School at Vanguard of Change : Education: Vaughn Street in Pacoima hopes to experience a rejuvenation by becoming one of up to 100 ‘charter’ campuses in the state.

If Karla Groth’s dream comes true, then Vaughn Street School in Pacoima, where she has taught for the last five years, will no longer exist come July.

Instead, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center will rise like an educational phoenix out of its ashes.

Classrooms that now brim with more than 30 youngsters will be replaced by classes of two dozen--or even fewer--students. Control over funds will be exercised wholly by the campus staff. A top-down form of school management will be supplanted by a plan to distribute power among teachers, administrators and parents.

And Groth and her colleagues, who have long felt thwarted by a central bureaucracy that seems to shackle them with burdensome rules and regulations, will experience a rejuvenation through Vaughn’s new status as a largely self-regulating “charter” school.

“It would let me do as an educator what I can’t currently do,” said Groth, who teaches pre-kindergarten classes. “It’s a chance to do something for the students and serve the needs of the community, and . . . a chance for a lot of the teachers who are so frustrated, like me, to regenerate themselves and feel the energy to get back in the classroom.”

The charter school concept, embraced by President-elect Bill Clinton and approved by California lawmakers last fall, is a new idea in educational reform that allows campuses to become near-autonomous entities.

Under state legislation, up to 100 taxpayer-funded schools can apply for charter status, which would exempt them from thousands of regulations in the state Education Code. The goal of the law is to “improve pupil learning” through “different and innovative teaching methods” and to give parents “expanded choices” within the public school system.

Charter school students would still have to take a statewide standardized test, and the campus must remain non-sectarian, nonprofit and non-discriminatory in its policies. But beyond those requirements, staff members are free to be as restrictive or liberal as they wish in crafting curricula, forms of governance and standards for measuring student performance.

Teachers at Vaughn Street decided last month to draw up a charter school petition and are expected to vote on--and most likely approve--a final draft later this week. Under the law, a simple majority of the faculty must approve the petition before it can be sent for review to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The district has already received two charter proposals, one from a Westside magnet school and another from an alternative school for dropouts. Only 10 schools in a district, regardless of the district’s size, can achieve charter status.

But none of the charter applications is as ambitious or comprehensive as Vaughn Street’s--a 40-page document, plus lengthy appendages, that outlines changes in everything from class size to hiring practices to payroll duties.

“Vaughn has been trying to do this for three years,” said Assistant Supt. Sara A. Coughlin, who oversees all of the San Fernando Valley’s elementary schools. “This isn’t starting from scratch. This is . . . a next step in their overall effort to restructure their school.”

In the last few years, the school has been transformed from one of the acknowledged worst in the district to a model of innovation widely cited for its efforts to bring social as well as improved academic services to its students, who are mostly Latino and poor. Crucial to the reforms has been hundreds of thousands of dollars that the school has won in state and private grants.

It was partly the fear that special programs might be cut when the state grants ended that led some teachers to turn to the prospect of autonomy through charter status.

“One of our first concerns was once those grants are gone, all of our programs are gone, because we won’t have the blessing from the state to do things differently from what the district allows,” said first-grade teacher Annamarie Francois, one of the charter school concept’s biggest supporters at Vaughn Street.

So the school’s petition repeats much of the contents of the school’s various grant proposals, such as the establishment of a campus family center that offers parent education and provides immunization and other health services to children.

About 20 members of the Vaughn Street staff, from teachers to clerical workers, hammered out the charter proposal during three intensive work sessions held over the winter break at Principal Yvonne Chan’s home.

The petition envisions an independent school operating on a $4.6-million budget, based on per-pupil state funding and existing outside grants. According to the document, which is scored throughout with boldface type and underlining for emphasis, the new “learning center” would include classes of 27 students at most. Some classrooms would group children of different ages rather than separate them by grade level.

Teachers would form teams of four, who would plan together under the supervision of an experienced lead instructor. Instead of relying purely on tests, teachers would assess students by such methods as the use of “portfolios” of essays, compositions and projects chosen by students. Classes would offer frequent field trips to local businesses and museums, and an after-school enrichment program would allow youngsters to learn about such fields as rocketry and film.

A committee of administrators, teachers and parents would coordinate hiring. Teachers would be evaluated by their peers, and their salaries, though comparable to district levels in the first year, may be revised thereafter. A private bookkeeping company--not the school district--would administer the pay.

Health benefits for employees would initially come from the district through school payment of premiums, but the plan could change in the second year. Collective bargaining rights may transfer from present unions to newly created ones. A council composed of a majority of teachers would govern the school.

And although the campus would first contract with the district for some services, such as maintenance and security, those, too, would be subject to negotiation in succeeding years.

“It’s a phase-in,” Coughlin said. “They’re not trying to do everything in the first year.”

But even these initial moves toward autonomy have stirred concern among district officials because of thorny questions of liability that go unaddressed in the charter school legislation. Authors of the law say they left it deliberately broad to allow educators the greatest latitude in reshaping their schools, but the potential for legal mistakes leaves some in the district and at Vaughn Street concerned.

“Will what we write legally hold water? Does it make sense?” said Neal Neyer, a resource specialist teacher at Vaughn Street. “Change just for change isn’t necessarily good.”

Although Neyer originally opposed the move to draft a charter proposal, he said he is encouraged by a series of staff meetings last week during which all faculty members were invited to air their concerns and help rework troublesome passages.

For several hours, teachers haggled like a gaggle of lawyers over words and phrases they felt were unclear, misleading or simply unwise. Neyer said he would also like the petition to undergo a thorough review by Los Angeles teachers union officials, partly to ensure that none of the gains won by teachers through negotiations over the years would be jeopardized or lost.

The union has expressed reservations over the charter school legislation and advised members to “proceed with caution.” Francois said Vaughn Street would present union officials with a final draft of its petition and then take their recommendations into account.

“We’re meeting with the union so they can advise us,” she said. Also, “we’re meeting with the legal department of USC and other agencies who can give us advice. . . . We have a lot of legal minds who will be looking at this.”

Not all teachers are convinced of the benefits of becoming a charter school, however. Two have already said they will seek reassignment within the district if Vaughn Street achieves charter status, although one is willing to sign the petition so that those who remain can go forward with the charter experiment, according to school administrators.

If the faculty approves the petition, then the Los Angeles Board of Education will have 60 days to hold a public hearing and decide whether to ratify the petition. The charter would last a maximum of five years. The school board retains ultimate oversight over the campus and can revoke a charter, but only if campus officials mishandle finances or fail to meet their stated goals.

If the proposal is denied, the school has recourse to county educational authorities. Some teachers have voiced concern that the district might drag its feet to prevent their petition from being among the first 100 received by the state Board of Education, which has already begun granting charter status to schools on a first-come, first-served basis.

But Los Angeles school board President Leticia Quezada, whose constituency includes Vaughn Street, sounded a more optimistic note.

“My hope is that they can work out,” she said, “especially for schools like Vaughn who are putting in a lot of energy and schools that have already gained some success in trying to do things differently.”