Teachers Learn of Obstacles in Bid for Charter Status : Education: Collective bargaining, staffing and liability issues are raised over a Pacoima school’s plan.

A week after delivering their charter petition to Los Angeles Unified School District officials, teachers at Vaughn Street Elementary School in Pacoima got their first glimpse Thursday of some of the obstacles they may have to surmount in their bid to extricate themselves from district control.

At an afternoon meeting, Joseph Rao of the district’s office of instruction told faculty members and parents that officials are now reviewing knotty questions of collective bargaining, staffing, liability and the nature of the tenant-owner relationship between the school and the district if Vaughn Street becomes a state-designated “charter school.”

Those concerns emerged from a meeting Wednesday of district department heads and others who have been charged with examining charter proposals before the applications are presented to the Board of Education, Rao said. He assured his listeners, however, that officials were interested in seeing the petition succeed and would work with the school in resolving any problems.

“We want to see . . . you present to the board a package that they can say, ‘You’ve answered all the questions we have, you’ve looked at the criteria, and we’re going to move on with it,’ ” Rao told the group that assembled in the campus library.

Last week, Vaughn Street officials presented the district with an ambitious proposal that would allow teachers to take control of the curriculum and nearly all aspects of campus operation. Supporters of the petition described it as a way for them to reduce class sizes and best serve the needs of Vaughn’s primarily poor students.

Thursday’s meeting represented the district’s first response to the proposal. One major concern identified by district officials centered on the school’s unionization plan, which calls for all employees to be represented by United Teachers-Los Angeles.

That provision, Rao said, might be challenged on legal grounds by the various bargaining units that represent administrators, aides and clerical staff.

More worrisome to some Vaughn Street officials, however, were questions regarding use of the school’s physical plant. Although staff members said their plan is to “borrow” the facilities rent-free as a charter school, teacher Stanley Stern expressed concern that the district might insist on establishing a costly rental agreement.

“The district can say, ‘Sure, you want a charter, but you need to sign an agreement and give us $3 million to lease the buildings,’ ” Stern said after the meeting. “At that point, there’s no point in going on with it. . . . Who’s going to come up with that kind of money?”

School officials, including Stern, are now scheduled to meet with the district’s charter committee next week to answer concerns.

Under the state charter school law, which went into effect last month, the local school board has the first formal say over whether a charter application is acceptable. If the board denies the request, the petitioning school can appeal to county education authorities.

The legislation allows up to 100 schools from throughout the state and 10 in a single district to write their own rules and be relieved from adhering to local and state regulations, which fill several thousand pages in the massive state education code.

In Los Angeles, three campuses in addition to Vaughn Street have submitted proposals, including a magnet school on the Westside and two alternative schools for dropouts.

The Vaughn Street faculty last week voted by a sizable majority to approve the school’s petition, a hefty document representing several weeks of discussion and negotiation among staff members over such details as governance structure and discipline procedures.

By law, the school board must convene a public hearing on the application within 30 days of its submission and make a ruling within 60 days.

9 SCHOOLS GET CHARTER: A3