Program’s Future in Doubt as Alternative Schools Close

Brother Modesto Leon closed the last of his full-scale alternative school centers Friday, leaving the once-acclaimed program hanging by a thread.

Two of the centers will begin operations next week with county-approved teachers, but Leon believes that the program model he carefully designed--with multiple instructors in each classroom--faces an uncertain future.

“The light at the end of the tunnel has now grown dark,” Leon said. “The model that worked so well will have to be put on hold until we can get funding.”

Leon staged a series of news conferences across Los Angeles County on Friday, calling it a “day of mourning.”

“It’s a sad day for all of us,” said Benjamin Ventura, a teacher at the program’s Pacoima school. “The real victims are the students. I’ll land on my feet, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

Over the last quarter of a century, Leon’s Soledad Enrichment Action has provided instruction for thousands of high-risk students, some who were on criminal probation and others who had been expelled from public high schools.

The validity of the school’s five-year contract with Los Angeles County Office of Education was publicly questioned in May when state officials reviewed Leon’s application for charter school status, which would give him more autonomy to run his program.

In September the county terminated its contract with the program, which at that time served 850 students at 16 centers, after the California Department of Education found that it violated state regulations. Among its violations, the nonprofit group had hired teachers and aides who were not county employees, taught students in seismically unsafe buildings, and had been erroneously funded as an independent study program.

There was no allegation of intentional wrongdoing, and Leon complained that he had been misled by the county office of education, which oversees such alternative education programs.

Leon said a team of instructors for each classroom is essential to working effectively with high-risk students and that he had used lower-cost private instructors, instead of county employees, for years.

Under Leon’s model, in addition to the classroom teacher, other instructors taught computer and job skills, parenting skills for pregnant teenagers, and provided counseling for students and their families.

After the September funding cutoff, Leon remained hopeful as he negotiated with education officials and applied for charter school status, a move backed by county and state officials.

He closed eight of the program’s 16 sites immediately but continued to operate eight centers by using $300,000 in reserve funds, a combination of remaining county funds and private donations.

But on Friday, he shut down the last eight centers when those funds had been depleted. Those centers served 180 high school students.

The county is phasing Leon’s centers into the charter school system. It has hired three of his teachers to work at schools in East Los Angeles and South-Central Los Angeles.

But Leon and his staff, students and parents fear that the county plan for only one teacher per classroom will not be nearly as effective because specialized services will be lost.

The program’s success, Leon said, rests largely in having three to five teachers in each classroom.

The county has pledged to provide one teacher for each center classroom as soon as it becomes seismically safe, assuming the program gains charter school status.

In addition to that, Donald Ingwerson, superintendent of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, said the county, at best, will only be able to afford 12 teacher assistants and half as many secretaries for the 12 classrooms at the eight schools.

Leon has sent letters to more than 10 private foundations seeking grants to fully fund his program.