Will LAUSD Evict Special Ed Program for New Academy?
Los Angeles-Hollywood-area parents say they were not consulted about a new middle school whose student body would be drawn from whiter and wealthier schools.
Charter-law reform may have come to California, but the free-market logic of schools-of-choice programs continues to divide. So say Los Angeles public schools advocates in the wake of a November 15 announcement by L.A. Unified that it may evict the Career and Transition Center (CTC) West program and its special needs community from its Fairfax High School campus home to make way for the West Hollywood-Fairfax Academy, a proposed new public middle school catering to neighboring WeHo families. (Although West Hollywood is incorporated as its own city, its public school students belong to the L.A. Unified School District.)
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For CTC West’s supporters, who rallied last week with protests and an online petition, the hostile takeover attempt is so much déjà vu. A similar gambit in May by the WFHA design team that targeted the campus of West Hollywood’s K-8 Laurel Span School was only beaten back by Laurel families and teachers two weeks ago. In both instances, defenders complain, WHFA’s prime mover, LAUSD District 4 board member Nick Melvoin, neglected to reach out to, or invite input from, the area schools that will be most impacted by a new middle school, whose student body would be drawn from whiter and wealthier West Hollywood schools. “District 4 is very famous for asking for forgiveness, not for permission,” Laurel activist parent Steve Veninga quipped to Learning Curves. “They don’t really come to the community until it’s too late.”
Melvoin admitted by email that the WHFA birthing process was far from perfect or inclusive. Which is why he had recommended to the school board that it postpone a final vote on WFHA from December 3 to sometime next year — a pause, he said, “to reflect on and address the voices of additional stakeholders, who only recently learned of the proposed new [middle school] pathway into Fairfax High.”
But the BD-4 member stood by his conviction that the WHFA enjoyed strong support from WeHo elementary parents, and that a new middle school remained the best bet to accommodate some of what he estimates to be the 85 to 95 percent of WeHo middle schoolers whose parents pass up LAUSD for private or charter middle schools.
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