Last Tuesday, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) filed a lawsuit against LAUSD for the district’s charter co-location policy. This policy potentially mediates or complicates the thorny implementation of Proposition 39 and the contested practice of co-location in resource-strapped communities. Prop. 39, a state law, stipulates that public school facilities should be shared equally by charter and non-charter schools alike. If non-charter schools have unused space on their campus, they should share that space with a charter school. However critics of the implementation of Prop. 39 have argued that the law has been interpreted beyond the mandated “reasonably equivalent” accommodations of charter schools. 

Schools like Daniel Webster Middle and Marina Del Rey Middle, currently co-located with charters, are newly protected by the LAUSD policy. Countless Westside schools have similarly been protected from future charter incursions, which supporters say protects marginalized students.

The LAUSD policy on co-location, approved on March 19, offers guidelines for co-location practices, including the stipulation that new co-location will not be approved with district schools designated as priority schools, community schools, or Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) schools. An estimated 346 of the 850 campuses in the district fall under one of these designations. 

While only 50 schools in LAUSD currently share facilities with charter schools under a Prop. 39 Facility Use Agreement, the CCSA argues, “Given the district’s plummeting student enrollment, it makes no sense to remove a wide range of schools from consideration for charter schools.” Enrollment rates have dropped for LAUSD and charter schools across the board, and some charters have even been ordered to pay back the district for resources they received for enrollment estimates that never came to fruition. The CCSA’s lawsuit is just one battle in the greater struggle within Los Angeles surrounding public education.

The past two decades have seen enormous shifts in funding and regulation of public education. Across the country, charters formed a significant bloc that wielded influence and in extreme cases, completely replaced public school districts. In Los Angeles, the CCSA has previously taken the LAUSD to court over its adherence to Prop. 39 and won. But the CCSA has a stronger adversary this time around. 

With anti-charter members in the majority on the LAUSD Board, and a teacher’s union a year on from a historic victory, the CCSA has fewer allies than it once enjoyed.

The CCSA names United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) as the force behind the anti-charter sentiment. Though the teacher’s union isn’t a party in the case, the lawsuit devotes pages to UTLA’s influence on the board, claiming the union has fostered an “adversarial political nature” and “misguided animus” towards charters. Last year, UTLA won a new contract with the LAUSD after 8 months of bargaining and a 3-day strike. Their contract won increased salaries, funding for BSAP and community schools, and an agreement to convert available unused LAUSD facilities into housing. Their contract also included a new policy to make the co-location process more transparent by having UTLA representatives present during individual school assessments and approvals.

In a statement released Wednesday, UTLA called the CCSA’s lawsuit “anti-democratic” and reaffirmed their stance on co-location: “All students deserve a space to thrive, and overcrowding our already resource-limited public schools has had a detrimental effect on both public and charter students”. They noted that marginalized students were more likely to be impacted by co-location.

One of the campuses potentially affected by the LAUSD policy is the Westside’s Daniel Webster Middle. In 2017, as charter schools were rapidly amassing political power and funding in Los Angeles, Webster became a testing ground for Prop. 39.

In 2017 Webster was already home to one charter school, Magnolia Science Academy 4. But it was then assigned a second charter to occupy its campus, Citizens of the World Mar Vista (CWC). Both charters have multiple schools in Southern California. Parents and teachers at Webster didn’t welcome the arrival of the second charter, citing concerns of overcrowding, labor protections, and the resources that would be taken from a middle school experiencing a renaissance. Webster had just opened a new magnet program and anticipated higher enrollment the following year. 

The Webster community circulated a petition to stop the second co-location on Webster’s campus. The petition cites concern over the “segregation of students,” the loss of critical educational spaces, the tax on hard-working school employees, and CWC’s inability to meet its purported social responsibility. While CWC’s stated mission was to serve communities of all backgrounds, their student population at the time was majority white and had small populations of English learning and low-income students compared, the petition said, to public schools like Webster. The petition continues “We believe that while the original intent of charter schools – to develop innovative approaches to educating our youth – was a noble one, in practice, they have served to re-segregate our schools and do damage to traditional public schools and the students they serve.”

Community push-back did not stop the second charter from joining Webster’s campus. 

Since 2017, LAUSD has launched programs to ameliorate district-wide woes. In 2021, the Black Student Achievement Plan was launched to provide resources to schools to better support their Black students. Daniel Webster has participated in this program. According to the new LAUSD policy, Webster is no longer eligible for a third co-location assignment. The charters that currently share its facilities would potentially be relocated elsewhere if they significantly expanded their enrollment and resource needs. 

While the LAUSD Board says the new policy will have little effect on current charter arrangements, the CCSA disagrees. They argue that relocating current charters or splitting charters between multiple campuses would have a detrimental effect on their “disproportionately Black, low-income and English learners.” While charters like CWC have achieved a student population more reflective of their community, with demographic data closer to Webster’s, some co-located charters don’t come close. 

Marina Del Rey Middle is a BSAP school and a priority school, one of 100 the district has flagged for special measures to improve the school’s general performance. The middle school has shared its campus with Goethe International School since 2009. In 2010, a request from Goethe to expand to accept middle school students was denied. The denial was based in part on the fact that Goethe’s school is majority white, with low populations of English learners, low-income students, and disabled students. Marina Del Rey Middle’s student body, by comparison, is 58 percent Latino, 35 percent Black, 81 percent economically disadvantaged, and 23 percent disabled. The denial of Goethe’s expansion predates LAUSD’s co-location policy by more than a decade, but the criteria used are nearly the same.

Marina Del Rey Middle has fought Goethe’s expansion attempts ever since. In 2019, community members in Marina Del Rey spoke out against the “resource theft and segregation” occurring due to the co-location with Goethe. One teacher spoke out on the loss of a particular classroom to Goethe. The teacher said, “Don’t take our spaces, they’re crucial… You’ve taken this room, without consent. The principal didn’t even know that you’ve taken this room.”

Another detractor of Goethe said, “The kids that really need the services here are marginalized”. While LAUSD and CCSA prepare for court, public schools will continue negotiating and advocating for space and funding.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker  on openverse