooled slightly in the fourth quarter of the year.)

“It’s more glamorous now – we look at chefs like rock stars,” said Julie Valenta Kiritani,who recently finished a program at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena.

The problem is, the shine of the kitchens on TV seldom matches the grime of the ones in reality. While the culinary schools churn out a torrent of graduates, the job market into which they are released is far from flashy – or lucrative.

Job market limits

In 2010, cooks across the nation earned about $20,000 a year on average, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food prep workers took home about $19,000 on average. For the kings of the kitchen – chefs and head cooks – yearly pay averaged $40,000, a livable wage, but hardly glamorous. What’s more, the bureau projects that job prospects for chefs and head cooks will contract by 1 percent in the next decade, even as the rest of the economy expands by 14 percent.

“Employment growth will be tempered as many restaurants, in an effort to lower costs, use lower-level cooks to perform the work normally done by chefs and head cooks,” the report concludes. “Workers with a combination of business skills, previous work experience, and creativity will have the best job prospects. ”

Kasmar of Los Angeles Trade Tech conceded that the past couple of years have been an employers’ market.

“They’ve been picking by hand who they want,” he said. “You go work for nothing and they see if they like you. ”

That certainly rings true to employer Ed Kasky, executive director of USC’s University Club that caters to faculty and staff. Kasky recently posted a job online for a sous chef and got 50 applicants.

“I can tell you that 75 percent of the people who applied were severely overqualified to be a sous chef,” he said.

Still, Los Angeles is generally considered one of the foodie capitals of the world, and instructors of the community college programs insist their students are heavily recruited. (None could provide job placement statistics for recent grads, though.)

“When Wolfgang Puck (catering service) wants to do an event for 15,000 people for the Oscars or the Grammys … they actually come and recruit at the school,” Kasmar said.

Delrosario, the instructor at Harbor College, says his graduates have been landing jobs all over the place – and not just in Los Angeles restaurants.

“I can’t crank out enough grads to fulfill all the needs,” he said.

Some of his students have gone to work in the homes of wealthy families on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, for instance.

Even more unique is the partnership Harbor College has forged with a group of restaurants in Australia, whose economy is booming. Since August, at least a dozen of the college’s students have taken jobs Down Under, where starting salaries run as high as $45,000.

One of Delrosario’s students, 23-year-old Minor De Leon of Gardena, even lucked into the Playboy Mansion, where he works as a junior chef making dishes for Hugh Hefner and his playmates.

“When I wake up in morning, I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m on my way to the Playboy Mansion,’” said De Leon, who was drawn to the profession by cooking shows such as “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” and “Emeril Live.” “How many people get to say that every day? ”

Louis Zandalasini, chairman of professional studies at Mission College (and a chef), said it isn’t uncommon for corporate chefs to take home $80,000 to $100,000, though not all students can expect to reach that level. However, students can realistically expect to make $40,000 to $60,000, he said.

“When you’re making that kind of money, you’ve usually been in that particular job as executive chef for 10, 12 or 15 years,” he said.

For the vast majority of entry-level cooks, though, the starting pay ranges from $10 to $12 an hour.

The good news for the tidal wave of chefs-in-training is that Food TV also has had a zeitgeist effect on the consumer. Hence, the explosion of affordable restaurants (and food trucks) offering all manner of cosmopolitan cuisine: French delicacies, premium gelato, spicy seafood dips, wood-grilled this or that, center-of-the-plate desserts.

“There are so many more food and wine festivals, where the food is now the star,” Kiritani said. “It used to be you’d go and see a band play, and that was more exciting than the food. Now it has completely shifted. ”

Kasmar of Los Angeles Trade Tech is thankful for the enrollment boost they’ve inspired. After all, it has fueled future plans for a $36 million renovation to his facility, whose new incarnation is scheduled to open in 2016. But there’s been a downside.

“They glorified what we do, and what we do is really not glorious,” he said. “It’s hard friggin’ work. “

For Jason Ferguson, captain of the varsity football team at St. Bernard High in Playa del Rey, the first day of this past season was pretty normal: everybody showed up, ran some laps and went home. But that was the beginning and end of “normal.”

When the powerhouse football team at St. Bernard High School in Playa del Rey quit en masse this fall and its members scattered to other schools, Jason Ferguson, the captain, stayed behind. He later helped recruit a large group of boys to assemble a new junior varsity team from scratch. St. Bernard High recently honored Jason with a leadership award for his team spirit.

Later that night, Coach Larry Muno, upset about a contract calling for him to fundraise for his own salary, walked. It was a bombshell. Within a week, nearly all the players on the varsity squad had scattered to other schools. Suddenly, what had been a 10-0 team the prior season was dust. Vanished, too, was the junior varsity team.

