Friends of Stoner protest the co-location of a charter school at Stoner Elementary. (Courtesy Adam Benitez)

* UPDATED

One day before LA Unified’s traditional schools opened, students at ICEF Vista Elementary Academy, a charter in Del Rey, began their classes, greeted yesterday by teachers and administrators — and about a dozen protesters who told them they were not wanted and should go somewhere else.

It was also the first day ICEF had moved part of its campus to be co-located on the campus of Stoner Avenue Elementary, and that is what the protest was all about. The Stoner parents and neighborhood residents who were protesting are dedicated to making ICEF parents and students feel unwelcome.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Stoner was the site of a co-location battle two school years ago when students of Citizens of the World – Mar Vista shared the campus with Stoner kids. It did not go well. The same organization responsible for yesterday’s protest, Friends of Stoner, organized similar opposition to the co-location until LA Unified moved the charter after one year due to a technicality of filing some paperwork late.

Adam Benitez, a parent of two Stoner students who helped lead the opposition to Citizens of World, was out on the sidewalk again yesterday, helping lead the opposition to ICEF. The charter students are not welcome in the Stoner community, Benitez said, and he hopes to see the them gone by next school year.

ICEF stands for Inner City Education Foundation, which operates 12 schools serving over 4,000 children, kindergarten through 12th grade, in the LA area.

“We are going to put as much pressure as we can on ICEF so they don’t come back next year and so the parents do not want to stay and will seek other options,” he said. “For the parents in the area, we want them to consider Stoner. For those outside the area, we are asking them to consider other options.”

He explained that his opposition to the co-locaiton is due to the increased traffic it causes in the neighborhood and the resources it takes away from the students at Stoner.

“As a parent of two Stoner Elementary students, I am upset that they have taken away resources from our children,” he said. “They have taken nine classrooms… all the resources that have been making this school great have been taken away from us, so we are really upset about that.”

Jason Mandell, spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association, said ICEF and Stoner should have a chance to prove they can peacefully co-exist before any protesting occurs.

“It’s unfortunate, and its upsetting that on the first day of school that a few adults decide to disrupt learning for public school students, for teachers and for families,” Mandell said. “It’s the opposite of modeling good behavior for children and it’s not going to help address any issues, it’s just creating conflict for conflict’s sake.”

Under Proposition 39, public school districts are required to provide charter schools with vacant space if it is requested to, even if the space is at an active school campus. While some co-locations at LA Unified work well, others have caused conflict.

Michel Schneider, senior director for ICEF Public Schools, declined a request for an interview but provided LA School Report with a statement: “ICEF Public Schools and ICEF Vista’s focus and collaboration with LAUSD has been and continues to be on students and providing them a safe environment for learning.”

ICEF still has part of its campus at a closed church a few blocks away and the request for space at Stoner was made to help the school expand. When asked how many students were taking classes at the Stoner campus, Schneider said, “With numbers fluctuating during the first week of school, that is not a question that we can answer today.”

Benitez said he understands that LA Unified is required by law to provide space to charters, and his main issue isn’t with LA Unified, it’s with ICEF for requesting Stoner.

“LAUSD has to follow the law. However, it’s ICEF that chose Stoner Elementary; that is why we are pressuring them. They can choose another place. LAUSD’s hand are tied,” Benitez said.

Mandell was asked if ICEF requesting the Stoner location was a good idea, considering the history of aggressive opposition to co-locations at the campus.

“I don’t think the question is if it was a good idea to co-locate a school there,” Mandell said. “I think the question is how can we create an environment so that the two schools are collaborating effectively, which we have seen time and time again at plenty of other schools. And the opposite of that is having a protest on the first day of school.”

* UPDATED to reflect the schools are located in Del Rey, not Mar Vista

ICEF Vista Academy Middle School, a charter that’s currently located at a church facility a few blocks away from Stoner, wants to expand to include nine new classrooms on the Stoner campus. Still mindful of last year’s unpleasantries, parents at Stoner are saying, “Thanks but no thanks.”

Under Proposition 39, charter schools are entitled to vacant space within district public schools. A charter school can request a preferred site, but ultimately the district decides. The public school caught in the middle gets no real say in the matter. That has wreaked havoc on campuses since the legislation passed in 2000, including several within LA Unified.

Last year, Stoner was embroiled in a bitter fight with another charter school, Citizens of the World – Mar Vista, with which it shared the campus. The dispute got ugly: name calling, lawn signs, endless email chains about the lawn signs that included name calling, physical confrontations, and at least one accusation of attempted arson.

