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

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?”

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.