"The co-location of charter schools, pursuant to Proposition 39, is often detrimental to District schools and the students they educate, and has a tangible negative impact on the District's ability to maintain and grow important priorities"
- LAUSD Board Resolution
Shirley Avenue Elementary provides a telling example of how PROP-39 victimizes LAUSD students. This neighborhood school is in the heart of the San Fernando Valley and has served its community since 1953. Reflecting the demographics of the area, the student body of this school is 78.5% Hispanic or Latino with 84.7% of the children coming from families that are "socioeconomically disadvantaged."
In 2020, Citizens of the World, a white flight charter school with a student body that was 43% white, demanded space on the Shirley campus. The public school students were pushed aside, with their music and art classrooms taken away so that the charter school could serve its students, 79.3% of whom came from families that were NOT classified as "socioeconomically disadvantaged".
Unwilling to accept this injustice, the Shirley community fought to reclaim their campus, and eventually, Citizens of the World moved to its own, private campus. Unfortunately, the start of the new year brings Prop-39 season and Shirley has once again been targeted for a colocation. I addressed this new attempt to steal classroom space from LAUSD students and the need for immediate reform in comments that I prepared for the District's Charter School Committee:
Board President Goldberg and Board Member Rivas spent a good portion of last year attempting to address the damage done by the LAUSD's implementation of PROP-39 co-locations. After multiple delays, their resolution was finally considered by the Board in September, with the final version requiring the Superintendent to present an updated policy within 45 Days. During the discussion before the vote, Superintendent Carvalho stated that this deadline was sufficient as his office would not even need this much time to craft the policy.
Despite this resolution being passed 107 days ago, the Board has not had an opportunity to consider and vote on a policy, In fact, as of this afternoon the Superintendent's office says that the "policy draft is being finalized". With the process already underway to assign space for co-locations for the 2024-25 school year, our students, the students you were elected to represent, still have no protections. This is completely unacceptable.
One of the things we learned in September was that the District had chosen to treat rooms used to provide Special Education services as "empty" when determining which facilities would be given away to privately operated charter schools. This has left our most vulnerable students pushed into closets and stairwells so that charter schools could use their classrooms to teach general education students.
Shirley Avenue in Reseda is an LAUSD elementary school that was told by the Charter School Division, led by Cole-Gutie'rrez, that state law required them to give up space that they used to provide services for members of their student body with Special Education needs, art and music programs, a parent Center and a base of operations for an after-school program. We now know that this was a lie. Cole-Gutie'rrez chose to classify these rooms as "empty "and gave them away to a school with only 8.9% of its students receiving Special Education services.
To make matters worse, Citizens of the World overestimated the number of students that would enroll in its school and were, therefore, granted more space than it was entitled to. Children with Special Education needs were pushed out of classrooms so that the rooms could be left empty. Under the law, the Charter School was supposed to pay a penalty for this over-allocation of space, 90% of which was supposed to go to the students of Shirley, according to LAUSD policy. However, Cole-Gutie'rrez forgave $24,237 of this penalty without public explanation. Of the balance remaining, $7,707 was not paid as of June 30, 2023, the last time the district provided an update to the public. (1)
Despite assurances that it would be protected from future co-locations, Shirley is once again a target for occupation by another charter school. If its students are going to be victimized again, they should be assured that they will not be forced into closets to receive vital services. A new PROP-39 policy is needed immediately and it must be implemented before allocations are made for the next school year.
- Despite promising the public to report balances owed by charter schools on a monthly basis, Cole-Gutie'rrez' has not updated the information in over six months.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him "a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles." For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.
