#AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal

The Building Boom Continues Despite A Loss Of Students

Why isn’t the LAUSD performing its regulatory obligations as Charter schools continue to build in an area already saturated with classrooms?

Photo by Erika Fletcher on Unsplash

“The bill would authorize a chartering authority to deny renewal of a charter school upon a finding that the school is demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition due to substantial fiscal or governance factors, or is not serving all pupils who wish to attend, as specified.”

– AB 1505

Decades of changing demographics have left public schools and charters competing for a share of the shrinking school-age population. This shift was predicted by the LAUSD years before it occurred and should have resulted in dramatic changes to how many new facilities the District planned to build. Instead, Monica Garcia led efforts to greatly expand the number of classrooms available in Los Angeles.

Perhaps by design, Garcia’s building spree has left charter schools with an opportunity to claim “empty “space on District campuses using PROP-39. At one school I visited during my 2017 campaign in BD2, the campus appeared to be built with a separate entrance for a charter school. The waste of taxpayer money was not an accident.

Over 15 years into the demographic shift, the use of scarce education funding to build more capacity has not stopped. A tour of a neighborhood near the intersection of North Vermont and West 1st Street near Korea Town provides an example.

Before charter schools, this small area had two campuses: Virgil Middle School, which was built in 1914, and Frank del Amo Elementary School…