The schools are eligible for School Improvement Grants (SIG) money that can result in $2 million a year for five years if the school administrators decide to implement one of seven school models that will help improve their scores.

The issue was brought up at the first LA Unified School Board meeting of the school year on Tuesday. Board members also discussed whether they need to intervene with the five traditional schools that are run by Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (and are not charter schools), as well as the six other charter schools that they oversee in the district.

The surprise is that a few of them named on the list are notable and previously celebrated schools as far as past achievements, yet some of them have been identified as low performing since 2010.

The traditional district schools are:

• 107th Street Elementary
• Annalee Avenue Elementary
• Augustus F. Hawkins High School-A Critical Design and Gaming School
• Barton Hill Elementary
• Cabrillo Avenue Elementary
• Daniel Webster Middle
• Dr. Owen Lloyd Knox Elementary
• Edwin Markham Middle
• Florence Griffth Joyner Elementary
• George Washington Carver Middle
• George Washington Preparatory High
• Samuel Gompers Middle School
• Tom Bradley Global Awareness Magnet Elementary
• Westchester Enriched Sciences High School Magnets- Health/Sports/Medicin

The charter schools are:

• Alain Leroy Locke College Preparatory Academy High (Green Dot)
• Animo Phillis Wheatley Charter Middle (Green Dot)
• Los Angeles Leadership Academy High
• Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle (ICEF)
• North Valley Military Institute College Preparatory
• Wallis Annenberg High (Accelerated School Foundation)

The list from the California Department of Education only slightly differs with the low-achieving list from the CORE district ratings which also included Century Park and Hillcrest Drive elementary schools and David Starr Jordan and Dr. Maya Angelou Community high schools.

The list of 291 schools throughout the state of low-performing schools identify 20 in LA Unified, one in Los Angeles County Office of Education (Soledad Enrichment Charter High) and one in Long Beach (Jordan High). In Los Angeles County, there are 12 other school districts with schools named in the lowest 5 percent of state schools.

The state’s lowest 5 percent of schools was based on 2015 math and English assessment scores, graduation rates based on four years of data, the English learner indicator of the past two years, suspension rates over two years and college and career indicators.

Among the charter schools, the 3-year-old North Valley Military Institute is the only one of its kind in LA Unified and is championed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Wallis Annenberg High’s Accelerated School’s elementary school was named by TIME magazine as the “Elementary School of the Year” for its impressive approach to education, and has boasted years of 90-plus percent graduation rates.

Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle is getting a new building, and ICEF CEO Parker Hudnut said they have hired new experts in math that are joining the staff.

Among the traditional schools, the Augustus High School Critical Design and Gaming School has been noted for its innovation in computer science, while the successes at George Washington Preparatory High were chronicled in a movie starring Denzel Washington who played then-Principal George McKenna, who is now a school board member.

George McKenna

McKenna said he is unhappy with the low performance of a school where he gained his academic legacy, but said, “Our role is not to play ‘gotcha’ and I know some people have that perception. But if you have that perception you may think we’re in some way an intruder on someone else’s autonomy or freedom and they should be left alone. We need your help, we are the district and we have responsibility. If it’s our property, it’s our responsibility, it’s our kids. We have an obligation to insist and inform otherwise we are enabling or are complicit in negative outcomes and deficits.”

McKenna and other board members approved allowing the 14 traditional schools to apply for the SIG money, but they expressed concerns about how to help the charter schools that they were not voting on Tuesday with SIG applications. Those charter schools must apply on their own, and McKenna also wondered about the five Partnership schools that the district co-runs as part of the nonprofit started in 2008 by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Of the 18 Partnership schools they now run in LAUSD, five of them are on the district’s list of 14. Four of those five have been on the list since 2010, and have received extra money to help improve their test scores. Partnership’s CEO Joan Sullivan was unavailable to comment.

The money used to help the schools could be something that must sustain their progress, said board member Monica Ratliff. She said, “The schools begin to rely on the funding for the purchased positions, and then they lose those positions and it causes a lot of heartache on those campuses. If they bring up achievement levels maybe they do need those positions, and then suddenly those resources are not there anymore, and you’re out of luck.”

According to a national report when the schools were helped first in 2010, generally 69 percent of the schools helped for three years saw an increase in math, but 30 percent saw declines and 2 percent had no change.

School board President Steve Zimmer said he wanted to know for sure where money was spent to pinpoint interventions to see how they worked. He said he supported the Partnership schools and wanted to help.

