(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.

Sharing Narbonne High’s campus, principals Gregory Fisher and Gerald Kobata.

At the final panel of the “Promising Practices” forum held all day Saturday, participants called for an arbiter at the district level who could step in to help solve disputes at schools sharing campuses.

The panel discussion was titled “Leading the Way with Collaboration and Sharing of Promising Practices: Perspectives from the Field” and included three sets of principals at co-located sites that share the same buildings, gyms and libraries. Sometimes the relationships are strained at first, as in the case of when Narbonne High School found its staff and students separating into a pilot school.

A smoky morning at the Sonia Sotomayor campus because of the Sand fire in the Santa Clarita Valley.

“Call it an amicable divorce, it wasn’t easy,” said Gregory Fisher, the principal of the Humanities and Arts Academy (HArts) pilot school that is co-located at Narbonne. A former teacher at the traditional district school, Fisher saw his pilot school competing for the same students and teachers. “We tried to be as sensitive as possible. Of course we had some common goals, but some of our goals were divergent.”

HArts and the traditional school were going through struggles that were similar to the five stages of death, Fisher said. Narbonne High School Principal Gerald Kobata agreed, saying: “That first year was not easy. It was difficult for me and my staff and why those teachers were leaving Narbonne. We experienced every conceivable problem.”

Now co-located for their third year, the principals agree things are going smoothly based on the mutual respect they have for each other and their regular communication.

“We had to get our staff to see that this is good for the students and we’re not competing with the other school,” Kobata said.

Both Narbonne schools shared professional development training such as active shooter training and a seminar on economics. Narbonne’s schools have common state championship sports teams, which is part of the glue that holds the school together, but they still have problems that the district could step in to help.

Yvette King-Berg of the Youth Policy Institute.

“The students are fine, they don’t see a difference,” Kobata said.

Fisher suggested that district administrators help settle disputes rather than simply letting the principals haggle it out. “Emotions can take over, and that needs to be addressed in a way to show there’s nothing personal,” Fisher said.

Yvette King-Berg, executive director of the Youth Policy Institute that runs the Monseñor Oscar Romero Charter Middle School on the campus of Berendo Middle School, warned that charter programs shouldn’t use Prop. 39 to co-locate at a district school and then come in with a bad attitude.

“Do not be the bratty younger brother or sister that was born second and you come in like you are entitled and have the right of access of resources from mom and dad,” King-Berg said. “You have the right for it all being equitable, but the older sibling was already there. You have to make it easier for the older sibling too.”

King-Berg said, “Prop 39 is not going away, it is what is best for kids. I make sure that me and my staff never engage in negative talk.”

She added, “We hear in LA School Report and the Los Angeles Times the negative stories about co-locations that are not working, but we need to show the partnerships that are working.”

King-Berg said she often has coffee every week with the Berendo principal, and they collaborate on grant proposals for both schools and share best practices.

“The community and parents all come together in the Pico-Union area and we treat them all like they are all our students,” said Berendo Assistant Principal Justin Howard.

The Sonia Sotomayor Learning Academies, where the conference was taking place, is a complex of 1,900 students with four high schools and one middle school, and two of the principals discussed their co-location issues.

“We all meet every week without exception,” said Kristine Puich, principal of the Los Angeles River School that specializes in environmental-related studies. “If we have a disagreement, we hash it out.”

Also on the Sotomayor campus, Alliance Tennenbaum Technology Principal Abigail Nunez said, “We have to accept and embrace that we sink or swim together, or we are going to tumble together. Once a school achieves success, it is success for the whole campus.”

Principal Kristine Puich of the Los Angeles River School.

Despite the mix of independent charter and traditional pilot school programs at the Sotomayor campus, the schools coordinate Advanced Placement and college testings, share costs for the librarian and athletic director and open after-school events to everyone.

But sometimes they are at odds and “some things need to be hammered out that are beyond a conversation between principals,” Puich said.

Nunez added that “over the past five years we have had some very, very heated discussions and some of them got very ugly because that’s how passionate they are.” She was also asking for someone from the district to help them come up with solutions when conflicts arise.

Superintendent Michelle King said she and her staff are gathering suggestions and solutions offered during the nearly three dozen sessions held Saturday. Although more than 350 people signed up for the event, about 200 turned out. Some didn’t show because of the fires in the northern part of Los Angeles, said a district spokeswoman.

King and school board members Monica Ratliff and Ref Rodriguez attended, and board President Steve Zimmer gave a rousing speech before he had to leave for a family issue. The seminars were equally mixed with charter and LA Unified district officials as well as parents and experts in this first-ever forum of sharing best practices.

Michelle King closing the “Promising Practices” forum.

Representatives from the teachers union, UTLA, and administrators union, AALA, attended the free seminars as did representatives from Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, the California Community Foundation and many other groups. Also in attendance was Marcia S. Reed, principal of 186th Street Elementary School in Gardena, who was just selected as California’s 2016 National Distinguished Principal.

