LAUSD School Board President Jackie Goldberg, seen here at a ceremony Monday, May 22, 2023, at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, pushed the district’s new policy of co-locating charter schools on district campuses. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
The Los Angeles Unified School District board voted last month to create a new policy that prohibits public charter schools from sharing space with other public schools at more than 300 district campuses, known in LAUSD as co-location.
An obvious question arises: what is the board afraid of? eyelids?
“We have consistently maintained that this policy is a shameful and discriminatory attack on public charter school students, which the district shares responsibility for settling,” said Myrna Castrejon, president of the California Charter Schools Association. “CCSA was left with no option but to take legal action to enforce the rights of charter school students to reasonably equivalent facilities from the district under Proposition 39.”
The fact is that charter schools’ ability to access public school campuses — and what we’re talking about is public — is guaranteed by California law. Still, a narrow 4-3 majority of board members want to ban new charters from locating at an unknown number of LA campuses with special needs programs.
LA law firm Latham & Watkins wrote the board in support of the charter, saying “public school facilities must be equitably distributed among students in all public schools, including charter schools.” The firm says the policy “prioritizing public school students who attend district schools over public school students who attend charter public schools violates” California law.
it does not matter. It just seems punitive. School Board President Jackie Goldberg, a longtime anti-charter, said the new rules would protect, for example, traditional high schools from competing for students with charter high schools that were housed on traditional elementary properties.
The solution to this supposed problem? Improve your traditional schools, LAUSD and win the competition.
Instead of legislating away competition, put the interests of students above all else. Create budgets that are about student achievement, not just about appeasing big-spending unions or protecting bloated bureaucracies. You know, do something other than what LAUSD has been doing for decades.
