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AET DONATIONS, GRANTS & CONSULTANTS
SAVE SMC FEATURED ARTICLES
(Academy of Entertainment and Technology Overview)
Table of Contents:
Donors |
Missing Donations |
GTE Donation |
Grants |
Mary Pickford Endowment |
See Also: AET Certificates and Courses | AET Overview | AET DONORS AND DONATIONS
Academy of Entertainment and Technology Donors
[Go to: AET INITIAL FUNDING]
Who donates money to SMC's Academy of Entertainment and Technology?
There's a nice little silver plaque which lists benfactors, patrons, and friends.
How did these companies, foundations, and individuals benefit the Academy? What were
the amounts? Where did this money go? Did these entities and individuals receive anything
in return? Were they really our "friends"? The list of donors includes the Mary Pickford Foundation,
Universal Studios, Sony, Verizon, Warner Brothers, and Jim Keeshen Productions.
Read More ... [TOP]
Rats Always Flee a Sinking Ship
[Go to: GTE VIDECONFERENCING CENTER DONATION]
How nice of GTE to give away $125,000 to AET for an alleged videoconferencing center. In fact, in Jan. 16, 1999, GTE sat on the advisory board of the Academy. Oh, but what do we have here? In SMC's Master Plan for Technology, Revision 1998-2000, under Objective 7, it states that "Leased lines currently cost over $60,000 a year from GTE." So, in two years, GTE is able to recoup its money and keeps reeling in more thanks to then SMC Associate Dean Winniphred Stone, Piedad Robertson's long time friend.
Read More ... [TOP]
AET Donors and Santa Monica College Foundation
[Go to: AET DONOR CHART]
What precisely is meant by "Computation of Excess Contribution Amounts"? 4 of the 5 donors listed are GTE Foundation, Intergraph Computer Systems, TODD-AO Studios West, and 3Com Corporation. Is this how these companies secured their respective seats on AET's advisory board as well as their engraved names on the AET plaque? What was this money used for, who did it benefit, and what happened to excess contribution amounts? And once again, why is this information not open to public inspection?
Read More ... [TOP]
Mary Pickford Foundation AET Scholarship Endowment
[Go to: PRESS RELEASE]
On or about June 24, 1998, the Santa Monica College Foundation allegedly received a $200,000 gift from the Mary Pickford Foundation "to establish an endowment fund for scholarships for students at the college’s acclaimed Academy of Entertainment and Technology." Why has SMC failed to disclose these records? Yet, Barbara Jacobs continues to receive $10,000 a year in consulting contract payments for her involvement in the Mary Speaker Series through AET Professor Jim Keeshen's ET2 Storytelling course.
Read More ... [TOP]
AET GRANTS AND CONSULTANT CONTRACTS
Piedad Robertson's Masterplan for Mediocrity
[Go to: AET CPEC REVIEW]
Piedad Robertson brought in Katharine Muller for the purpose of creating AET. 1997 was at the height of the dot.com craze, when companies milked investors with infinite undeliverable promises and eventually vanished from cyberspace. Technology was little understood at this time, yet its glimmer and dazzle would secure much needed district, state, and federal funds. Winniphred Stone was also brought in to plug distance education through eCollege in order to reach a greater paying audience.
Read More ... [TOP]
Katharine Muller Begs for Money for AET
[Go to: MULLER'S LETTER RE: VTEA FUNDS]
According to the Whitehouse's official website, the Federal Perkins Loans, the Tech-Prep Education State Grants, and the Vocational Education State Grants were being eliminated with the help of Congress as they were found to be ineffective and not performing. In essence, the government found that they were a waste of tax dollars. Despite this outcome, AET Katharine Muller sent out a sample letter online, urging her "dear friends" of AET to write our various politicians to keep this money flowing.
Read More ... [TOP]
Piercing Jim Keeshen's Various Corporate Veils
[Go to: JIM KEESHEN PRODUCTIONS]
How many corporate veils does Jim Keeshen use? Why are they all convoluted and overlapping? At one point, he even used AET's 1660 Stewart Street school address for Jim Keeshen Productions. He also uses a post office box for his company. On another website, Jim Keeshen Productions once again uses the Sawtelle address where he ran his animation studio. He also went under the assumed names of Animatics and Studio Animatics to secure questionable federal grants with SMC and to hide his identity from scrutiny.
Read More ... [TOP]
Jim Keeshen's Studio Animatics SMC Contracts Exposed
[Go to: KEY DOCUMENTS]
James Keeshen created a multi-language CD-ROM in his capacity as a SMC professor. So, why did Katharine Muller authorize the $40,000 payment in the SMC Instructional Consultants document to Keeshen under Animatics, stating that he was not an employee of the district? Why did Keeshen himself sign the 2001 contracts stating that he was not an employee of the district when he was? This project was financed by federal funds and belonged to SMC, yet Keeshen placed his Studio Animatics copyrights on it.
