Friends of Stoner, a group fighting to block the co-location of another charter school at Stoner Avenue Elementary in Palms, has met with lawyers to discuss legal options against LA Unified for extending the application deadline by three days.

Frustrated Stoner parents, opposed to sharing the campus with nearby ICEF Vista Elementary Academy, contend that the district does not have authority to change the state-set Nov 1 deadline without permission from the Department of Education, which it appears district officials did not solicit.

The district prolonged the submission window for charter schools seeking classroom space on traditional public school campuses after the online application program went down on the day applications were due. This is the second year the district has accepted electronic applications.

“The deadline is the deadline and you can’t arbitrarily change it by three days not for ICEF and not for anyone,” Adam Benitez, president of the group told LA School Report. “What authority do they have to supersede state regulations? “

“The district is basically saying, regulations be damned, we’re going to do whatever we want!” Benitez said. He said the group has already contacted the office of the state Attorney General and is awaiting a response.

This is the second time in two years that Stoner parents have mounted a defense to keep a charter school from co-locating at its facility. Last year, Citizens of the World — Mar Vista tried unsuccessfully to take advantage of empty space at Stoner.

ICEF Vista got its application in on Sunday, Nov 2.

The high-performing ICEF charter school based at a church campus just a few blocks away from Stoner, hopes to expand enrollment and services by taking over what it says is available space at the traditional public school.

“We tried to submit it on Nov 1 but the system was down, and it wouldn’t take any submissions,” said Michel Schneider, communications director for the charter school organization, who contended that the school’s application was “90 percent complete at that point.”

“It was just the last step that we needed to finalize that it would’t take,” she added. But, ICEF officials tried again the following day, and it finally went through.

“We submitted it on Sunday, Nov 2, and received a confirmation.”

It is unclear how many more charter schools took advantage of the added time.

In a statement late this afternoon, the district said: “Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, on November 1, 2014, prior to the deadline for submitting a Proposition 39 facilities request, the District’s online Facilities Request Form began indicating that the application window had closed.  Therefore, charter schools that had ‘in-progress’ requests could not submit them through the online system. To allow the District time to resolve these technical issues without precluding charter schools that would have otherwise submitted a timely request from being able to do so, the deadline for submitting Proposition 39 facilities requests for the 2015-2016 school year was extended to 11:59 p.m. on November 4, 2014.”

The district plans to notify charter schools about co-location assignments on April 1.

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.”

CWC Mar Vista Charter School

Citizens of the World Mar Vista (CWC) wants to remain a citizen at Stoner Avenue Elementary School in Del Rey next year despite months of bitter fighting between parents of students at the two schools.

In a letter sent to LA Unified officials today, CWC denies it missed the district’s deadline to respond to the offer to stay and expand as a co-located school on the Del Rey campus, as district officials reported earlier this week.

CWC officials also rejected the district’s proposition to relocate its co-location to Horace Mann Middle School, 15 miles away.

Sarah Kollman, a lawyer who drafted the letter addressed to district General Counsel David Holmquist said, “In addition to making a timely verbal acceptance in early February, in both the middle and at the end of March and multiple times prior to May 1, 2014, CWC MV also accepted the allocation of space at Stoner in writing via email, and verbally.”

CWC is demanding the district officials recognize its May 9 response accepting the invitation to continue to grow at Stoner.

By removing CWC from its current location, Kollman asserts, the district is rewarding “mean-spirited, potentially defamatory, and criminal efforts of a few non-representative individuals who live near the Stoner campus” who seek to “intimidate CWC MV parents, bully the school, and drive district policy through the court of public opinion.”

Last week the district informed Stoner parents that they would not have to share the campus with CWC next year.

“First and foremost we have every right to stay here,” Amy Held, Executive Director of CWC and parent of a kindergarten student at the school, told LA School Report.

“We’ve invested a lot frankly,” she said. “A lot of energy and time into being good neighbors and being good partners. We have worked incredibly hard with the Del Rey neighborhood council and with folks at Stoner to really make some inroads and get over the hump of lots of the tumult there.”

Held concedes the scuffles between parents, ostensibly over parking and traffic congestion, have been challenging but says relations between the schools’ staffs are positive.

“Our principals work really effectively together and have a strong working relationship and partnership,” she said. “They have formed a liaison group with parents and teachers from both schools “to open up the lines of communication between all of our stakeholders.”

“I don’t think that exists at any other co-located school in the district,” Held added.

In case that the district is not swayed by CWC’s letter, Held says her school would be “very flexible” about considering other options so long as they are in close proximity to the current location. The letter offers to consider any other school that would be accessible to CWC students by foot or bicycle.

“This is the community we serve and this school is for our community,  so it would need to be somewhere in the general vicinity,” she said.

But whatever the location, she says, with only a few weeks of school remaining before the end of the year, “we are anxious, obviously, to get this resolved as quickly as possible. Our parents want to know: where are their kids going to school next year?”

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.