ADELANTO -- One of the High Desert parents who used a state law to wrest control of their failing elementary school away from school district hands is alleging that the group that helped organize the effort offered to pay parents to promote the "parent trigger" movement nationwide."According to the financial bylaws, there was supposed to be no financial gain" for working with the Desert Trails Parent Union, recruitment coordinator Joe Morales said Thursday.
The father of two children, including a fifth-grader at Desert Trails Elementary School, he helped lead the effort for local parents to use California's parent trigger laws, which allows parents who gather sufficient signatures to wrest control of their school away from officials and, in this case, turn it over to a Hesperia charter school operator at the end of this school year.
The trouble began last fall, he said, when "Won't Back Down," a film telling a fictional story of a parent trigger effort, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, was being released. Parent Revolution, the non-profit that helped get California's parent trigger law passed in 2010, and which has helped organize all the parent trigger attempts in the state to date, helped promote the movie and the parent trigger concept in the national media.
"When 'Won't Back Down' came out, (Parent Revolution) claimed they had a group of nine people who would go