The issues involved in the Playa Vista Elementary School dispute are a microcosm of complexities within the second largest school district in the country. They involve noise and air pollution, freeways and airports, pitting charter schools with traditional public schools, school over-crowding, district budget cuts and an increase in demand to teach the students’ parents in an ever-growing adult education program at LAUSD.

And, it also involves classism: With the area in question a part of Los Angeles that includes million dollar beach houses and families with yachts as well as some of the most notorious gang-infested housing projects in the city, where do children go to school?

The friction began when Playa Vista Elementary opened in 2012, offering a highly-regarded STEM program for kindergarten through fifth grades. It had 26 classrooms at the time but has now grown to 540 students with no more space available. New housing under construction nearby suggests that by 2020, the school will need to accommodate 400 more students in 14 more classrooms.

A proposal will move fourth and fifth graders from Playa Vista to Wright Middle School by the 2016-2017 school year. Wright also has 19 classrooms on campus for the Westside Innovative School House charter elementary school (WISH). The district is looking for a new home for the charter classes and is considering renovating the adult school at Emerson, which was originally built as an elementary school.

Now, there are families who want a separate middle school for the area. Playa Vista families even issued a press release in that regard. Parent and longtime resident Lisa Hamor said the conflict has resulted in “pitting schools against schools, and potentially students against students with little or no regard for our students or our existing school communities and their desire for a quality education.”

Parents and students protest outside of Playa Vista Elementary

The school board voted to conduct a feasibility study to see about locating the charter school at the Westchester-Emerson Community Adult School and upgrading Wright’s science lab, as it seeks to deal with increasing enrollment at the local schools — one of the only areas in Los Angeles where enrollment is burgeoning.

Underlying any final decision are issues of diversity.

In one of his final speeches as superintendent, made at last month’s board meeting, Ramon Cortines recounted how the issues are playing out across the district. He drew hisses and boos from the audience when he said, “I’m going say it the way it is, I’ve been to these schools, I’ve spent 60 years of my life dealing with the issue of integration, and I know some of you will disagree with me: One of the issues that you as community are going to have to face is the class issue.”

He added: “There are some people in our schools that don’t want to go to school with those children, based on class.”

A woman in the audience shook her head, and he pointed to her. “Ma’am, I see you saying it’s not true. I’ve seen it, and I have gotten the letters that it is true,” he said. “So I’m saying that together in working on an instructional plan, you are going to have to face that head on because there are people that feel they are entitled because of where they live, and I am saying you can’t escape it anymore.”

Cortines continued despite audible protests. “Our children need to grow up in an education that deals with all levels of socio-economics, all levels of ethnic and cultural diversity. We cannot escape it anymore. And this school district and this area needs to be a model of that.”

School board president Steve Zimmer, whose district includes these and nine feeder schools, said he apologized for past miscommunications about solutions but cautioned all sides of the issues to approach solutions in a respectful manner.

“I will not take responsibility for way people have treated each other, and the idea that somehow we’ve created the animosity, that is about something else,” he said. “We must take this difficult and painful journey together.”

Local teacher, Kelly Morisaki, who is also a Westchester resident, said, “We already have a successful program at Orville Wright; make our middle school better. There is no reason for division and separation.”

Board member Mónica Ratliff questioned why WISH was getting preferential treatment about the move, and she said she didn’t like the idea of turning an adult school into a charter school.

Rene Mitchell, who is continuing her education at Emerson Adult School said, “What I see is my hopes and dream for future slipping away again. Do not deprive us of this school.” And, Gabriel Scott, who attended Emerson to get adult education said, “My class is filled with adults who want an education, and Emerson is in a perfect location now, don’t change it.”

Cortines said he toured the campuses on several occasions to figure out what works best. He said that adult education is expanding, and there is a waiting list of 16,000 for some LAUSD programs.

The school board voted (with Ratliff against) to add four classrooms at Playa Vista and to renovate up to five existing classrooms at Wright to create flexible learning/science labs and study the viability of sites and possible relocation of the Emerson adult school.

Zimmer told his board colleagues that the issue will not easily fade away, conceding that they are complex disputes “coming soon,” he said, “to a district near you.”

Parents and students protest outside of Playa Vista Elementary

By Nicholas Melvoin

If members of the LAUSD Board of Education are curious as to why the district’s enrollment is declining, they should review how the district treated parents over the last few days in the Playa Vista and Westchester neighborhoods for some clues. In a tale that is unfortunately all too familiar to many LAUSD parents, district leaders publicly promised one thing, parents relied on that promise, the district broke the promise at the eleventh hour, parents were left scrambling.

It is no way to treat constituents — let alone run a school district. And the response from Board President Steve Zimmer acknowledging that parents may have felt communication was “inconsistent and at times confusing,” is quite the understatement. Parents were “confused” because they were misled.

In negotiations over the past year, the district promised parents in Playa Vista that, in exchange for relocating some grades to a nearby campus, the district would help them create a new middle school, open to residents of neighboring communities, that would have its own administrator and greater autonomy.

Late last week, these same parents learned that LAUSD would no longer honor these promises. Superintendent Ramon Cortines acknowledged that there were “promises [he] maybe should not have made.” And yet, they were made. Instead, the board on Tuesday passed a resolution allocating $10.25 million to “define and approve project definitions” at local school campuses — i.e., study the feasibility of a new plan.

Not only did district leaders agree to an enrollment growth plan only to then reverse course at the last minute, but even the initial plan was devised without the input of all parents in the community. The district consulted some parents while leaving others in the dark.

