St Joan of Arc school, CWC’s new home

* UPDATED

Citizens of the World Mar Vista has a new new home.

The charter school, which was forced to move from its co-location site at Stoner Elementary School after a tumultuous year, has turned down LA Unified’s most recent offer for classroom space and is moving onto a Catholic school campus. 

CWC finalized a one-year deal with St. Joan of Arc in West Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Archdiocese last week — it will remain an LA Unified charter school. 

“We are thrilled that we found a place where we can accommodate all of our students in one location,” Jana Reed, Chief of Schools for CWC Charter Schools, told LA School Report. 

In June, CWC officials agreed to split the K – 3 school between two district campuses in Westchester — Loyola Village and Kenwood Elementary — a situation Reed described as “far from ideal.” So CWC’s “very active parents” continued the search for an alternative school site. 

It was one of them who found the church property, formerly a private school that has gone largely unused for several years. 

“Our parents are really committed so they just kept looking,” Reed said. “We really didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.”

CWC’s 220 students will have the new campus all to themselves. Reed says it will be much more expensive to operate the school at a non-LAUSD site.

“Our rent with the district would have been about $105,000. Now we’re going to be paying twice that” for the year, she said. But despite the cost increase, Reed insists the school’s budget remains intact. 

The co-location with Stoner last year was marked by arguments and acrimony, with disputes over traffic and parking as a proxy for a larger fight over co-location rights and the state law that gave rise to them a decade ago. But it was a missed paperwork deadline that eventually lead to CWC’s removal from Stoner. 

Weeks of negotiations ensued and an offer to move to Horace Mann Middle School was rejected before CWC agreed to take over five classrooms at Loyola Village and two classrooms at Kentwood, plus room for an administrative offer at each site. 

But it all appears moot, now that CWC has found a new home — at least for a year  — although Reed says she’s learned an important lesson through the search experience: “Start much sooner.”

“We are already working with our facilities committee to look at options for next year,” she said. 

* Clarifies who is speaking for CWC Charter Schools.

Previous Posts: CWC charter tells LAUSD it wants to stay at Stoner Elementary; By missing deadline, CWC charter sent looking for new home; Westside charter school finally finds a new home, or two

Campus shot of Loyola Elementary School, one of Mar Vista’s new homes

The long, bitter saga of a westside charter’s move to a new home after an unpleasant year at Stoner Elementary School has finally ended.

Officials representing Citizens of the World Mar Vista said yesterday they have accepted an offer from LA Unified to relocate on the campuses of two Westchester elementary schools about 1.4 miles apart, Loyola Village and Kentwood. CWC’s other option was moving to Horace Mann Middle School, about 15 miles from Stoner’s campus in Del Rey.

“Splitting our student body is not ideal, but the location of the schools offers our families a more reasonable commute than Mann Middle school,” CWC’s Los Angeles Executive Director Amy Held and CWC Mar Vista Principal Alison Kerr said in a message sent to CWC parents.

“Given our tough year at Stoner Elementary, this will be a chance to meet new friends and neighbors.”

It was a tough year, indeed. CWC co-location with Stoner was marked by arguments and acrimony, with disputes over traffic and parking as a proxy for a larger fight over co-location rights and the state law that gave rise to them a decade ago.

Despite on and off efforts by the two schools to forge a peace, friction led to accusations of bad faith, shouting and the occasional physical confrontation among parents and neighbors. The district finally told parents at both schools that CWC would not return for a second year.

After earlier deadlines came and went in an effort to find CWC a new home, CWC was facing a 4 pm deadline yesterday to accept the district’s final offer. CWC notified the district at 3:52 pm of its decision.

Even after all the controversy, CWC still wanted to remain at Stoner. That became moot when the district claimed that CWC had not officially notified the district’s Charter School Division that it wanted to stay. CWC officials said they had made their intentions clear well before a deadline.

But once that deadline passed and the district assured Stoner that CWC would not return, negotiations between the district and CWC began, with the two sides talking past each other.

In a June 7 letter to CWC Los Angeles Board Chairman Josh McLaughlin, LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy presented CWC officials with two alternatives “despite no legal obligation” to do so. “It is within the paradigm of continuously seeking to serve the best interests of all public students in Los Angeles that it is proposed,” he wrote.

The first option, which CWC had previously dismissed, was taking over nine classrooms and one administrative office at Horace Mann.

The second option was five classrooms at Loyola Village and two classrooms at Kentwood, plus room for an administrative offer at each site.

Both also required CWC to pay $50,000 for costs associated with moving.

McLaughlin responded three days later, on June 10, with a counter-proposal of three options: Staying at Stoner, moving into another school within two miles of Stoner or taking the two-campus offer but with more space.

“Unfortunately, our proposal was rejected,” the message to parents said. A request to extend yesterday’s deadline to July 1 was also rejected.

So the ordeal appears to be over, with the remaining issues for CWC the challenge of finding three additional rooms to the seven offered by the district and moving into new spaces two months before the start of the school year.

“Our hope,” Held and Kerr wrote, “is to work over the summer with the school leadership and parents at Loyola Village and Kentwood to build a positive working relationship before our students begin attending class this fall.”

Horace Mann Middle School

While officials of Citizens of the World Mar Vista said last week they were blindsided to learn they would not be returning to their shared campus at Stoner Avenue Elementary, LA Unified said today CWC was notified nearly a month earlier that it could remain at the site if the school wanted to stay.

It was CWC’s failure to reply by a May 1 deadline, seeking clarification of the school’s intent, that lead to its removal from the campus in the neighborhood of Del Rey.

“The district, per the regulatory deadline, provided them an offer letter to stay at Stoner in April, and CWC had until May 1 to respond,” Jose Cole-Gutierrez, director of the charter schools division told LA School Report.

The option to remain at Stoner would have allowed the K-2 school to expand into another grade level as it moved into its second year, boosting enrollment by 75 students.

“However, the district  did not receive a response until May 9 — after the deadline,” said Cole-Gutierrez.

He would not confirm, however, whether CWC had accepted the district’s invitation to stay on the Westside. Nor would he confirm whether CWC has accepted an offer to relocate in Horace Mann Middle School, near Inglewood.

The question of why CWC failed to meet a deadline that its officials were aware of suggests that they were not entirely genuine in asserting last week that they were “taken by surprise” by a district letter to Stoner parents, informing them that no charter would be co-located at their campus in the 2014-2015 school year.

Their inaction also suggests that they may not have wanted to remain at Stoner, where parents of both schools have been engaged in a digital, and sometimes physical, conflict over the integration of the two schools.

Amy Held, Executive Director of CWC Los Angeles, told LA School Report, that as of today, the charter school has not been offered an alternative site.

But Cole-Gutierrez provided LA School Report a letter from LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy addressed to Held, dated May 14, “aimed to finding a workable solution to its facilities needs.” In it, the district offered CWC a new home  at Mann.

It remains unclear whether CWC will accept.

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.”