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Community Briefs

By Daily Bruin Staff

Nov. 20, 1996 9:00 p.m.

Thursday, November 21, 1996Benefits of UC outreach programs
questioned

A draft report studying minority outreach at the University of
California found no hard evidence the programs work.

"The current outreach efforts of the university are inadequately
coordinated, unsatisfactorily documented and poorly evaluated,"
said the report by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE),
a research group based at UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

The report was presented last month to a UC task force formed to
devise ways to expand outreach in the wake of the UC Board of
Regents July 1995 decision to drop race and gender as factors in
admissions, hiring and contracting.

That policy was set to take effect next year. But it became
effective immediately after voters passed Proposition 209, the
ballot measure outlawing many state race- and gender-based
affirmative action programs.

According to the report, UC has more than 800 tutoring and
counseling programs, costing more than $20 million this year. The
programs are designed to increase admissions of underrepresented
minorities.

The PACE report noted that outreach programs in other states
also don’t get good marks.

The report did find that some programs, including the Early
Academic Outreach Program, seem to benefit students. However, the
report added that there was no way to tell whether those students
would have made it into the university without help.

The report recommended the UC president’s office be explicit
about long-term goals, such as deciding whether to focus on
admissions or retention.

CALPIRG sponsors trash cleanup in L.A. River

Twenty UCLA volunteers pulled over a ton of trash out of the
L.A. River Nov. 16, on a three-hour cleanup with CALPIRG Water
Watch.

The cleanup, at Balboa Park, retrieved 2400 pounds of trash,
including several shopping carts, a steering wheel, a windshield,
and socks and underwear.

A research and monitoring team also measured pollution levels at
two sites on the river. The results are currently being
compiled.

The cleanup was timed to take advantage of the river’s low water
levels before the first floods of the rainy season.

Ex-treasurer of Orange County sentenced

Former Orange County Treasurer Robert Citron, the central figure
in the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy, was sentenced to a
year in jail and fined $100,000 Tuesday.

He had pleaded guilty to defrauding investors in the years
before the county’s finances collapsed.

Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger also ordered the
71-year-old Citron to perform 1,000 hours of community service and
undergo psychological counseling.

Czuleger sent Citron to prison despite a plea from his lawyers,
who called experts to the stand to testify Citron is brain-damaged
and has trouble analyzing information ­ a problem they said
contributed to his inability to understand the dangers of the
complex investments he carried out.

Orange County, a prosperous area of Southern California,
declared bankruptcy in December 1994 with a $1.64 billion loss
caused by Citron’s continued bets on stable or falling interest
rates.

The six felonies to which he pleaded guilty were not directly
related to the bankruptcy.

He instead admitted participating in a scheme to divert $107
million in interest from a pool where the county’s money was mixed
with money from schools, cities and other public agencies.

He also was accused of misrepresenting the state of his
investment pools to investors and buyers of more than $1 billion in
municipal bonds. The county emerged from bankruptcy in June.

Compiled from Daily Bruin staff and wire reportsIn the election
supplement published Nov. 6, the article titled "Four more years"
contained an error. Elliot Shirwo was incorrectly identified as a
lawyer. Shirwo is a law clerk.

The Bruin regrets the error.

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