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Top Stories: Nov. 24, 2009

Zynga Gets Rich on Questionable Practices; Parents of Slain Boy Talk

by Danny Wool on Nov 24, 2009
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Perez's Jaunts for San Jose Evergreen Come under Scrutiny
It's good to be an executive assistant. Dr. Bayinaah Jones, executive assistant to Dr. Rose Perez, Chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District knows that all too well. Not only has she received a pay hike of $30,000 since 2005, not only did she buy a home in San Francisco together with the Chancellor (maybe to help her send emails from home), she was also appointed Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness and given the rank of dean.

And then there was the 10-day trip to Scotland with Perez, all paid for with college credit cards. Ostensibly, this was to see how Scotland runs a program for elementary and high school students. Perhaps that is also why the college also paid travel expenses for a young man named Emery Perez-Odess, who is not a school employee. He's much closer in age to the groups being studied, and he has a direct line to the Chancellor, his mother.

But this was only one of eighteen trips taken by Perez and Bayinaah, which also included trips closer to home, like West Palm Beach and Chicago. Nor were they the only members of the college's administration to take such trips. One group of administrators took four trips to Vietnam, and one each to Cambodia and Thailand, at a cost of $112,000. The purpose of the visits: to recruit 141 students for the school (the trips to Cambodia and Thailand were less successful).

Admittedly, about half was paid by the participants themselves, but as for the other $50,000, there is at this time no documentation verifying that the students were recruited. Or an explanation as to why new students weren't recruited more locally, say, in California, where students are being turned away from the colleges.

With California's colleges and universities struggling against fee hikes and downsizing, donors are left to wonder why tax forms show that in one year, $353,000 was allocated for use by the administration at its discretion, while only $88,000 went to student scholarships. That $353,000 equals about 10 percent of the college's budget cuts of $3.5 million.

Perez is now on a leave of absence because of health issues. She has announced that she will be retiring at the end of her term, but until then she will keep her $300,000 a year salary (48 percent higher than it was when she was hired), as well as the $147,000 bonus she received. There is as yet no information as to how that money may have helped disabled students—their budget was cut 50 percent—or possibly restore some of the 38 classes that were cancelled in both campuses because of budget constraints.
Read More at ABC 7.
Read More at the Mercury News.

Zynga Worth $1 Billion
Zynga, the online social games network, may have gotten Facebook in trouble. The two may even face a $5 million class action suit. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus may have even admitted in a Youtube video that he "needed revenues right ****ing now," so he did "every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away." But that hasn't stopped some of Silicon Valley's top VC firms from investing in Zynga.

Kleiner Perkins and Institutional Venture Partners poured as much as $45 million into the company, which now earns between $210 million and $355 million per year. Considering that Electronic Arts paid $1 billion for Playfish, another social networking game, observers are now suggesting that Zynga, which plans to go public, could receive just as much. Suddenly, the $5 million class action lawsuit it faces seems like chump change.
Read More at the Business Journal.
Read More at Valleywag.


Parents Speak to Press about Their Son
The first name of the 12-year-old boy who was shot while trick-or-treating this Halloween has yet to be released, but his parents, Yesenia and Samuel Contreras, agreed to speak to the Merc about how the incident has changed their lives. The parents of five haven't had it easy since they arrived in the Bay Area from Mexico six years ago. Samuel, a construction worker, was injured, and hasn't worked in two years. Yesenia, a janitor, hasn't been to work since her son was shot. The bills have been piling up, and both the school and the police union have tried to lend a hand.

But the family also received some good news. The doctors' prognosis is much better than it was, even just a few days ago. Their son is healing, even if the process is slow. Now they hope that one day he'll be able to return to Lee Mathson Middle School, where he was an A and B student.
Read More at The Mercury News.



by Danny Wool on Nov 24, 2009
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