Wouldn't it be cool if there was a Mariachi Grinch out there? Upset with all the cool mariachi fun the kids have over at Davis Bilingual Elementary. Just before the school year begins, the Grinch cames down from that shed he lives on at the very tip of Tumamoc and took an accordion, some keyboards and other musical supplies. By week's end, he returned hearing the kids play "La Negra," and with tears in his eyes and that broken black heart of his still broken, but less dark. Everything returned, the kids fall in love with him and make him equipment manager for all the out-of-town gigs.

But no. That didn't happen. Instead, some ass broke into a cabinet and stole those items, and now the school needs help to replace the accordion and keyboards.

From KGUN9-TV:

TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - At Davis Bilingual Elementary Magnet School, it's all about the music, and their mariachi band travels all over Tucson to perform.

"Sometimes we go to sing to people that are in the hospital," said Davis Student Annika Arvayo. "Just seeing them smile, it makes you smile as well."

But just one week before the school year began, Davis Music Teacher Jaime Valenzuela says he went to his classroom and noticed his locked cabinet open.

"My heart dropped," he said.

The thieves took a brand new accordion, 20 piano keyboards and about $1,000 worth of tools and supplies from the school located on St. Mary's Road near I-10.

The new accordion and keyboards were part of a plan to expand the school's music and mariachi program.

In all, Davis Principal Carmen Campuzano says the thieves stole $3,000 worth of equipment.

"In schools right now, that's a lot of money," she said, noting that TUSD's insurance policy doesn't cover their loss because it was less than $10,000.

Some parents like Elizabeth Vega are trying to raise funds to replace what was stolen, because they know how valuable the music program is to their children.

"You know this is their beginning and their future," said Vega.

"You feel very violated because somebody took this not only from me but from the children," said Valenzuela. "And that's what really hurts."

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Valenzuela says the accordion was black, and the keyboards all have "Davis Bilingual" written in sharpie on the back. If you have any information about what happened, call 88-CRIME. You can remain anonymous.

The school is also reaching out to the community for donations to replace what was stolen. If you'd like to donate, contact the school at 520-225-1400.

There's a great, reasonably new website in town: Bringing Up Arizona. It's a researched-based site about education headed by Richard Gilman, a former Daily Star reporter and editor who also was a senior vice president at the New York Times and publisher of the Boston Globe.

You can find a number of interesting reports on Bringing Up Arizona, but my favorite part is a series of slides called "Overcoming the Education Divide." In 15 slides, it illustrates the overwhelmingly strong correlation between Arizona's school grades and students' family income. Using the Tucson and Phoenix areas, it shows the "A" schools concentrated in the affluent areas of town and the grades descending from there as family income lowers. Anyone who wants solid data on the subject — maps, scatter graphs and bar charts — that's the place to go.

I did some similar research, though not nearly as thorough, and presented my analysis in a segment of the cable access show I do with Ann-Eve Pedersen, "Education: The Rest of the Story," which is at the top of this post.

Two insider baseball news bytes from the world of "education reform" for people who like to pay close attention to this kind of thing.

First, Michelle Rhee is leaving Students First, a pro-school-privatization organization she founded. Rhee is a curious figure in the education world, someone lots of people have fallen in love with until they learned more about her. She lied about her success in her few years of teaching, which helped her land the job as Washington, D.C., schools chancellor. She made the cover of a few magazines due to her no nonsense, tough-as-nails approach to improving schools. Under her aggressive leadership, under-performing teachers and administrators were fired and those whose test scores went up were rewarded. Some D.C. schools saw too-good-to-be-true spikes in their test scores which turned out to be, well, too good to be true. There was clear evidence of cheating by some staff members, but Rhee chose not to conduct a thorough investigation. Instead, she left the D.C. schools and founded Students First, which never measured up to her hype. In a wonderful piece of understatement, a former Students First staffer said, "I'm not claiming that she's egomaniacal, but . . ." Rhee will chair the board of a charter school chain run by her husband, ex-NBA star and current Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.

