Grants Accelerate Plans for New Type of School : Education: Corporate donations of $237,000 pave the way for South-Central campus that will have some autonomy from the district. Curriculum is designed to boost achievement of at-risk students.

Thanks to $237,000 in corporate grants, local educators are within sight of their goal to open a radically new elementary school this fall that will receive public funds but be financially and academically independent from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The Accelerated School, as it will be called, will be one of the first storefront public schools in California, offering regular classes at a leased site in South-Central Los Angeles or in Watts.

In addition to a $207,000 grant from Wells Fargo Bank, the Weingart Foundation has pledged $30,000 to help pay for the school’s start-up costs. The 180-student school will receive normal per-pupil funding from the district plus money for special programs.

“This is the largest grant at the kindergarten-through-12th-grade level that Wells Fargo has ever given, so it’s a very significant grant,” said Tim Hanlon, vice president of the San Francisco-based bank. “We were impressed with this proposal because the money will not go toward just bricks and mortar. It will be incorporating the whole idea of school reform.”

The school’s curriculum will be patterned after the Accelerated Schools Model, which was developed at Stanford University and is designed to boost the achievement of at-risk students by requiring all students to learn the same material. The model is being used at 99th Street School in South-Central, where the Accelerated School’s organizers now teach.

“The instructional model is certainly sound,” said Joseph Rao, administrative coordinator of the Los Angeles school district’s office of school reform. “But you need a lot of business acumen to run a school, and you also need a lot of energy to attract parents and make the school a success.”

Like the nine other charter schools the Board of Education has approved, the Accelerated School will have considerable autonomy. Some schools have hired new teachers, set different salaries, developed innovative curricula and adopted their own rules and budgets.

“We’re taking school reform a step further,” said Johnathan Williams, a teacher at 99th Street Elementary and co-director of the Accelerated School. “We’re so overcrowded that educators need to look at new alternatives. We need schools in churches, businesses and storefronts.”

The school board gave conditional approval to the Accelerated School charter proposal in November, but would not give its final approval until the school’s organizers raised $200,000. The school board must approve the school site before it can open.

“The district required us to have $200,000, and now we have more than that,” Williams said. “We also have a number of other grants that we’re waiting on. If we can come up with $300,000, we’ll be ready to open in September.”

Under the 1992 Charter School Act, which took effect last year, as many as 100 schools in California and 10 in any district can achieve charter status, which continues the school’s public funding but frees it from state and local education regulations.

Two other charter schools in California are operating at independent sites. Lazear Middle School in Oakland, now known as the Jingletown School, operates out of a church basement, while a dropout charter program, Options for Youth, holds classes at a leased building in San Bernardino County.

“The idea of the charter school is to experiment and to see all kinds of stuff,” said David Patterson, an education consultant with the state Department of Education. “This is about inventing new ways to educate.”