This Isn't Wright

Los Angeles CA

13 February, 2022

11:56 AM

Description

"every child has a right to attend a high-quality Sustainable Community School in their neighborhood." - UTLA Growing up in New York, my elementary school was the center of the community. After school and on the weekends we would spend time on the playground. My Boy Scout troop met Wednesday nights in the lunchroom and I played little league baseball on the school's fields. During the summer, the town would use the school for a day camp program. The idea of bolstering neighborhood schools so that they could be more like the one from my childhood was a central pillar of the demands made by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) leading up to the strike in 2019. The community schools model leverages "public schools to become hubs of educational, recreational, cultural, health and civic partnerships, improving the education of children in the community and furthering the revitalization of the entire community." In addition to changing the approach of education to better reflect the needs of the community, these schools would also confront the conditions that interfere with the student's abilities to learn. On-site food programs and "wrap-around services such as health care, eye care and social and emotional services provided year-round to the full community." At the state level, $3 billion has been allocated towards converting "several thousand schools in low-income neighborhoods into centers of community life and providers of vital services for families as well as students." These community schools will "take an integrated approach to students' academic, health and social-emotional needs by making connections with an array of government and community services and by building trusting relationships with students and families." Bucking this trend are LAUSD School Board President Kelly Gonez and her board ally, Nick Melvoin. Instead of strengthening schools in struggling neighborhoods, they want to turn the buildings over to privately operated charter schools. The public may have paid for these buildings but they will no longer have any control of what happens within their walls. In Melvoin's Board District 4, the students of the Orville Wright STEAM Magnet are set to be evicted. Under this plan, which was crafted without any community input, the 510 students of this public school will no longer attend school on their newly renovated campus. Instead, they will have to move to a different campus that they will share with another school. Despite owing the LAUSD $424,326.5 in past-due overallocation fees, the WISH charter organization is set to take over the campus that is currently being used by Orville Wright. Instead of revoking their charter for having unsound fiscal practices, the district is going to reward them with more space. This is what $18.6 million in election campaign spending has bought the charter school industry. When WISH takes over the campus currently being used by Orville Wright, the demographics of the student body will be drastically different. While 77.5% of the students at the public school are socioeconomically disadvantaged, only 20.9% of students at the WISH Community charter school fall into this category. At the WISH Academy High School, 25.4% of the student body has this classification. The new student body will also be significantly whiter. Orville Wright has one of the largest percentages of black or African American students in the district with 60% of the students identifying as belonging to this group. Only 3.7% of the students identify as being white. The WISH schools have student bodies that are 24.1% and 41.9% black or African American. At the Community School, 39.8% of the students identify as being white. 18.8% of the high schoolers at the charter school are white. Unfortunately, the Orville Wright community is not the only one fighting to save their neighborhood public school. The parents at Pio Pico Middle School have been informed without any prior notice that they will have to find new schools for their students next year. Instead of collaborating with parents to save the school, the district held Zoom meetings where two other schools competed "Hunger Games" style to absorb students from the neighborhood school that is set for closure. In Gonez's Board District 6, Mount Gleason has been told that they will have to give up space for the North Valley Military Institute (NVMI). This is the same charter school that illegally charged students to attend summer school and paid parents and students below minimum wage to pay off those summer school fees. They did not notify parents at the school where they are currently located that an administrator was accused of sexual impropriety with students. There are also reports that the charter school was shut down last month because they were not complying with LA County COVID protocols. The problem is also not limited to Los Angeles. In Oakland, a new round of school closures has been met with resistance from the community. Unlike in the LAUSD, students have an ally on the board who is willing to fight these closures. Members of the Los Angeles board need to follow the lead of Mike Hutchinson and fight to save the public schools that they were elected to represent from elimination. It is the right thing to do. Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for students with special education needs and public education. He is an elected member of the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and serves as the Education Chair. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him "a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles." For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.