This time around the “Friends of Stoner” parent group, says it’s not standing by while another co-location is foisted on the community. In a letter to ICEF board members, whose chairman is former LA Mayor Richard Riordan, the president of the parents group, Adam Benitez, wrote, “The Stoner community is mad and is fighting back against this proposed co-location.”

He continued: “In speaking with the ICEF community, we have learned that many of the ICEF parents are opposed to the co-location and are angry that ICEF is seeking the co-location without having sought the input the parents first. Also, ICEF parents I spoke with were upset when they learned that the ’empty’ rooms are actually set-asides, and that a co-location would mean taking resources from one set of kids in the neighborhood to give to another. ICEF parents thanked us for standing up for the community and have asked what else they can do to avoid the co-location.”

Stoner parents have been leafletting against the arranged marriage in front of the ICEF Vista school and collecting signatures for a petition that it plans to present to the charter organization’s board next month.

ICEF officials did not respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear if the district has approved ICEF Vista’s request. Friends of Stoner contends the district has not extended an official offer, holding on to hope that it can block the assignment.

Steve Zimmer LAUSD Board Meeting

* UPDATED

As lawyers figure out where Citizens of the World Mar Vista decides will call home in the 2014-2015 school year, LA Unified board member Steve Zimmer says the charter is likely to encounter the same friction it endured as a co-located school this year at Stoner Elementary if it remains on LA’s west side. (See story here).

“It’s not that it has much to do with CWC specifically,” Zimmer told LA School Report. “It’s that, on the west side you have a culture war playing out on the issue of school choice.”

Much of it has to do with the shortage of land and property values that shut out more people as housing prices increase.

“Land out here is treated like water in the desert,” he said. “It is extremely valuable.”

Zimmer, whose district covers much of LA’s coastal neighborhoods, has been a steady critic of co-locations, a phenomenon that grew out of Prop 39, a voter initiative approved in 2000 that established the practice of making under-used space in a public school available to a charter. Last fall, he introduced a board resolution, asking state lawmakers to draft more clearly-defined guidelines for applying the law so that the host school is not penalized for sharing its space.

In west side areas like Del Rey, Westchester and Venice, where other co-location disputes have broken out, the demographics of homeowners has changed much faster than the local school populations, generally shifting from a mix of African-American and white to larger numbers of white homeowners.

A plan to add middle school students at Goethe International Charter on the Marina Del Rey Middle School campus was denied in 2010 by Superintendent John Deasy and the school board because of a lack of diversity among its students. In 2012, Ocean Charter School wanted to build a new facility on two acres of unoccupied land at Walgrove Elementary in Mar Vista, but after intense protests by parents, the school board voted against the project.

Parents at Westminster Avenue Elementary blocked the co-location of Green Dot’s Westside Animo Middle School. The charter was subsequently assigned classroom space at Cowan Elementary in Westchester, where it faced no opposition, evidence that co-location is not always acrimonious.

“All parents want a safe, high quality educational facility where their children will learn,” the California Charter Schools Association said in a statement. “Prop. 39 is a law approved by voters that ensures that all public school students, including charter public students, have access to these public school facilities, and co-locations are but one way that school districts can comply with the law. Co-locations, while they may present some challenges for the adults involved, are not the problem. They can and should be part of the success story for all public school students.”

In reference to issues on LA’s west side, Zimmer argues, “The parents buying up the houses, who have more resources, have a lot of fear about public schools…and when you give them the opportunity to really engage and create integration and diversity in their neighborhood public schools, they don’t want to.”

Instead, he says, they exercise their right to start their own charter schools or they send their children to private schools.

Charter school opponents contend that the growth of charters arising out of market-driven segregation inherently sets up a contentious dynamic between the public school families and those attending charter schools.

Making it worse, says Zimmer, “you actually give parts of your schools away.”

“You give them free space in the place where they wouldn’t come to be with your kids, but they will come to be with another demographic of kids,” he added. “That’s really going to piss you off.”

A recent UCLA study analyzing segregation in California public schools found that in the 2012-2013 school year in LA Unified, almost twice as many Latino and black students, 89.9 percent and 86 percent respectively, attend a low-income school as their white counterparts, at 48.3 percent.

That dichotomy played out this year at Stoner. Disputes over traffic congestion, parking and resource sharing drove a wedge between Stoner parents and local residents and CWC parents, leading to sometimes ugly confrontations and giving anti-charter and anti-co-location forces new evidence for their cause.

At Stoner, whose 811 API score is above the state standard, there is a “minuscule difference” in the demographics of the student population between now and last year, before the co-location with CWC, according to Stoner’s principal, James Stapleton.

In 2012-13, Stoner was 91 percent Hispanic, 6 percent African-American, 2 percent white and 1 percent Asian/Pacific Islander.