If you were wondering why Linda Ronstadt doesn't live in Tucson these days, her interview with the Arizona Republic published over the weekend might shine some light on her decision to head to San Francisco...too much of a car culture (fair) and she didn't want her children influenced by the "kind of thinking" here:

"And they were coming home with some decidedly exotic attitudes. There was a lot of homophobic stuff that they would hear at school, which I found very, very offensive as we have lots of gay friends. They've been around openly homosexual people since they were born, and for them to come home and say 'That's so gay,' I was offended by that.

"And then one day, my son went to have a playdate with a little boy, about 8 years old, and he said, 'What church do you go to?' And we said, 'Well, we don't go to a church,' and he said, 'Well, you're gonna go to hell, then.' So I had to stop the car. I wasn't mean to the little boy, but I had to explain to him that my son was a fine person and that I didn't think there was anything wrong with him and that we didn't even believe in hell. And certainly he wasn't going there, even if we did, and that I didn't like that kind of talk.

"But it kept happening, so eventually I decided that (they needed to move). Safety is small groups of like-minded people, and the group was so small in Tucson. It was certainly there; I have wonderful friends there and I'm really glad that I went back because I got to pick up those friendships in a certain way that I wouldn't have if I hadn't lived there for 10 years. But I just didn't want my children to be influenced by that kind of thinking."

Also, Ronstadt's not a huge fan of the architecture downtown these days:

"I still like Tucson, I still like to come back and I love to see my friends. I love to go to Mexico, which is more like Tucson was when I liked it than Tucson is anymore ... I'm sad about the downtown. I'm glad that people are down there, but the buildings look like Stalinist Russia. They're so generic. They didn't seem to realize that Tucson in the old days had a distinctive architecture."

If you're interested in living in Ronstadt's amazing former Tucson home, it appears to still be for sale at the quite reasonable price of $1,650,000.

So, radio personality and Best of Tucson winner Jon Justice posted this joke(?)/remark about the continuing drama in Ferguson, Mo. on Facebook this morning:

• Nicola Freegard

City of Tucson officials will be addressing new issues surrounding major traffic gridlock and Sun Link ridership delays following the first 2nd Saturdays event held in Downtown Tucson since the streetcar’s arrival. Last Saturday’s early evening event was plagued by extended motorist logjams and waits of up to an hour for potential streetcar passengers during 2nd Saturdays’ peak hours. In addition to increasing service during such special events, the City is also aiming to “change traffic flow patterns” at trouble spots along the route.

At what many were calling the busiest 2nd Saturdays to ever be held during Tucson’s normally sleepy summer months, jam-packed streetcars could be seen inching down Congress St. and Fourth Ave. prior to dusk. On Monday, expectations were high for final ridership totals for the weekend, but the released numbers did not reflect the long waits or social media photos and anecdotes from the night.

Bryan said he spends most of his time at work behind a desk, but still hits the departments on-site gym three days a week.

Researchers have said law enforcement personnel are 25 times more likely to die from weight related cardiovascular disease than the actions of a criminal.

“When you’re in a life or death struggle, you’ve got to win that fight, said Bryan about the importance of keeping fit.
But an estimated 80 percent of law enforcement officers are overweight, according to the FBI.

The photo above isn't from the recent demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of an unarmed African American teen. It's over a decade old, a photo I took at a 2003 march in Portland, Oregon, protesting Bush and the Iraq war. I'd attended a number of marches and rallies in Portland before this and had never seen this kind of militaristic response by the police. Were they expecting trouble? Maybe, but not the kind that would demand military-style gear more appropriate for an occupying force in a hostile country than a police department in an urban U.S. setting.

Welcome to our post-9/11 WMDs: Weapons of Mass Deterrence. Counter-terrorism money from the Feds given to local jurisdictions was spent so overgrown children could play dangerous games of dress-up and shoot-em-up on our city streets.

There were no violent incidents during the Portland march. The police didn't fire any tear gas or rubber bullets. But you have to wonder if some of them were disappointed they weren't able to play with their new toys. How many of them were channeling Dirty Harry, thinking, "C'mon, protester, make my day"? After all, when you have all those cool, macho hammers, it's natural to look around for nails you can pound into the ground.