Change The LAUSD

“Her current scandals and controversies will continue throughout her presidency and we will make it honestly, look, it's gonna be virtually impossible for her to govern. Now, the Republicans have talked very tough and the Democrats. It's gonna be just another mess for another four years, folks. A mess. We've got to get back to work, right? I mean, we have to get back to work.”

- Donald Trump, November 5, 2016

At no other time in history have we had access to so much information. Unfortunately, even with 24-hour news channels and the Internet, our news media provides us with very little depth. As an example, you probably heard plenty in the past week about trade wars, White House staffing turmoil and a possible summit with North Korea. But how many times did the talking heads and Internet pundits mention the following aspects of the stories:

“I think it is important that parents know what is going on.”

- Scott Schmerelson, LAUSD Board Member

Under the current rules of the LAUSD, “a charter school [is] required to notify all parents, guardians and teachers in writing within 72 hours when the District issues a Notice of Violations...and that the notification include the District’s rationale for the action”. However, no such notification was made after a Notice of Violation was issued to Granada Hills Charter High School on March 3, 2017, detailing unapproved alterations to the District-owned campus that “were a risk to the health and safety of [the school’s] students, staff, and other individuals.”  The Charter School Division staff did request “that they share that information with families because it was significant”, but the school’s administration refused to do so. To date parents and guardians have not been notified of the dangers existing in their children’s school and no formal action has been taken against Granada for breaking this rule.

On February 20, 2018, the LAUSD School Board put the proposed Holding GHCHS Accountable to Their Charter on the agenda of their Committee of the Whole meeting. The following is the written statement that I provided to the Board:

Honorable LAUSD Board Members:

This is Chanda Smith. She was an LAUSD student with special education needs who fell through cracks in the system. In 1993, lawyers from the ACLU filed a class action suit under her name. The result of that suit is a consent decree that the District is still struggling to comply with 22 years after it was signed.

Around the same time that Ms. Smith’s lawyers were filing their paperwork, California began its experiment with charter schools. Since charters claimed that this would give parents more choice, the LAUSD embraced these new types of schools and became the largest charter authorizer in the country. Did those in charge consider the effect on students like Chanda Smith? Were these students given more choices or were they left behind?

“A gun has killed 17 of my fellow classmates. A gun has traumatized my friends. My entire school, traumatized from this tragedy. This could have been prevented.”

- Kyra

If the shooter in Parkland, Florida had been named Mohamad, we can be sure that Donald Trump would have immediately taken to Twitter in an effort to use the tragedy as proof for the need of his Muslim ban. If instead, it was Jesus or Jose, the subject of those Tweets would have been his border wall. Instead, the killer was just a run of the mill domestic terrorist who used a gun to kill 17 people in a high school. Therefore, we will be told to offer hope and prayers and ignore that this was the eighth school shooting in this new year. To do otherwise politicizes the tragedy and disrespects the victims and survivors and their families.

Bullshit.

“It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

- Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

Granada Hills Charter High School has used its student-run newspaper to announce that its “Devonshire campus will open as a transitional kindergarten through eighth-grade school starting in the fall semester of 2019.” The article declared that “there is excitement from the community for this new change” but did not provide quotes from anyone in the community. In fact, Granada’s Executive Director, Brian Bauer, was the only person quoted by the author, which gave the article the feel of a press release carefully constructed by the school’s administration. While pushing Bauer’s agenda, it did nothing to address the many consequences for the surrounding community and the student body of Granada.

"The recent defeat of legislation that would make charter schools accountable and transparent, AB 1478, established definitively that charter schools are private businesses, not public schools.

All public schools must comply with the Brown Act, the California Public Records Act (PRA), or the Political Reform Act of 1974, which make their spending and operations transparent to the public. The charter lobby insists that there are merely bureaucratic burdens and that charters must be free to operate without any public transparency, as private businesses do.

Carl Petersen writes about this issue here."

“It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this act to do both of the following:
(a) Ensure that charter school governance is transparent.
(b) Ensure that monitoring and oversight of charter schools are conducted to protect the public interest.”

-California AB 1478

As recipients of public funding, one would expect that organizations running charter schools would be subjected to the same open government regulations that other government entities, including elected school boards, must follow. While it is not always convenient to conform to the Brown Act, the California Public Records Act (PRA), or the Political Reform Act of 1974, these provisions of California law help ensure transparency to the taxpayers.  Unfortunately, under the state Education Code, the charter industry is currently exempt from following these requirements, leaving parents of students in these schools blind to their operations.

“choice

noun  \ ˈchȯis \

2 : power of choosing”

- Merriam-Webster

More than 19 months have passed since the LAUSD issued a Notice To Cure to Granada Hills Charter High School, demanding that they abide by their charter and give “first preference for enrollment...to students residing in the former attendance area.” As lawyers wallow through the “formal ‘dispute resolution’ procedure,” students are forced to attend classes supervised by uncredentialed advisors in buildings that need to “be razed given [their] age and condition.” In at least one case, their actions violated the education code which mandates that “students with special needs who wish to participate in independent study to have an individualized education program (IEP) that provides for independent study.”

“It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead”

- Nightwish

In order to prevent charter schools from discouraging parents from enrolling children with special education needs, the Office of the Independent Monitor required that the District prohibit them from asking for any special education paperwork prior to enrollment. As originally pointed out in a Uniform Complaint filed on December 21, 2016, Granada Hills Charter High School (GHCHS) has blatantly violated this prohibition for years without any intervention from the LAUSD Charter School Division, the LAUSD School Board, or the State Department of Education. In fact, as the school enrolls students for the next school year, it still requests prohibited documents on three different pages in the enrollment section of its website.

“Why are we having all these people from shitho**** countries come here?”

- Donald Trump

Before the public ever thought that Donald Trump would run for President, he “bought space in multiple New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the five black and Hispanic teens accused of raping a jogger in Central Park.” To this day, he still believes that they “were guilty, despite being officially exonerated by DNA evidence” and the fact that someone else has confessed to the crime. To begin his campaign, Trump descended an escalator before a gaggle of paid “supporters” to announce that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems”. Unfortunately, it was not poverty or joblessness that he was concerned about but his false accusation that they were involved disproportionately in drugs, crime, and rape. During the campaign, he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. After Heather Heyer was killed for protesting against white-supremacists in Charlottesville, Trump went off script to declare “that were very fine people, on both sides.” He described any NFL player who would dare to respectfully protest police brutality by kneeling during the National Anthem as a “son of a bitch”. Are we really surprised that he thinks that only white people from rich countries deserve the opportunity to immigrate to our country?