Teachers Delay Vote on ‘Charter’ School Bid : Education: Faculty and parents continue to discuss the proposal, which would remove the Pacoima campus from the L.A. district’s control.

A vote by teachers at Vaughn Street School in Pacoima to remove the campus from Los Angeles school district control was postponed Thursday as faculty members and parents continued to hammer out--and sometimes spar over--details of the breakaway proposal.

Facing thorny issues of collective bargaining, staffing, finances and governance, campus officials put off until next week a vote on whether Vaughn should become a “charter” school.

Under the state’s charter school law that took effect Jan. 1, public schools can continue to receive state educational funding yet stand exempt from state and district educational guidelines, becoming largely self-regulating bodies.

Instructors at Vaughn Street also wanted to give the teachers union--which regards the charter school concept with uncertainty--time to review their charter petition before they decide whether to submit it to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education by the end of the month.

The 40-page document spells out what the elementary school’s goals and operational procedures would be as one of the state’s 100 charter schools.

Officials with United Teachers-Los Angeles “know we’re under time constraints,” said Stephanie Moore, Vaughn Street’s union representative and one of the leaders of the move to draft a charter proposal. “But they don’t want to rush so that we don’t end up messing ourselves up” and jeopardizing the benefits that the union has won in the past.

The state board of education has said it will accept charter applications on a first-come, first-served basis, and advocates at Vaughn Street are scrambling to get their application in soon.

The Los Angeles school board must first ratify the petition before it can be sent to Sacramento.

“We want it before the board by the 28th,” Moore said, referring to the Los Angeles board. But, she added, “we’re going to see what will happen these next few days” as staff and parents attempt to resolve differences between faculty and parents and among the teachers themselves in recent days.

In a series of long and occasionally heated meetings, teachers, administrators and parents have been dealing with issues that, if settled unsatisfactorily, could threaten the easy passage some had expected for the proposal.

Approval at the school level requires a simple majority vote of teachers.

It is still unclear how the school would be governed. The first draft of the petition called for the creation of a central management council, with teachers making up half the membership and the other half split between parents and administrators.

But some parents have pressed for greater representation, and on Thursday, school staff and parents agreed on a council of 20 members, nine of whom would be teachers, Principal Yvonne Chan said.

Teachers have also wrestled with staffing questions, particularly how to reckon seniority to bilingual teachers, who now can take precedence over more experienced monolingual colleagues when instructors are shifted or displaced.

About 90% of Vaughn Street’s students are Latino, most of them with limited English skills.

That issue was resolved this week by giving precedence to teachers with the most years of service.

Other concerns include how to establish oversight and accountability over the school’s projected $4.6-million budget and how staff members would be allowed to unionize--whether through existing agencies such as UTLA or newly created groups.