TogetherApart: Co-location And Collaboration Constrained By Pandemic
In the wake of pandemic, priorities are rearranged.
Prior to schools’ closing in March, 2020, several LAUSD school sites were facing the prospect of sharing their campus with a charter school next year. These forced “colocations” are directed by the District when a “public charter school” requests public space for its operations under legal mandate from a voter initiative passed in 2000.
Proposition 39 addressed schools facilities issues by lowering the passage threshold for local school bond measures from 67% to 55%. With over $10m of vested interest from ubiquitous charter privateers Ann & John Doerr, John Walton and Reed Hastings, the initiative established a facilities payload for the charter industry. Along for the ride was the ideological position that charter schools had the right to request of the public District “reasonably equivalent conditions” for operations. The specifics for calculating and granting these conditions were litigated through a series of lawsuits (2007, 2010 and 2012) inordinately taxing on the public purse in contrast with that of the billionaire-funded charter school lobby.
Charter schools are publicly funded, while simultaneously privately operated. Consequently their “public” status is arguably ambiguous and at least contentious, though even Forbes, the “defining voice of CONTINUE READING: TogetherApart: Co-location And Collaboration Constrained By Pandemic – Los Angeles Education Examiner