“As far as charter schools, we feel these things shouldn’t happen,” Zimmer said about the list including independent charters. “We are granting the level of autonomy from the ed code that charter schools get and then results should follow them and not get deeper.”

Zimmer noted that the school board took a “leap of faith” in approving Green Dot charter renewals and said their two schools on this state list indicate “this should green-light more collaboration and I hope that it won’t be punitive, and would be a lot of engagement.”

George Bartleson, chief of School Choice at LA Unified, said the district has helped with partnered schools in the past, and there was a time when someone from the central office was assigned to schools to help.

David Tokofsky, a former LA Unified school board member who works for the principals union, pointed out that the school board and superintendent should have more scrutiny of the charter schools that will be getting the extra $2 million a year, especially if they continue to remain on the state’s improvement list.

LA Unified originally had 31 persistently low-achieving schools on the list. Eight schools are still receiving money from past SIG funding, according to a report by Frances Gipson, the chief academic officer. The district has to submit their applications for the schools to the state by Sept. 8.

Gipson said schools are already “discussing the selection of the intervention model that will best benefit their school culture.”

Yvonne Dunigan stands outside the school she worked at since the beginning.

Yvonne Dunigan walked the halls of the new $19.6 million school on South Crenshaw Boulevard and remembered when on that same street corner there was a Ford dealership where she bought her car 13 years ago.

She’s still driving that same car, but much else about the landscape has changed.

“I knew someday that this would happen and this school would be built, but it’s hard to believe it’s here,” said Dunigan.

For 17 years, Dunigan has worked as the school operations manager for View Park Elementary School, which until the advent of the new building had to be divided up into three different locations, including at Crenshaw High School.

She remembers protesting at the L.A. Unified school district with fellow parents to open the charter school, and then sending her son and daughter there. Working at View Park from the very beginning, she has seen children, now grown, bringing their own sons and daughters to school here.

Parker Hudnut where the time capsule will be buried.

“And now, we have this building, and everyone is just thrilled, and I’m feeling old,” Dunigan said.

View Park is part of the Inner City Educational Foundation Public Schools, which will be dedicating the new building—its first ever built—in the Crenshaw district of South Los Angeles, on Saturday with city officials, school board members and other honored guests.

For ICEF—which operates 12 schools in Los Angeles and Inglewood serving about 4,000 African-American and Latino students—it is a crowning achievement for a charter organization that was once on the brink of bankruptcy and facing closure. Dunigan remembers waiting weeks sometimes to get paid and worrying about whether the school she loved would no longer exist.

“Miss Dunigan is the heart of this school, she really runs the place,” said Parker Hudnut, ICEF’s CEO.

Dunigan, in turn, praises Hudnut’s commitment.

“I have to give the credit and honor to Parker Hudnut for making this happen,” she said, standing in the school now known as the ICEF View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter Elementary School located on the first two floors of the school with Kindergarten through 2nd grade on the first floor and 3rd through 5th on the second floor. 

The middle school is on the third floor, and a few blocks away is the ICEP View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter High School.

The 43-year-old Hudnut is now figuring out with the students what items and messages they will put in a time capsule that they will bury under the foyer of the front office. It will be opened 35 years from now when the building’s tax exempt state bond that helped finance the nearly $20 million construction project is paid off.

“I hope I’m still around to be here when it’s opened,” he said.

When Hudnut came to ICEF five years ago, things were dire. Five of their schools were locked out of their sites because rents weren’t paid and they needed new locations before school started in just two months. There was a $7 million payroll, 165 vendors clamoring for payment and only $15,000 in the bank account.

“My friends and fellow educators told me I was crazy to come here to try to fix the mess,” Hudnut recalled. “They said I shouldn’t leave my cushy job for this financial train wreck. But it was an amazing challenge, and I saw the dedication of the parents and the people who believed in educating these kids, and I tried to help.”

With severe cuts, and consolidating some schools, Hudnut got their schools to live within their budgets. He treated them like a business, while always keeping in mind the educational aspect. He came from LA Unified where he worked as the executive director for Innovation and Charter Schools.

“We looked at each component of the schools as a business to see what was working, and frankly some of the schools with only 150 students we couldn’t maintain,” Hudnut said.

Parker Hudnut and Yvonne Dunigan in a Kindergarten class.

Today, Hudnut heads ICEF, which prides itself as a leader in educating African-American and Latino students and preparing them for higher education. The accelerated learning techniques used for the students is based on a school model developed by Henry M. Levins at Stanford University.