If this sounds familiar, it is because a similar thing happened with the Mandarin Dual-Language Immersion Program at Broadway Elementary School earlier this year. After some parents from neighboring cities with higher performing schools sought waivers to get into LAUSD because of this school, the district pulled the rug out from under them and downsized the program.

What can the district leadership do — besides stop bemoaning declining enrollment only to then stifle its parents’ efforts to stay in district schools?

For one, they need to undertake, in a transparent way, an honest accounting of facilities and enrollment numbers. Parents, principals and teachers have been told different things by different LAUSD offices about which campuses are under-enrolled, which are over-enrolled, and which campuses have the capacity to facilitate more students and even multiple instructional models. In his letter to parents this week, Zimmer admitted that they “do not yet have a plan that meets all community needs.” This seems like an oversight, to say the least.

An overall plan would not only ensure equitable use of space, but would also reduce the in-fighting between schools that occurs mostly as a result of the district’s failures. When there is no leadership from LAUSD, parents are led to believe that space is a zero-sum game and if one school wins, the other must lose. That does not have to be the case, but without a comprehensive plan for space and pipeline for parents who would like to avoid making stressful decisions about schools every year or two, parents are left to fend for themselves.

LAUSD also needs to reorient itself as a service-provider to parents and not as a bureaucratic entity that has a monopoly over public education. As a parent making the hugely important decision about where to send your kid, you should be able to see all the available options on the district’s website — traditional, charter, pilot, teacher-led. It should be a parent-friendly process, not the Herculean task that it is today.

Finally, district leadership should make decisions with parents, not to parents or for parents. A common thread throughout all these near-successes is that, at the last-minute and without warning, LAUSD leadership has turned on these parents and reneged on commitments. Whether it is politics or bureaucracy that is interfering with student achievement and parent satisfaction, this type of backroom and closed-door decision-making needs to stop. 

The district is facing an enrollment crisis, but the culprit is not just new school growth or demographic trends. Every time district leaders mislead parents or pit one group of parents against another, constituents lose trust and faith in LAUSD’s ability to adequately serve our city’s children. It is time for  the district to bring parents together to improve schools for all kids rather than to be a source of divisiveness and the architect of its own decline. 

Nicholas Melvoin is a former LAUSD middle school teacher and current education attorney and advocate.

Parents and students protest outside of Playa Vista Elementary School (Photo courtesy Alex Stein)

Parents and students at Playa Vista Elementary staged a protest today over an unexpected change in the district’s Westside expansion efforts that directly affect Playa students. Some families held a “sit out” and kept their kids out of school.

The LA Unified school board is scheduled to vote tomorrow on an expansion plan for Playa that also involves shuffling at several other school sites. Parents say the district is making last-minute changes and breaking promises that were made over the last year through a series of negotiations and community meetings.

“To fold this quickly was really surprising to us,” Alex Stein, a parent leader at Playa, told LA School Report. 

The protesters say the district vowed to create a second middle school on the campus of nearby Orville Wright Middle School, aligning the new school’s program with the STEM program at Playa, which was developed in partnership with Loyola Marymount University.

But now, according to materials for the board meeting and a memo last week from Superintendent Ramon Cortines, the new plan calls for a second “program” on the campus at Orville that will be developed, based on of the curriculum of several elementary feeder schools, not just Playa, and the program will not have its own administrator.

“They are sort of shifting the wording to ‘program’ now,” Stein said. “Our last sticking point was having our own administrator and our own location code with our own administrator. We know that is the key to our success.”

Stein said board President Steve Zimmer, who represents the area of the schools in question, presented the plan last month at a community meeting at Orville and expressed support for it. It is unclear if Zimmer supports the changes, and he did not respond to a request for comment. The district’s communications office said the district and Cortines have no comment.

A meeting was held yesterday at Playa, attended by the local area district superintendent, Cheryl Hildreth. Stein said she did not fully explain why the second school was taken out of the plan.

“It’s basically an 11th hour switch that throws everything in doubt,” he said.

Orville is a magnet school with a STEAM program (science, technology, engineering, arts and math), but many of the parents at Playa say they do not want to send their children there, according a press release from Friends of Playa Vista School, a parent booster organization. Orville students scored below the state and district average on the recent California Assessment of Student Progress and Performance (CAASPP) standardized test, with only 16 percent of students meeting or exceeding the math standards.

Playa Vista is currently operating at or near its capacity, with enrollment only expected to grow due to new housing under development in the area, according to the district’s Playa Vista Area Enrollment Growth Plan, a complicated measure that involves shifting students and programs at four different Westside schools.

Under the plan —  hang on — Playa will have four new classrooms by 2020 for its kindergarten through 3rd grade students at a cost of $7.68 million. Playa students in grades four and five will be moved to a satellite campus at Orville, which will also have five classrooms ungraded to science labs by 2018 at a cost of $2.57 million. The Westside Innovation School House (WISH), a charter school co-located at Orville, will be moved to Emerson Adult Learning Center, and Emerson will be moved to one or multiple locations, possibly Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets high school.

The district is currently looking at budget shortfalls in the coming years, due in part to declining enrollment as more parents are choosing charter schools over traditional schools. At Playa, a traditional school, the district is seeing the opposite problem, with overcrowding due to its highly regarded STEM program. But Stein said the district’s current plan for Playa will just drive parents away.

“These are a group of parents who want to stay in the district, and to be blunt, these are the kind of parents who usually don’t,” Stein said. “These are the kind of parents who go to charters, privates, to El Segundo or Manhattan Beach. We’re saying, ‘Let us stay, let us create a middle school to bring everybody in.'”

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