Foshay Junior High LEARNs to Run Without District Control

Convinced that district bureaucracy has hindered their school’s success, educators at James A. Foshay Middle School in South-Central hope to boost academic achievement by reinventing education in their own vision.

As one of 34 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District participating in the LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) reform project, Foshay has the opportunity to incorporate the kind of sweeping changes that administrators, teachers, parents and students have always desired, but never had the authority to instigate.

“With LEARN, everybody involved is a stake-holder,” said Wayne Stevens, a teacher at Foshay and chapter president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles. “Parents must be involved, as well as teachers, the custodial staff and cafeteria workers.

“I’ve been a teacher at Foshay for 32 years, and I know I can do without all of 450 North Grand,” Stevens said, referring to the address of the district’s administrative offices.

LEARN, a privately funded coalition of business, civic and education activists, has set out to overhaul the nation’s second-largest school district by essentially liberating schools from the district’s central bureaucracy and shifting decision-making authority to the school campus. The school board approved the plan in March, despite an ongoing campaign to break apart the school district and an upcoming statewide vote on school vouchers.

One of the most distinctive features of the LEARN model is that a participating school has 85% control of its budget. It also has the freedom to develop its own curricula and the power to hire its staff.

With a $7.5-million budget, including a $1.5-million state restructuring grant, Foshay Principal Howard Lappin said the school’s staff will be looking at every item in the budget to see what stays, what goes and what needs to be added.

“The district has guidelines for everything,” Lappin said. “But LEARN schools have more flexibility. For example, we want to network computers in four of our rooms. Before, we had to call someone, write a memo, have an estimate done and then have someone come and do it. Now, we can call someone and they’ll come out tomorrow.”

Foshay teacher Debbie Laidley, who teaches 43 students in a crowded classroom, said she hopes the school’s participation in LEARN will translate into smaller class sizes for all teachers:

“Class size is a big concern. We’re looking at how we can adjust our budget to allow for more teachers even though salaries aren’t going to change.”

Foshay educators also are considering doing away with homeroom period to allow for more instructional time, and they want to change the school’s year-round schedule to three tracks instead of four. The school, at 3751 S. Harvard Blvd., has 2,150 seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders. Next year it adds sixth-graders.

“As we add sixth-graders, we won’t be able to fit everyone on four tracks,” Lappin said. “We want each track to have its own counselor, dean and administrator so each track would run like its own school. It would be like having three small schools on one campus.”

Many educators and community activists regard LEARN as a great hope for Los Angeles’ ailing school district, but it has yet to achieve widespread support. In late April, UTLA leaders voted to withhold support of the reform effort unless it incorporated more teacher rights. The union, which feared that LEARN would give more authority to principals, has requested that at least 75% of the faculty at each school agree to participate.

Although 80% of Foshay’s faculty voted in favor of the LEARN plan, Lappin said there are some teachers who are against it because they believe it threatens job security.

“Some people are afraid of it because LEARN doesn’t give us an opportunity to hide,” Lappin said. “We all have to produce, and if we don’t, the faculty and staff can write each other out.”

At this point, UTLA spokeswoman Catherine Carey said, the union neither supports nor opposes the LEARN model. It will wait for LEARN teachers to report their experiences to union leaders in the spring before pledging support for or opposition to the plan, Carey said.

This summer, principals and lead teachers from each LEARN school attended a monthlong training retreat that included two weeks at Cal Poly Pomona and two weeks at Loyola Marymount. The program, organized by UCLA’s Advanced Management Program, included lessons on budgeting, improving parental participation and leadership.

“LEARN is about everything we’re already doing,” Lappin said. “It will fit in nicely to what we have already going.”