Read More ... [TOP]
Santa Monica College's Failed Forgery Attempt
[Go to: KEY DOCUMENTS]
So, if Jim Keeshen was granted some kind of exception to enter into a consultant contract with the District in which he was employed, then why didn't he use his own social security number? Or he could have used James Keeshen Productions, Inc., his only registered company with the State of California. But that would still have his name attached to the SMC Board of Trustees minutes and agendas. As we've discussed before, he didn't want anyone to know about his lucrative outside consultant contracts with SMC.
Read More ... [TOP]
With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
[Go to: KEESHEN'S SABBATICAL]
Going back to Randall Lawson's admissions regarding Jim Keeshen's involvement in the Title VI-A project, it is obvious that Keeshen's role was to be as a faculty member of AET and not as an outside consultant. In any event, if his intentions were sincere in this federally funded project, then why not use his Jim Keeshen Productions? Simply put, he was clearly identified under that company as it appears as a "friend" of AET on their silver donor plaque. SMC Administrators, Katharine and David Muller, are also our AET donor "friends."
Read More ... [TOP]
SMC's Skullduggery and Creative Refinancing of Federal Funds
Since there were "problems" with the original GMSC/FLP grant, we can see why Katharine Muller did a little creative refinancing by shifting funds from the CCITD grant and renaming the whole package a Title VI-A grant. But what do we get for our money? A prototype CD-ROM which teaches us how to find the restroom in seven different languages, several international media tracks which were never used, and an International Institute of Trade and Global Media Studies Center that don't appear to exist despite federal funding.
Read More ... [TOP]
READ KEY PROFILES OR SEARCH THE AET DATABASE
GO TO: AET VOCATIONAL SCHOOL OVERVIEW OR AET CERTIFICATES AND COURSES 
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The SAVE SMC Blog and Website are not affiliated with nor endorsed by Santa Monica College.
Des Manttari is a current student at SMC's Academy of Entertainment and Technology (AET),
studying video game development and animation. She has been a teaching assistant for
the AET courses: Storytelling and History of Animation. Ms. Mantttari was a former legal
publisher and paralegal for many years.
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JIM KEESHEN PRODUCTIONS COMMENTS
more
"At SMC, the charter school model finds its home in the Academy of Entertainment and Technology. Non-Profit Foundations? Gifts, grants, and donations? Public policy issues? Foundation budgets? Board of Trustee control over curriculum, student policies, budget, and hiring and firing of faculty and staff? Sounds like the same old thing from Massachusetts repackaged in California. Is it any wonder a second vote of no-confidence was in Robertson's future at SMC and that she would leave to take over the ECS?"
-- Des Manttari [January 7, 2006, Piedad Robertson's Masterplan for Mediocrity]
"In tech-prep programs, now available in nearly half the nation's high schools, as students work toward their high school diplomas, they also rack up community college credits to put toward associate's degrees. Tech-prep programs are geared especially toward students interested in high-skill fields like engineering, health care, business, or the mechanical, industrial, and practical arts. The rapid growth and diversification of dual-enrollment options has created what the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in a 2001 report, calls 'a new arena of educational practice' that could profoundly affect the academic experiences and opportunities of virtually all high school students. But it is an arena, the report warns, in which state and federal authorities, individual schools and districts, and higher education institutions 'are too frequently acting in isolation, and in the absence of either clear principles or an appreciation of unintended consequences.' High schools ought to prepare each and every student for postsecondary education and training. More recent studies of the dual-enrollment phenomenon paint a similar picture: a rapidly growing movement with enormous appeal and potential, but which so far lacks a solid basis for decisionmaking in areas ranging from program design, to funding, to regulation."
-- Piedad F. Robertson ["Dual Enrollment - Spanning the Border Between High School and College--And Reshaping the Landscape of Public Education" (July 13, 2005)]
QUOTES
more
"Neither Mr. Keeshen, nor Mr. Javelosa have credentials to be teaching. They do not have an academic educational background, nor do they have the substantial industry experience in training and supervising personnel to qualify to be Vocational instructors. Neither of these men have the moral or educational requirements to be proper leaders for these young students on the AET campus."
-- Margaret Wick [former Vocational School Board Trustee]
"I don't care about Julie Yarrish and I don't care about [Winniphred] Stone and I don't
care about [Judith] Penchansky. I have to live with them because we're swimming in the same pond."
-- AET Professor Jim Keeshen [Re: His SMC Colleagues]
"I'll leave on my own terms when I want to leave. Right now I'm just using them so that I can finish my film."
-- Jim Keeshen [Re: SMC and his "Day of the Dead" animated film]
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