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Who Is Watching Out For The Safety Of Children In Charter Schools?
The LAUSD School Board approves renewals of three KIPP charter schools ignoring the chain’s attempt to build a school on a toxic waste site.
“California’s charter public schools are safe places to learn and work.”
– California Charter School Association (CCSA)
In 2019 the California Charter School Association (CCSA) detailed the “greatest threats” facing its publicly funded private schools. If children were the focus of this trade group, problems like inexperienced teachers, low-performing schools, or preventing theft of public funds would have been on the list. Instead, the CCSA mainly focused on its need to repel efforts to make its schools accountable for the public funds they receive. Most outrageous was its opposition to requiring “charters to comply with [the] Field Act,” a law passed after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake when 230 schools collapsed. It mandates “rigorous oversight of the construction of every public school” and ensures that California schools, according to earthquake expert Lucy Jones, are “the safest buildings in the world.”