Transfers Blocked by Charter School : Education: Threat of legal action stops L.A. district’s plans to reassign Edutrain dropout facility’s enrollment of 230. Students remain anxious.

Threats of legal action by directors of a charter school for dropouts abruptly stopped the Los Angeles Unified School District’s first attempt to close the troubled Downtown campus Tuesday, but did little to assuage student fears.

In the wake of Monday’s school board vote to shut the independent school, a group of district administrators and teachers arrived at Edutrain Charter School at 8 a.m. Tuesday, planning to transfer out about 230 students. But they were headed off in the front office with news of the expected litigation.

“Right now, we’re on hold,” said Dick Browning, director of high schools for the district and leader of the group. “We don’t want the kids to get hurt in an adult problem.”

Worry and anger seeped into the Grand Avenue school’s classrooms and corridors anyway. Many of Edutrain’s students landed there after trying--and failing at--several other public schools. .

“I only have 35 credits--that’s half of a freshman--and I’m 18,” said Dereck Figueroa, who began at Edutrain this fall and is on probation for a bus-tagging arrest. “I’ve been to at least 10 schools all around. I don’t think any other schools would accept me and, if they did, I couldn’t get along.”

Edutrain President Winston Doby carried word of the planned litigation into a morning math class, where he pleaded with glum students to keep coming to school.

“Don’t give up, and tell your friends to continue coming to school too,” he said. “We’re going to fight for you because we believe you deserve the opportunity that this school is giving you.”

Only one youth raised his hand when Doby asked for questions, but he voiced the common concern: What would become of him if the school ultimately closes?

Doby said it was concern for the students’ fate that led school directors to vote to file suit next week against the Los Angeles Unified School District. In an action that marked the first charter school failure in the nation, the district decided Monday evening to shut Edutrain because it had become mired in debt and record-keeping problems.

“Our goal is to ensure that the school continues to operate until this issue is resolved, so the students don’t have to transfer somewhere else and then transfer back,” Doby said.

Doby, who helped found the school in July, 1993, and is also a UCLA vice chancellor, said Edutrain will challenge the closure on grounds that there was inadequate proof that the school had violated its charter contract with the district.

He said the school will ask a judge to issue a temporary restraining order and force Los Angeles Unified to continue funding Edutrain while the suit is pending.

Los Angeles Unified officials said they halted plans to begin transferring students Tuesday to see what happens in court, but they maintain that state charter law is on their side.

Legislation approved in 1992 allows 100 charter schools--10 of them in Los Angeles--to operate largely free of outside control. But, local school districts must approve the five-year charter contracts and have the right to cancel them if their stated goals are not reached.

“If (Edutrain officials) don’t want us in the picture at this time, that’s their wish,” said Bill Rivera, spokesman for district Supt. Sid Thompson. “But what the board did last night was final.”

The board acted on Thompson’s recommendation to revoke the charter, based on staff reports that the school’s accounting and roll-taking procedures were inadequate, even though the district had spent weeks trying to help correct the errors.

Board members also were influenced by allegations that while teachers lacked books and supplies, administrators treated themselves to expensive retreats and a housing allowance for the principal.

Doby has acknowledged the past problems, but claims that many of them have been solved since the school underwent an administrative overhaul in early November. The school had asked the board for a three-month extension of its charter contract to enable it to complete a reorganization plan, pay off some of its about $1-million debt and continue its classes for troubled teens.

The very things that brought teen-agers to Edutrain in numbers peaking at more than 500 last spring may make it difficult to find alternative programs for them--arrest records, gang affiliations, repeated academic failures, babies.

Irene Gonzalez, 21, dropped out of school nearly four years ago when she became pregnant. She tried to return to her regular high school after her baby’s birth, but was told that at 18 she was too old. She tried to find other programs that provided child care, but was told waiting lists were too long. She started working with an independent study program, but it closed up shop.

“This was the only one for me,” said Gonzalez, whose 3-year-old son spends most days in Edutrain’s on-site child-care center. “Now they want to take it away too. What a great city.”

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Edutrain’s student body is two-thirds Latino, one-third African American. About 85% of the students have arrest records; 15% are on probation and reporting to a resident probation officer.

Teachers there estimate that dozens of gangs are represented at the school, yet its walls have remained remarkably graffiti-free and there have been no serious gang fights.

Gang members who attend Edutrain say it is viewed as neutral turf, the first example of that many of them have ever experienced and a tribute to the painstaking efforts of teachers and staff to resolve conflicts peacefully.

“At other schools the gang thing was always going on, people saying it was their neighborhood and all . . . and I have a temper,” said Undra Williams, 17, who came to Edutrain nine months ago after an unfocused stint with a home-study program and several stints in juvenile detention.

“Here, I don’t have to worry about no gangs,” Williams said. “And the teachers sit down and talk with you like you’re a real person. . . . I can’t go back to a regular school.”

But Browning, the district high school director, expressed confidence that transfers could be arranged for all of Edutrain’s students. “Kids do get attached to their school and don’t want to leave it, and that’s the kind of kid we would expect at Edutrain,” Browning said. “But we probably have more alternatives than they’re aware of.”