Their test scores are still not where they want them. The English scores last year in elementary school had 35 percent meeting or exceeding standards, which was better than the LA Unified district score of 33 percent, but less than the state average of 44 percent. In math, the score was 21 percent,  less than the district score of 25 percent and the state score of 33 percent. In the middle school grades, the scores are 21 percent in the English tests, while 33 percent at the district level and 44 percent in the state, and only 6 percent meeting or exceeding standards in math scores, while the district is at 25 percent and the state is at 33 percent.

Hudnut said he hopes that getting the students all under one roof rather than in multiple sites will help their academics. He explained, “Yes, we are working to raise our results for our students to exceed the state averages.  One specific change that we have made is the addition of James Waller to our team.  He will oversee the View Park K-12 family.  He ran Gertz-Ressler High School for many years and he reports directly to me. I am excited about his addition to the executive team and we are expecting good things this year at View Park and throughout ICEF.”

The new three-story building on Crenshaw Boulevard stands on a plot of land that long frustrated former Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks. He tried many ways to get something substantial built there. Now, it will have a school that hopes to share its multi-purpose room with the local Neighborhood Council if it wants to hold meetings there, or offer it as a regular place for voting during elections.

“We want the school to be a part of the community,” Hudnut said. “I think they are now seeing the value of having a school here.”

The school offers a great view of the neighborhood, including downtown Los Angeles and nearby Crenshaw High School, where school board member George McKenna will now have offices in the rooms they previously occupied.

The Media Center designed by an interior designer.

The school has a computer lab, and nearly a one-to-one ratio of Chromebooks and computers per student. The library holds comfortable lounge furniture and new books from a fundraiser last year and was created for no charge by noted interior designer Bridgid Coulter.

Classrooms have interconnected doors so teachers can more easily work together. There is an art room, a science lab and something else they’ve never had before: a teacher’s lounge. The multipurpose room serves as a gym with lines for volleyball and basketball, a stage with an auditorium that can seat 500 and a cafeteria for the K-8th graders.

“The students have already taken a lot of pride of ownership,” Dunigan said.

Although the racial mix of students hasn’t changed much since Dunigan started working at the school in 1999 (with about 90 percent African-American and the rest a mix of Latino and white), the socio-economic ratio has changed dramatically.

“We used to have more children of doctors and lawyers and business people,” Hudnut said. “We had about 20 percent eligible for free lunch when we first started, and now it’s about 85 percent.”

The downturn in the economy hurt both the neighborhood and ICEF, so when Hudnut took over, he sought help from the philanthropic community. Former Los Angeles mayor and former California Secretary of Education Richard Riordan joined the board and helped raise money. Then, Hudnut made judicious cuts.

ICEF pared down the number of schools and students it once served. Hudnut received help from the non-profit charter group Ex Ed, and the Weingart, Ahmanson, the W. M. Keck and Parsons foundations, among others. Parents donated money, and some even shared their retirement accounts.

“I had to make hard cuts, like a favorite art program, and I love the arts,” Hudnut said. “I just told the teachers, ‘You are the educators, so you do the teaching, and let me figure out how to keep up the payroll.’ I don’t think anyone really knew how bad it was.”

And just as they thought they were close to being in the clear, they found a stack of unpaid bills, to the tune of $700,000, in the desk of a laid-off employee.

Parker Hudnut with the engraved shovel for the dedication.

“It seemed like we couldn’t get out from under it, and ICEF was getting a bad reputation for not paying its bills, but we have worked to improve that,” Hudnut said. “We couldn’t have done it alone.”

Hudnut credits the support of Pastor Timm Cyrus of the Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church where they shared space for the school since the beginning. He will help make the dedication of the new building on Saturday.

There is a waiting list to get into the school, that now holds about 1,000. But they hope to grow, and ICEF has plans to start buildings for other schools soon.

“This is a true community effort that this school is here, so we hope everyone will come out to see it,” Hudnut said.

The public is invited to the open house, which starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday at the school, 5311 South Crenshaw Boulevard. They have an engraved shovel ready for the occasion.

The meeting was called last week after the search firm of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates presented its compilation of input from community forums, private interviews and surveys.

In open session starting at 1 p.m. at district headquarters, the school board will hear from the search firm again to discuss and define the desired characteristics of the next superintendent. Then, after hearing from any members of the public, the board will retreated into closed session. Any decisions made will be announced in public after the private meeting.

Earlier, at 9:30 tomorrow morning, the Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee will hear a report from district lawyers about the possibility of turning all of LA Unified in a charter school district.

