(Courtesy: City Charter Schools)

Citing financial woes due to low enrollment and problems with its private facility, the governing board of City High School voted Monday to close the charter school immediately, leaving 116 students scrambling to find new schools.

The school, located in Pico-Robertson on Los Angeles’ Westside, had been offered a location at Dorsey High School through Proposition 39 but turned it down because it was too far away from its middle school, according to Valerie Braimah, executive director of City Charter Schools. Choosing a more expensive option of leasing a private location on the Westside at 9017 W. Pico Blvd., the school struggled with enrollment and experienced electrical and air-conditioning problems at its building, which hurt enrollment more, Braimah said Wednesday evening.

With the only option being to cut staff to the point that academic viability of the school would be hurt, Braimah said the board opted to cease operations at the high school immediately. The school expected 150 students on the first day, but only 125 showed up and more dropped out in the first few weeks, leaving the school in financial trouble, Braimah said.

“This was an extremely heart-wrenching decision. This was not a problem with our educational program, this was an operational problem,” Braimah said.

The high school is part of a network of schools called City Charter Schools that includes City Language Immersion Charter, a dual-immersion elementary school in Baldwin Village, and The City School, a middle school. The middle school has been operating for five years, and the network’s leaders wanted to create a high school to serve its outgoing middle school students, but the school struggled to keep its enrollment up.

Braimah said the school was originally offered space from LA Unified at Emerson Community Charter School in Westwood through Prop. 39, a law that requires school districts to offer space to charters at district schools if it has unused classrooms or facilities. This can lead to charters sharing a building with another school, referred to as a co-location.

Emerson is 2.2 miles away from The City School, but the district changed plans and ultimately offered space at Los Angeles High School, which is 7.5 miles away in the Mid-Wilshire district. After a year at LA High, the school asked LA Unified for another location and was offered space at Dorsey High School, which is 6.4 miles away near Baldwin Village.

“Unfortunately, last year we ended up with a Prop. 39 site at Los Angeles High that was an adequate site facilities wise, but was geographically far for a lot of our families, and so a lot of our 8th-grade class did not matriculate to the high school and we started with a class of 60,” Braimah said.

City High only has 9th and 10th graders because it began last year with a freshman class and planned on adding a new class each year. After being offered Dorsey, the school chose to rent a private facility near its middle school, but the problems with the building added to financial woes and also led to several students dropping out, Braimah said.

“Long term, without a permanent facility in our sights and with the lack of predictability on Prop. 39, this problem really would have persisted. We are still young in our program, and we felt it was better for our kids to have another option that is college preparatory,” she said.

Braimah said the district has been helpful in getting students placed in schools and has extended the magnet enrollment deadline for its students. She also said the school has a partnership with Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy, which has offered to take as many students as are interested and has also offered them free busing to their campus near LAX from a central location.

LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside, said late Wednesday, “The only thing that we are concerned about in this moment is the students and families impacted by this closure three weeks into the school year.”

When asked about the Prop. 39 issues and if City High had been offered an adequate facility, he declined to comment.

“When something like this happens, we should all remember that these are all of our kids and everyone has a role and a responsibility to make sure every family has the services that they need to make sure that there is not academic injury that would compound the stress that happens when the school closes,” Zimmer said. “So that is what is most important right now. There will be time to talk about what we need to do in terms of our early warning systems to know about when enrollment is at a point where viability is a question so that we know about it before it becomes a disruption.”

The school employs 10 teachers and three administrators, and City Charter Schools is working to find them new jobs, Braimah said. She also said the goal is to have every student placed in a new school by Friday.

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.

24th Street Elementary, a school recently approved for charter co-location

LA Unified has released a preliminary list of charter school co-location proposals, showing that the district is offering more traditional school sites for co-locations for 2014-15 than in either of the previous two school years.

According to Lorena Padilla-Melendez, director of Community Relations for LAUSD’s Facilities Services Division, 80 traditional school sites were recently approved as “legally sufficient” for potential charter co-locations, a slight increase over the two prior years, when the district approved 69 and 75 facility requests, respectively.

The preliminary list of co-location proposals is comprised of applications from new charter schools requesting facilities for the first time, existing charter schools requesting renewals of their current facilities and existing charter schools that might need more space to accommodate a growing student body.

The charter schools filed their requests in November. The approval process hinges on the charter’s projections of their average daily attendance and whether the district agrees with the estimate, according to Padilla-Melendez. A charter has until May 1 to accept the district’s offer of the co-location, and if accepted, the charter can occupy the allotted site within 10 working days of the first day of instruction, according to the Prop 39 regulatory timeline.

California voters approved Proposition 39 in 2000, amending the state education code so that school districts must provide “reasonably equivalent” facilities to charter school students who would otherwise attend district schools.

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