The teams were gone, but not all the players. Ferguson, captain of the varsity team and an outside linebacker, stayed on.

“St. Bernard is pretty much a family to me,” said the soft-spoken high school senior, who next year plans to study computer science at either Northern Arizona University or the University of Arizona. “I couldn’t really leave it behind.”

It was a painful decision. All summer long, Jason had been looking forward to a final year of football, and now that senior dream was dashed. Or was it? A new coach was soon hired. That coach, John Bibb – nicknamed “Bama” for his Alabama upbringing and faint accent – solicited Jason’s help in recruiting some guys to assemble a junior varsity squad.

Jason took this calling to heart. He hit up five senior guys who weren’t already on the team. Using Facebook and Twitter, he gently cajoled the waverers.

Jason also gave tours during freshmen orientation with an ulterior motive in mind. If a group contained an unsuspecting big guy, Jason made sure to take a detour through the courtyard, where Bama was lying in wait. The coach gave a quick spiel and let the kid know what time practice would be.

“They were like, ‘OK,’” Jason said. “They pretty much kind of got tricked into it.”

Eventually, they’d cobbled together a team of about 30. About half of the players had never before suited up for the gridiron. The junior varsity squad canceled its first couple of games so it could get up to snuff. But the Friday night of the team’s first game on Sept. 14 was soon less than a week away, and Jason was pumped: He was going to play football again after all.

That Thursday, the day before the game, Jason and the five other seniors were summoned into a room by Coach Bibb. The school’s two principals, Cynthia Hoepner and Mike Alvarez, were there. They had bad news: The Del Rey League had rejected the team’s request to allow the seniors to play. (CIF rules allow seniors to play JV football, but divisions within the statewide league can override the rule.)

The room fell into an awkward silence. The boys choked back tears, as did the adults.

“We’re still gonna need you,” Bibb said. “You’ve been good role models. ”

Jason was the first to speak up.

“I’m in, coach,” he said.

The others followed suit. That first game was against Washington Prep High. Jason and the five seniors graced the sidelines in jerseys and jeans – fetching balls, calling plays, offering water, but, above all, providing moral support.

Jason doesn’t remember the score.

“It was a blowout,” he said.

A blowout in favor of the St. Bernard Vikings.

And so it would be for the next six games, each of them won by the Vikings, most by a wide margin. The team finished 7-0.

In one of those games – the nonleague game against Marshall High from Los Angeles – Jason and the seniors were allowed to play. On defense, Jason made a tackle. On offense, he ran the ball for a 20-yard touchdown.

After securing the league championship, the team celebrated in the locker room with pizza and fizzy apple cider, which they shook and sprayed like champagne.

Last month, at a gala celebrating the school’s 55th anniversary, Jason was feted with a leadership award for his loyalty to the team. The other person so awarded at the March 16 event was the school’s most famous alum, Kevin Chilton, who, after graduating in 1972, went on to become a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, a four-star general and an astronaut who piloted the space shuttle Endeavour on its maiden voyage in 1992.

Hoepner, one of the school’s co-principals, said Jason is all the more deserving of the award for his humility.

“I don’t know that Jason fully understood what his heroic efforts did for the morale of the school,” she said. “I don’t know that at the time he fully comprehended or even wanted the attention. … He’s a kid. He did what he felt in his heart was right to do. ”

Indeed, Jason is reluctant to take so much credit. He cited another senior who stayed on, Gilberto Cabuto, as well as two other seniors who’d done the same last year, during a strangely similar series of events with the school’s basketball team.

As for Hoepner, this fall was almost as traumatic for her as it was for the players. A new principal, she hadn’t been on staff for a month when Muno quit.

During that first week of practice, she would stand in the library, looking out the window facing the football field at the dwindling number of players. On Day Two, there were 30 or so, sans Muno. By Day Five, the roster of varsity and junior varsity players had withered to a measly eight.

“Eight players on this huge field,” she said. “You’re going, ‘That doesn’t even make an offense.’ ”

That imagery led to a rallying cry that has stuck all year at the school – one emblazoned on school-spirit T-shirts: “From Eight to Great. ”

Over the months, bonds among members of the hastily assembled team grew strong. “They’d go to the chapel before every game with Coach Bama,” Hoepner said. “They were a family. ”

She vividly remembers a celebration in the jam-packed faculty lounge after the team won the title.

“One freshman said, ‘Go hard or go home!’ The whole team, in one roar, said, ‘And home is not an option!’”