Also on the committee’s agenda are a detailed report on the charter schools that LAUSD oversees, the budget of the charter schools division and how much it costs for the district to monitor the charter schools. The committee, chaired by Mónica Ratliff, plans to get a report on healthcare, pension and other post-employment benefits costs, which were cited in a report last week as major contributor to the financial stability of the district.

The Office of the Inspector General also plans to report about their collaboration with the Charter School Division and its costs.

At 4 p.m., Mónica García’s Successful School Climate: Progressive Discipline and Safety Committee plans to hear from an FBI agent, a probation director and other experts about a call to collaborate and stop the commercial exploitation of children. The committee also will get an update on the Ready to Learn: El Niño Preparedness in our Schools program from Chief Facilities director Mark Hovatter and Maintenance and Operations director Roger Finstad.

Click here to sign up for the LA School Report newsletter, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In a quiet effort that could help mitigate the proliferation of charter schools, the LA Unified board is scheduled to vote tomorrow on what would be first two gifted/highly gifted high school magnets in the San Fernando Valley. Taft High in Woodland Hills and Kennedy High in Granada Hills would join 14 other magnet programs approved to begin in traditional district schools this year.

They are also among 47 proposed magnets — about 20 percent of the district’s existing 198 — that are on track to open over the next two years. That would increase the number of magnet programs to 245. The current number of charter schools in LAUSD is 285.

But it’s not about outnumbering the charter schools, said Keith Abrahams, LAUSD’s executive director of Student Integration Services, who is in charge of the magnet programs. “We want to continue to expand choices, and parents want what’s best for their children,” he told LA School Report. “So it is an ongoing process to continually provide those choices in the areas closer to where they live.”

It’s also about keeping higher-performing students from leaving the district. In his report, Abrahams showed that over the past year, a large number of these students were withdrawing from local schools because they don’t have magnet high schools to attend.

“LAUSD lost 1,099 identified 8th graders who transitioned to a Northwest (district) high school this year. ” Abrahams said, “This may be due to the lack of a Gifted High School in the entire Valley (Northwest and Northeast).”

Abrahams helped identify the two Valley high schools as magnet possibilities. His report will be presented to the board tomorrow. The plan for the new magnets was sparked when the board passed a resolution in 2012 to start addressing declining enrollment. Abrahams said 23,000 students are now on magnet waiting lists and more than 20 percent of them — 5,213 — are currently enrolled in charter schools, private schools or other districts.

So, to get them back, the district is stepping up efforts to add more magnets. Last year, 25 traditional public schools asked to become magnet schools, and 14 were approved in May. The cost to create those magnets, including transportation costs for buses, new teachers and new materials (at $17 per student, per class) totaled $2.2 million.

For the two new magnet high schools on the agenda tomorrow, the cost is $823,000.

Ten other schools are awaiting approval to become magnet programs, and 21 others have expressed interest but have not yet submitted complete proposals.

“We are working closely with the other schools to go through this comprehensive process [to become a magnet school] because a lot of things have to be in place,” Abrahams said.

Of the schools that want to be magnets in the next two years, none of them is located in the central/downtown District 1 represented by school board member George McKenna. Abrahams said he is meeting with district officials from that area tomorrow morning to discuss more potential school magnet sites in that area.

Magnet programs do not give preference to people who live in the designated school boundaries but are opened to students who live within LAUSD borders. Access is generally determined by the Magnet Selection Priority Points System, with the number of students selected based on the number of available spaces at a particular school. Students are randomly accepted into Magnet programs based on a priority points system. Magnets offer theme-based instructional opportunities from grades K through 12.

By 2021-22, the two new schools predict an enrollment of 613 for Taft and 458 for Kennedy.

Abrahams pointed out that since 1986, 78 magnet schools and centers have been named as California Distinguished Schools. Additionally, 14 LAUSD magnet schools and centers have been awarded National Blue Ribbon School status.

In the recent Smater Balanced statewide tests, magnets outperformed the district’s independent charter schools in nearly every major category, although the demographics of magnets vs. independent charters do not match up evenly, and some magnet schools are for highly-gifted students, which requires them to meet certain academic criteria for enrollment.

* Corrects to say the two new schools in the Valley would be for gifted and highly gifted students.

Click here to sign up for the LA School Report newsletter, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Two of the contracts include raises for teachers.

UTLA currently represents more than 1,000 educators at 13 charter schools. They include six charters that converted from traditional  schools  — Birmingham Community Charter High School, Granada Hills Charter High, Montague Charter Academy, Pacoima Charter, El Camino Real Charter High School and Palisades Charter High.

