Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Reform Remains Goal for Teachers Despite Charter School Defeat : Education: Highland High instructors haven’t decided how to proceed after trustees denied proposal.

They won’t be able to abandon the rules entirely, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t looking for new ways to play the game.

Educational reform remains a goal for Highland High School teachers, who worked about a year toward the creation of a charter school on their campus only to have their plan rejected.

Three of the five Antelope Valley Union High School District trustees voted last month against the charter school proposal, which would have allowed Highland High to operate outside the constraints of the state education code. Trustees Wilda Andrejcik and Bill Olenick supported the proposal.

Glen Horst, head of the charter committee and a Highland High English teacher, said reform supporters at the school have yet to determine how to proceed now that their charter plan was denied.

“We’re not really exactly sure,” he said. “We’re kind of wrestling that out for ourselves.”

The bottom line is working toward educational reform, Horst said. Now it’s a matter of figuring out how to get there. “We don’t have a focus now,” he said.

A Senate bill signed into law in late 1992 by Gov. Pete Wilson allows for the creation of 100 charter schools in the state. Since the law took effect Jan. 1, 1993, 48 charter schools have been approved.

The intent of the bill by Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara) was to give schools the freedom to reinvent themselves. With authority to abandon the dictates of the education code, the charter schools are free to concentrate on education programs tailored to the needs of their students. Of course, such schools must produce measurable results.

Teachers at Highland High, the first in the Antelope Valley to propose a charter school, had envisioned creating a learning environment based on the “needs of students in the 21st Century.”

The heart of the proposal, supporters said, involved an effort to “develop self-motivated, competent, life-long learners.”

The first year of the five-year charter would have been a development year with the governance of the school to remain unchanged, Horst said. The charter was to have been implemented in the second year with an elected council of students, teachers, staff members and community members as the decision makers for the school.

Much of the concepts in the 18-page proposal, he said, were based on “Second to None: A Vision of the New California High School,” a 1992 report prepared by the California High School Task Force that laid out a vision for reform strategy.

A majority of high school district board members failed to support the charter plan, in large part because of a two-page letter from the general counsel at Bakersfield-based Schools Legal Service.

Signed by Frank J. Fekete, the letter states: “ . . . the charter proposal still fails to address many of the specifics that must be determined before the school can begin operation.” Fekete cited items such as management of the school, fiscal control, curriculum and liability as not being detailed enough.

The letter concludes: “ . . . I think there are good reasons to delay approval until further development work is completed.”

Horst said the charter committee went through “every hoop that was conceived” before putting the proposal before the board of trustees for a vote.

“In truth there was no reason to fear this proposal on any level,” he said. “People who claimed there weren’t enough details don’t have a good structural understanding of the process approach.”

The charter committee considered appealing the decision to the Los Angeles County Board of Education, as allowed in the legislation, but decided against it.

“The year’s tough enough,” Horst said. “We don’t need to belabor this anymore. It was a long, arduous haul doing what we did.”

Although the denial of the charter proposal was a letdown, committee members believe their effort is having some benefit.

“The ripple effect is already being seen,” Horst said. “Things are happening at other schools that we’ve been talking about (for) a year.”

Trustee Andrejcik, who supported the proposal, also believes that despite its defeat the charter plan will have an impact.

“I see the ideas that went into the planning of that could still be incentives for restructuring, which we need in the high schools,” she said. “We’re working on some new ideas (such as) curriculum changes and realignment of curriculum along vocational lines.”

Regardless of how it happens, she said, “What we need to do more than anything else is spark in these students a purpose for education so they’ll take more interest and devote themselves more to what they’re engaged in.”