The Los Angeles Unified School District board voted last month to create a new policy banning public charter schools from sharing space with other public schools on more than 300 district campuses, known in the LAUSD as co-location.
An obvious question arises: What’s the board afraid of? Cooties?
“We have consistently maintained that this policy is a shameful and discriminatory attack on public charter school students for which the district shares a responsibility to house,” said Myrna Castrejón, president of the California Charter Schools Association. “CCSA was left with no other option than legal action to enforce the rights of charter school students to reasonably equivalent facilities from the district under Proposition 39.”
The plain fact is that the ability to access public school campuses by charter schools — and the ones we’re talking about are public as well — is guaranteed by California law. Yet a narrow majority of board members on a 4-3 vote want to prohibit the new location of charters at an unknown number of L.A. campuses with special needs programs.
L.A. law firm Latham & Watkins wrote the board in support of the charters, saying that “public school facilities should be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools.” The firm says that by “prioritizing public school students attending district-run schools over public school students who attend charter public schools, the policy violates” California law.
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It doesn’t make any sense. It seems merely punitive. School board President Jackie Goldberg, long anti-charter, says that the new rules would protect, for instance, traditional middle schools from competition for students with charter middle schools that had been placed on properties with traditional elementaries.
The solution to that supposed problem? Make your traditional schools better, LAUSD, and win the competition.
Instead of legislating away the competition, put the interests of students above all others. Craft budgets that are about student achievement, not just appeasing big-spending labor unions or protecting bloated bureaucracies. You know, do something other than what LAUSD has been doing for decades.