Five other independent charters have been unionized by UTLA  — Ivy Academia, Apple Academy Charter Public Schools, Accelerated Schools, Port of Los Angeles High School and Global Education Academy. And two charter chains — Green Dot and Camino Real — have their own California Teachers Association-affiliated unions.

The new contract at Palisades High will include an eight percent raise over two years, an increase in stipends for master’s and doctorate degrees, and “an agreement that an academic accountability committee made up of a majority of educators will assess students’ needs and make recommendations based on those needs, which will then be bargained and voted on by the membership,” UTLA’s newsletter reported.

The newsletter also said the committee was formed due to the administration instituting an “unpopular bell schedule change.”

At Pacoima Charter, teachers will receive a 12 percent raise in each of the next two years, as well as a commitment for an increase in 2017. The teachers also “fought off a number of take-backs, including elimination of lifetime health benefits for new hires, extension of faculty meetings, and new mandatory meetings and PD sessions,” UTLA reported.

UTLA said teachers at Ivy Academia received a stronger voice in decision-making and teachers at Granada Hills Charter received improvements on their vision and detail plans, auxiliaries and salary point credits. UTLA also said contract bargaining is underway or about to begin a number of other charter schools where the teachers are represented by UTLA.

A group of teachers at Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is currently working unionize as well, an effort the administration is against. The fight has led to UTLA filing a labor complaint against Alliance for what it says is illegal interference in the unionization process.

Two Alliance College-Ready Public Schools students at a community garden in South LA. (Credit: LIIF)

A 400-square foot community garden located on the grounds of a south LA charter school run by Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is celebrating its first harvest with an event tomorrow.

The garden, which just opened this school year, is funded by the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) and Citi Foundation.

The first City Garden includes an athletic field and is located on the duel campuses of Alliance Renee & Meyer Luskin High School/Alliance College Ready Middle Academy 7. The garden is integrated into the science curriculum of the schools, according to a LIF spokesperson.

The garden also aims to “reduce food insecurity for students and improve health in south Los Angeles, where 25 percent of children live in poverty and 94 percent qualify for reduced price meals at school,” according to press release from LIIF.

The release also said the garden will provide “healthy food to students; an opportunity to teach students and their parents about cooking and gardening; and a new venue for health fairs and farmers markets. The field will create places to play and exercise and a new community gathering spot where none existed before. Together, they create a new hub of the neighborhood.”

At 10 a.m. tomorrow, Alliance parents, students and staff are planning to celebrate the garden’s first harvest with an event that will include performances by the Alliance Luskin Choir & Dance Group and Debbie Allen Dance Academy, remarks by Rep. Karen Bass, tours, cooking demonstrations, and ProCamps events with professional athletes DeAndre Jordan and Shannon Boxx.

Advocates of the controversial law argued that that an overhaul was required for progress. Short of parent testimonials, advocates have had little evidence to prove themselves right since the state suspended standardized testing as districts transition to the Common Core.

Until now.

One set of statewide tests — the California Standards Test in science, strangely omitted from the testing ban — suggests students at the triggered schools have made impressive progress over the last two years.

True, the testing sample is quite small, but the results are positive.

Of the fifth graders who took the science exam at 24th Street Elementary, the first school within LA Unified to undergo a complete overhaul, almost twice as many scored Proficient on the exam over those who took the test in the pre-trigger year 2013. The percentage of students who rated as Advanced skyrocketed to 33 from 2.

Ben Austin, founder of Parent Revolution, a non-profit group that helped the two schools organize their petition to pull the parent trigger, conceded that the single test is a narrow measuring stick but insisted that it’s an indicator of wider success.

At 24th Street, LA Unified runs pre-K through fourth grade while Crown Preparatory Academy runs fifth through eighth grades.

“Potentially, the test scores speak to two things,” he told LA School Report, referring to the hybrid nature of the campus. “One is the value for children in these types of collaborative partnerships when adults put their ideological differences aside.”

“And it speaks to the very good work that Crown Prep has done as a charter school.”

At Desert Trails Preparatory Academy, formerly Desert Trails Elementary, which was the first in the country to be converted into a charter school as a result of California’s Parent Empowerment law, students made even more impressive gains. More students tested Advanced or Proficient in science than anytime in the past 10 years, including almost four times as many as those in 2013.

In addition to 24th Street Elementary, a handful of other LA Unified schools have leveraged the parent trigger law to make changes on campus: Haddon Avenue Elementary in Pacoima, West Athens Elementary and Lenox Elementary in Baldwin Hills, and Weigand Elementary in Watts.