Neighborhood Public Schools Forced to Give Up Space to Charter Schools
Neighborhood Public Schools Forced to Give Up Space to Charter Schools
Catskill Avenue Elementary, located about 14 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, is a “legacy school,” says 5th grade teacher Elizabeth Untalan.
“It’s been around for 71 years….Grandparents, great-grandparents, daughters son have all gone through our doors.”
But Untalan and many of her colleagues and neighborhood parents are worried. They believe Catskill’s deep standing in the community is endangered by the possibility that it may soon be sharing its building with the new Ganas Academy Charter School.
This is called “co-location,” one of the more unfamiliar practices behind the sector’s dramatic expansion in California. (As of 2017-18, charter schools serve almost 630,000 students in the state.)
In Los Angeles alone, more than 70 public schools have seen valuable learning and collaborative spaces appropriated by charter companies for their staff and students. Co-locations also exist or have been approved in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, and the state’s Central Valley area. The same trend has been underway in Chicago and New York.
If the co-location with Ganas goes into effect, students at Catskill could lose their library, computer lab, parent center, and rooms for counseling.
“These are the resources we pour into our children, these are the resources that raise student achievement,” Untalan told. “Why should our students have to give them up just so a charter business can expand into a community that doesn’t want it?”
How bad could it get? Some of the schools special education students and their instructors will lose their classroom and be forced to move into a closet.”
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is mobilizing its 33,000 members and parents in opposition, but Ganas is pushing ahead, undeterred by concerns over how the co-location will impact Catskill’s 522 students. Thirty percent are English language learners and 90 percent are federally subsidized under the U.S. Department of Education’s Title I program.
Education Research Report: 2019 KIDS COUNT Data Book