But the composition of the CWC student body is 47 percent white, 27 percent Latino, 14 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 8 percent African-American, 4 percent identifying as “other” — a breakdown that suggests white parents are more comfortable sending their children to a charter.

The diversity reflects one of the core tenets of CWC’s mission. Its website states: “Through targeted outreach and recruitment, our schools are intentionally designed to reflect their surrounding communities and the larger society in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.”

CWC literature also cites studies showing that students who form meaningful relationships with people of other races and cultures are better able to live and work in diverse settings later in life than those from more homogenous schools.

While no one has argued against this philosophy, anti-charter groups insist that traditional public schools would not be so homogenous — with overly large majorities of brown and black students — if white middle class students weren’t fleeing the system. Parents of white students often turn to public charters as an alternative to more expensive — and less diverse — private schools.

In the aftermath of bitter clashes at Stoner, Zimmer has been trying to accommodate both groups though there is little he can do formally. It is an issue that must be resolved by LA Unified’s charter school division and CWC.

“There is an answer, it just has nothing to do with parking,” Zimmer said, referring to the initial squabble that lead to the battle between parents.

“When you have an issue like parking it’s really not about parking,” he continued. “For generations nobody had an issue about parking because everybody went to their neighborhood school.”

For now, CWC’s future remains uncertain. It has rejected the district’s offer to move to Horace Mann Middle School and this week asked to remain at Stoner or at a school in close proximity. But the final decision depends upon negotiations between the charter and district officials.

*Adds comment from the California Charter Schools Association.

CWC Mar Vista Charter School

* UPDATED

Parents of students at Stoner Elementary School, who have been fighting to get the co-located Citizens of the World  Charter School Mar Vista (CWC) off their campus, have succeeded in their quest.

A letter from LA Unified has informed them the charter “will not be co-locating” on the campus next year, a decision that effectively ends CWC’s presence at the Del Rey campus after just one tumultuous year.

The letter, dated May 22 and signed by Lorena Padilla-Melendez, director of community relations for LA Unified’s Facilities Services Division, offers no explanation for why the decision was made, and requests for comment from the district were unsuccessful.

The letter apparently caught the CWC school community by surprise. Amy Held, executive director of CWC Los Angeles, said in an email late yesterday that CWC was “caught off guard” by the letter inasmuch as CWC officials had been in talks with the district to remain at the campus,

She said her side has reached out to Superintendent John Deasy “for clarification.”

If CWC is leaving, it would bring an end to months of friction, including several incidents of violence, linked to the oil-and-water mix of the two schools.

Neighbors had complained to school and district officials that daily traffic congestion reflected an untenable relationship between the two schools, and outsiders used the conflict as an exhibit in their eternal fight against charter schools and California’s Prop 39, a decade-old law that allows under-enrolled public schools to share their space.

“The way it was handled was very much by the book,” said Adam Benitez, the father of a daughter at Stoner and one of the neighbors leading the efforts to get the charter removed. “The district told us it was a ‘compliance’ issue, but they didn’t tell us what wasn’t complied with.”

He added, “I’m not sure we can take full credit for getting them off our campus. It was their own ineptness.”

The removal of CWC, a school run by a national charter organization, means that to continue, it would need to negotiate for another space in the district.

A message left for Alison Kerr, the CWC Mar Vista principal, was not immediately returned.

* Adds comment from Amy Held, CWC Los Angeles executive director.

CWC Mar Vista Charter School

They came. They ate. They talked.

And they came up with a few ideas they say might work.

Four people from Citizens of the World Charter School (CWC) and four of its neighbors shared a meal at the school last night and discussed the traffic and parking problems that have angered local residents, causing friction between CWC and its co-located school, Stoner Elementary.

Alison Kerr, CWC’s principal, called it a productive exchange that could lead to easing congestion and lowering tensions.

“It was a smaller turnout than we would have liked, but we had a really fruitful discussion,” she said this morning. “We talked about some real concrete next steps that we can take between now and the last four weeks of school and before we reopen in the fall.”

For many of the schools’ neighbors, the opening of CWC this year brought with it real and psychological changes to the neighborhood, with a twice daily parade of cars to drop off and pick up children at one school while local kids generally walk to and from the other.

It has led to congestion on small streets, blocked driveways, arguments over parking and ugly confrontations. It also provided a convenient landscape for people who oppose charter schools and the state re-location policy to hawk their particular points of view.

Kerr said she believed most of the neighbors who have voiced concerns in recent months are primarily focused on traffic problems, even if others have larger issues in mind. Last night’s conversation, she said, dealt largely with traffic issues.