King opened and closed the session. “I was impressed with the openness and giving,” King said at the end of the seven-hour summit. “We now have to go back and tell somebody what we learned today and spread it across the district to help change the narrative.”

King said she hopes to double the numbers of the sessions and hold a similar collaboration next spring.

Temporary classrooms will be dismantled after students move back to their Porter Ranch schools.

The 46 new classrooms installed when two schools were temporarily relocated because of the Porter Ranch gas leak will be taken down once the students go back to their former locations.

The district spent $5 million in building the temporary classrooms that are equipped with heat and air conditioning and required plumbing, wiring, utility poles, paving and other major construction work to create two entire school campuses within other existing school space. The two schools with 1,800 students will be relocated back to their former sites once there’s an all-clear that the air is safe in the Porter Ranch neighborhood.

But the district won’t be keeping the classrooms, nor are they eligible for charter schools in the area that may need the classroom space.

“These sites were designed and erected as temporary facilities, and they will be dismantled after Castlebay Lane Charter and Porter Ranch Community School return to their home campuses,” said LA Unified spokeswoman Barbara Jones. “This move will be made when all health concerns have been resolved and on a schedule that will not disrupt teaching and learning.”

Although the methane gas leak is reportedly plugged up, some residents are still worried about the gas that caused health concerns for students and teachers at the schools near the leak. Superintendent Michelle King said she is monitoring the situation and won’t authorize the schools to move back until she knows it is safe, and so it won’t disrupt their lessons. Most likely, if there’s an all-clear, the schools will return to their locations over the summer, but not before that.

Porter Ranch Community School was added to a lot behind Northridge Middle School.

The district wanted to keep the students and teachers together and not split them to multiple school sites in the area. Some classes are held at existing empty classrooms on the campuses, and others had their desks and materials shipped to new temporary classrooms that were located on a playground. LA Unified is not in need of more temporary classrooms because 30 percent of all classroom space districtwide is in temporary classrooms, and the district has been making efforts to reduce unused space.

According to the district, the temporary classrooms are not available for use by charter schools that are seeking empty spaces in district schools under the state’s Prop. 39 law. So the classrooms at Northridge Middle and Sunny Brae Elementary schools will be taken down.

“A couple of charter operators identified Sunny Brae Elementary as their stated geographic area of interest when they filed their requests for Prop. 39 facilities last fall,” Jones said. “None of the charters specifically requested the use of the temporary classroom space occupied by the Castlebay Lane students.”

But because they are built as temporary classrooms, they are exempt from the Prop. 39 inventory, which allows charter schools to occupy spaces not being used at traditional schools.

“The temporary classrooms were placed on the campus to serve only as interim housing during an emergency situation, and state law excludes interim housing from the district’s Prop. 39 inventory,” Jones explained.

Meanwhile, the district expects to be reimbursed for all costs by Southern California Gas.

State Senator Kevin de Leon

In response to a critical story by the Associated Press that concluded the Clean Energy Jobs Act (Proposition 39) has failed to meet its stated goals, two of the campaign’s co-chairs said the program needs more time to benefit schools.

“It’s irresponsible and more than a little misleading to prejudge a long-term, multi-year program this early in the process,” Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León and Tom Steyer said in a statement, referring to a story that circulated yesterday. “We are disappointed that the Associated Press did not take time to present an objective or comprehensive analysis of what is still a developing program.”

The program, passed three years ago by California voters, closed a tax loophole for multi-state corporations while intending to funnel half of the savings to clean energy projects in schools. It promised to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year.

However, the AP pointed out:

Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.

 

The AP also concluded:

• The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has not met once.
• Only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years.
• Not one project for which the state allocated $12.6 million has been completed at LA Unified. Two schools were scheduled this summer to receive lighting retrofits and heating and cooling upgrades, but no construction work has been done.
• de Leon previously estimated LAUSD would save up to $27 million a year on energy costs, but projects proposed by the district so far would save only $1.4 million
• $153 million of the $297 million given to schools has gone for energy planning by consultants and auditors.
• Proponents such as de Leon and Steyer told voters it would send up to $550 million annually to the Clean Jobs Energy Fund, but it brought in just $381 million in 2013, $279 million in 2014 and $313 million in 2015.

The statement from Steyer — a billionaire who funded the ballot measure with $30 million of his own money — and de Leon did not address most of the specific issues the AP story brought to light. They did claim California schools are saving $25 million in annual energy costs by pursuing projects that are creating thousands of clean-energy jobs and that most school districts are either “in the planning phase or are preparing to launch large-scale, intensive retrofit projects that will maximize benefits to students, school sites and the California economy.”

They added, “We have every confidence that, as more projects break ground and come on line, Californians in every region of the state will increasingly realize the full benefits of improvements that make schools stronger and more energy-efficient while building on our state’s position as America’s clean-energy jobs leader.”

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.

Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León, Gov. Jerry Brown, Tom Steyer (from left)

Governor Jerry Brown today dropped by John Marshall High School to talk about energy efficiency and the millions of dollars LA Unified schools can expect to receive from the state as a result of Proposition 39.

The governor, who’s up for re-election next week, was on the Los Feliz campus with Tom Steyer, the Democratic mega-donor who backed the initiative; and state Sen. Kevin de Leon. The Clean Energy Jobs Act was passed by voters in 2012 and changed how corporations calculate their tax loads, sending the proceeds to schools and other learning centers for use in improving energy efficiency.

“Two years ago, voters closed a flagrant tax loophole and sent hundreds of millions of dollars to California schools with passage of Proposition 39,” Governor Brown said. “Today, with these funds, schools are starting to repair inefficient heating and air conditioning systems, replace old windows and install new lighting, saving money through energy efficiency.”

As the largest school district in the state, LA Unified has been awarded over $26 million for the first year of funding from Prop. 39. Funding is based on a district’s average daily attendance. In all, the state has collected over $400 million to fund energy retrofit projects at every K-12 school district in the first year.

Marshall High School will be the first school in California to receive Prop 39 funds. More than $1.8 million will be spent on new air systems for the auditorium and classrooms, lighting controls for the gym and other high-use areas, a new energy management system and improved lighting throughout the campus.

“It’s the kind of investment that you don’t actually see when you walk into a room,” Mark Hovatter, the district’s Chief of Facilities, told LA School Report. “They are all improvements that are hidden behind walls so you don’t really notice them, but in the end, they’ll save the district hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The energy efficiency upgrades at Marshall are expected to yield 29 percent in energy savings, resulting in an annual reduction of over $100,000 from the school’s electricity bill.

Afterward, LA Unified board member Bennett Kayser thanked the Governor and Senator for choosing Marshall High School, one of the district’s oldest, built in 1930, for the opportunity to “improve our facilities in a sustainable manner.”

“We plan to utilize these critical dollars to address needed repairs,” he said.

The measure makes changes to corporate income taxes, providing $550 million annually for five fiscal years beginning with the 2013-14 fiscal year for job creation initiatives. The recipients include California’s K-12 schools and community colleges.

School districts will soon receive about $38 million from the state in this second round of  funding, a total of $6.8 million for LA Unified. Altogether, recipients in Los Angeles County, including school districts and charter schools, are receiving $11.2 million — not surprisingly, the most of any county.

The first round of funding—totaling approximately $106 million was distributed in November, with the proviso that recipients use the money for authorized energy planning projects.

In a press release announcing the latest round of funding, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said, “The funding voters provided with Prop 39 will go a long way toward supporting our schools as they create stronger learning environments for our students.”

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.

Previous Posts: Charter renewal denied for two high-performing schools; LAUSD leads Charter Schools Growth in California and Nation; Charter Schools Association Pushing Election for LaMotte Seat

Board Member Steve Zimmer

An emotionally-charged debate erupted at the last school board meeting over the co-location of a charter on the campus of an elementary school in Boyle Heights.

Parents of public school students at Lorena Street Elementary School were furious that the school was forced to relinquish space to accommodate Extera 2, a charter school, because of Proposition 39 – a law approved in 2000 requiring districts to share unused facilities with independent schools.

Fed up with the “constant battle over the co-location issue,” school board member Steve Zimmer responded by drafting a resolution, which will be taken up at the board meeting tomorrow, to persuade state lawmakers to create guidelines for applying the law.

“It’s time to reexamine the implications of Prop. 39,” Zimmer told LA School Report. “I want the people who know best to tell us what we can do. What can the legislature do? What can the State Superintendent do? What can the state board of education do?”

In short, Zimmer said, he wants to know, “What are the different avenues that we can pursue for relief that are not courts of law?”

The district is in a legal fight with the California Charter Schools Association over the funding formula used to allocate space for charters. The CCSA wants to use a model that gives them one classroom at a ration of 15 to 1, while traditional LA Unified public schools often range between 24-to-1 and 30-to-1. The charter school formula also divides enrollment by the total number of classroom facilities on a campus, including parent centers, preschool classrooms and even storage rooms.

Zimmer hopes new guidelines will exclude certain non-instructional spaces from the charter school formula. Spaces such as parent centers, computer labs, and libraries should be totally off-limits, he said.

“Prop. 39 was designed to create opportunities for charter schools,” he said. “It was not designed to punish parents of children who choose to remain in neighborhood public schools.”

A second piece of Zimmer’s plan is to block charter school operators from recruiting potential students on public school grounds. Zimmer said charter schools should follow the same guidelines around solicitation as all other vendors.

“We should solidify that you can’t do it on campus and you shouldn’t do it at the school house gate,” Zimmer said. “Schools shouldn’t have to be under siege that way.”

Previous Posts: LA School Report – What’s Really Going on Inside LAUSD; LA Unified Schools Top Lists of California’s Best Charters, By the Numbers: Charter School Waitlist Exceeds 15,000, Westside Forum: Charters, Evaluation

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