UPDATE: I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I MANAGED TO TURN OFF THE COMMENTS ON THIS POST, BUT THEY’RE BACK ON NOW. (And, while I’m at it, here’s Ray Cortines in conversation with the LA Times editorial board. Can we say Lame Duck Brewer?)
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Yesterday afternoon, the California Charter School Association and nearly 200 charter school parents held a rally outside the LAUSD board meeting to protest what they said was a broken deal. The deal came out of a legal settlement, reached in February of this year, that required the district to provide class room facilities for 2000 of LA’s charter school students, and charter parents say that LAUSD has, once again, caved into pressure from UTLA, the powerful local teacher’s union.
Here’s the back story, In 2000, the California voters passed Proposition 39, a state ballot measure that requires school districts to share public school facilities fairly among all public school students, including those attending charter public schools. The idea was that all public school children must be provided with a physical place to learn—be those students charter or district kids.
When LAUSD failed to comply to the law, the city’s charter schools sued the district for access to the facilities mandated by Prop. 39. This past February the school board voted to settle the lawsuit and agreed to provide some kind of physical site for all LA’s charter school kids.
For charter schools, the locating and paying for a physical facility is the biggest barrier to keeping a school afloat. Hence Prop 39 and the lawsuit.
On April 1, LAUSD offered space on its campuses for nearly 40 charter schools. But, then on the April 30th the district withdrew a bunch of the offers leaving many schools with no place to go in the fall, say charter operators. (Naush Boghossian of the Daily News has more of the details about LAUSD yanking the offers.)
The charter school people say LAUSD withdrew the offers because the teachers union, UTLA pushed its union reps at the various affected schools to organize parents and teachers to protest and apply pressure on the district.
“And the bureaucracy at the district just caved in to the pressure,” said Caprice Young, the head of the California Charter School Association said after the rally. “So it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that the district complies with the settlement.”
Greg McNair, LAUSD’s associate general counsel (who is generally supportive of the charter movement), said he thought it wasn’t so much pressure as it was that the district had agree to allocate space on the various campuses before it had thought the matter through.
According to McNair, when Senior Deputy Superintendent, Ray Cortines came on the job earlier this year, he had a look at the Prop. 39 situation and decided the due diligence had never been done regarding those campuses into which the charter kids were supposed to be shoehorned. So he sent staff to check out the situation, decided that certain of the campus sharing plans would cause too many problems, and subsequently withdrew seven of the offers.
So is (pre-Cortines) mismanagement a better excuse than caving in to political pressure? I asked McNair
He sighed. “Look,” he said, “there are not enough seats in the Los Angeles Unified School District to seat all LAUSD’s students and charter students.” And until the state of California decides to come up with enough money to build additional facilities, he said, there aren’t going to be an adequate number of seats.
Of course, with the state slashing ten percent out of all school budgets, those funds are obviously not about to be forthcoming any time soon.
So what to do? Is there no district money available to somehow manage to seat all the public school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Hey, wait a minute. There WAS a bunch of money available in LAUSD’s building fund….where did all of it go?
Hmmmmm. Well, there’s that rollercoaster/ski jump/boondoggle-–AKA the new district art and performance high school—that was to have cost $73.2 million, but with its elaborate architectural redesign it has ballooned up to a budget of $230 million.
I wonder how many student “seats” that $156 million difference would have bought?
PS: Caprice Young says there is $62 million of still unspent Prop. 39 money languishing in the district’s coffers, and that money could and should be spent to help solve the facilities problem.
Here’s hoping that Ray Cortines has the political savvy to find a fair way to solve this facilities problem.