LA Times Databases Provide Insight into Political Contributions, School Scores and Archdiocese Accusations

The Los Angeles Times has created several databases for the Southland area that allow for quick and easy searching for information on political contributions, school test scores, and accused sexual offenders from the Archdiocese (yes, there are some in Santa Clarita).

The political contributions category allows searching for both Los Angeles County Supervisors and Presidential contributions. You can search the database for LA County Supervisors by candidate and by contributor.

Remember that the political contributions per County Supervisor was limited to $1,000 per company (or person) recently, so a company may contribute under its name as well as the names of its officers, directors, employees and family members in order to maximize its impact. Also interesting to note is the timing of contributions to the Supervisors. Typically the contributions spike in years where there were critical votes to approve certain developments (Newhall Ranch, for example).

Presidential contributions can only be searched by zip code. The 91355 zip code shows 88.8% of contributions going to Romney and 0% going to Clinton. The 91354 and 91381 zip codes are a little more lukewarm towards Romney, with Giuliani and Clinton balancing out the scoreboards.

For the priests of the Archdiocese accused of sexual molestation, the database issues a pop-up warning that not all accusers were guilty, trials are still pending for some of these priests, and that many of these issues will be resolved outside of the courts through the mediation process. You’ll either need to know the name of the parish or browse by parish to search this database. A quick scan of the parish database shows that Blessed Kateri has no accused priests, Our Lady of Perpetual Help has two accused priests and St. Clare Catholic Church has no accused priests.

The schools database provides test scores for California Standards, Federal Adequate Yearly Progress and the California Academic Performance Index. You’ll need to search by school name, and be careful that you select the right city and school match since there are often duplicate school names throughout the state.

When using these databases, be sure to check the timing of the last update when available. Some of these databases are more current than others. Still, these Los Angeles Times databases do provide some great insights into our local political climate as well as providing easy access to school test scores and churches that may have unresolved issues with their priests.