Panel Backs Plan for Valley’s 1st Charter Middle School

A key Los Angeles school district committee has endorsed plans for the San Fernando Valley’s first charter middle school, as backers dropped a Pacoima site in favor of more spacious quarters in Lake View Terrace.

The 158-page proposal will be presented at a hearing this afternoon at the district’s downtown headquarters. In two weeks, members of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education are expected to vote on whether to approve Community Charter Middle School, which is scheduled to open this summer with 100 sixth-graders. By 2001, the school would have 300 sixth- through eighth-graders.

“We recommended that the board approve the proposal because it seems like it’s a well-planned, thought-out school that would benefit and meet the needs of students and the community,” said Kathy Swank, LAUSD’s administrative coordinator for charter schools.

The school site has changed from the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley in Pacoima to 4,200 square feet of former medical suites near Lake View Terrace Hospital. The new site offers better opportunities for expansion, said Jackie Elliot, the former Los Angeles teacher, administrator and health educator spearheading the proposal.

Elliot said she still hopes to work with the Boys & Girls Club, which is a five-minute drive from the new site at 11500 Eldridge Ave.

The new site is also within walking distance of Fenton Avenue School, one of the three elementary charter schools in the northeast Valley from which the middle school hopes to draw students.

Another advantage to the Lake View Terrace site, which will have four classrooms and a multipurpose room, is its hilly, peaceful setting, Elliot said. “Cows are right across the street from the school,” she said. “It’s a nice learning environment.”

A charter middle school is important, Elliot and her supporters said, because it offers an alternative to larger overcrowded, financially strapped and impersonal middle schools.

“Middle school is such a critical time in a young person’s development,” said Elliot, who in January left Montague Charter Academy in Pacoima to work full time on opening a school. “It’s often the last chance we have to build self-esteem and a sense of connection to the school and community.”

The school would integrate reading and writing skills into science and social studies classes, require parents to volunteer and, possibly, extend the school day to include tutoring and lessons in visual and performing arts.

In exchange for higher student achievement, charter schools operate outside most state and school district guidelines and control finances and curriculum.

Elliot, 49, of West Hills has secured state and private grants, a partnership with Cal State Northridge and about 170 signatures of parents interested in sending their children to the school.