Among the ideas discussed, she said, were providing neighbors parking permits that would deny outsiders space and moving CWC’s entrance gate to unclog small streets.

Whether any of the ideas lead to an easing of tensions remains to be seen. Kerr said neither Adam Benitez nor his brother, Jose Benitez, whom CWC parents believe are the leaders in sowing animosities against CWC, joined neighbors at the dinner.

Adam Benitez said yesterday he would not participate, saying CWC officials had refused to answers neighbors’ questions in the past “so it’s difficult to believe what they say now.”

Citizens of the World Charter School (CWC), a K-2 LA Unified school of 160 students in Mar Vista, is inviting neighbors over for dinner tonight. It’s a gesture intended to show that CWC is a better neighbor than some in the area apparently think.

The offer to break bread comes at an unpleasant time for the school, which shares a building with Stoner Elementary, a K-5 school of about 360 students. At this point, though, it’s unclear if the offer will make much difference.

Tensions have been rising through the year, CWC’s first, over issues big and small relating to the co-location experience. The uneasiness, purportedly over traffic congestion generated by CWC’s separate entrance on a residential street, has escalated into a proxy fight over the wisdom of Prop 39, a state measure that allowed for co-located schools when the public school has room to spare, and the intrinsic value and fairness of charter schools.

Groups on both sides of the issue have been arguing and protesting since last Fall, and the animosities continue building.

In recent months, CWC parents claim they have encountered threatening signs, ugly gestures, fear mongering and worse from local residents who have made it clear they don’t want CWC in the area. The parents also say literature circulated in the neighborhood spreads untruths about the school, including the erroneous contention that as a charter it drains funds away from local district schools.

“The bottom line is that we want a safe, peaceful environmental for our school,” said Amy Held, executive director of CWC, which operates schools in Los Angeles and New York. “Since we co-locate with other schools, we have no reason to believe that’s not possible here. That’s what we’re driving toward.”

The latest incident came on May 2, when a CWC family was picking up a child and “a neighbor living near the school shouted expletives attacking the family and the school and threw a lit cigarette into the backseat of the car — where a toddler was seated,” according to a “fact sheet” developed by CWC parents and staff.

The cigarette, they said, ignited a fire in the car. It was extinguished without causing harm to the toddler, but police were called, and the perpetrator was charged with a misdemeanor.

The incident led to LA Unified’s posting a school police officer at the CWC entrance during morning drop-off time and afternoon pick-up times as well as a more frequent presence of LA police.

Adam Benitez, a law librarian and neighborhood resident who has a daughter at Stoner and a nephew at CWC, has been a leader in the effort to push CWC out of Stoner.

In an interview, he described enduring traffic problems as the genesis of the issue but conceded that outside forces are using the dispute to make a larger case against charter schools and co-locations.

“There are people,” he said, “who talk about the traffic, privatization of public education by charters, charters not having union teachers. I’m just a guy who lives across the street.”

Benitez offered a different version of the facts, one that includes his receiving nasty emails from CWC parents, CWC parents using students-only bathrooms in the school, refusal by CWC parents and officials to address neighbors’ concerns, protests by CWC parents and stolen lawn signs that advocate for Stoner. He has maintained a blog since January, chronicling his view of events.

In a recent post, he acknowledged the cigarette incident, writing, “Now, CWC is using this incident as a rallying point for their community and claiming that there is an ‘organized hostile opposition’ in the community, when really all there is are a bunch of neighbors who are upset by the traffic cause by the co-location of CWC.

“The only difference between this incident and every other day,” he continued, “is that there was a cigarette involved. If there was no cigarette, the traffic/parking/safety problems would just continued as they always have.”

At this point, he said in the interview, a dinner is not going to make much difference and only one solution would satisfy local residents.

“With so many bridges burned and lines crossed, we don’t trust them,” he said. “My conclusion is they should leave.”

Held said neither she nor parents believe the issue is solely traffic and congestion. If it is, she said, LA Unified could solve it by granting permission to move CWC’s entrance. The school cannot do it unilaterally, she said, adding that the district has so far been unresponsive to a request for moving it.

Remediation may be on the way. CWC parents said they have appealed to LA Unified board member Steve Zimmer to resolve any troublesome issues to the satisfaction of all sides although matters of co-location can only be addressed by the state legislature or another statewide ballot initiative.

Held said she and the parents are optimistic that an accommodation can be reached — but when and how remains unclear. Events of recent weeks, she said, have convinced her there is little time to waste.

“People are have a right to their different opinions,” Held said. “The problem occurs when physical safety is jeopardized. “That line has been crossed.”

*Clarifies involvement of Board member Steve Zimmer.