First California public school falls to “parent trigger law” - World Socialist Web Site

First California public school falls to “parent trigger law” - World Socialist Web Site:

First California public school falls to “parent trigger law”

By Jack Cody 
14 August 2013

Elementary school students in the small California town of Adelanto came back to a different school in late July than they left at the end of the last school year. Over the truncated summer break, Desert Trails Elementary School, the neighborhood public school, was taken over by a charter and re-opened under a new name, Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. The completed conversion makes Desert Trails Elementary the first public school in California to fall to the controversial Parent Trigger law.

Under the so-called Parent Trigger law, first passed by the California state legislature in 2010, a group or organization gathering signatures from 51 percent of parents can seize an underperforming public school and transfer control to a private operator, called a charter. The campaign to convert Desert Trails began in 2011, when an organization called Parent Revolution began circulating petitions.

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Although Parent Revolution claimed to have gathered the requisite number of signatures, their effort stalled in court when a group of concerned local parents successfully challenged the validity of most of the signatures. Many original signers asked to have their signatures rescinded, claiming Parent Revolution had misled them into signing something that they did not understand (see: Adelanto, California: Parents defeat effort to privatize local school).

Despite the fact that the rescinded signatures brought the total well