A School From Scratch

At recess, the 120 kindergartners and first-graders stream out of their classes onto a small yard covered with cracked asphalt and parked cars.

And only after they’re nestled back indoors do the teenagers come downstairs from the county-run high school for troubled kids on the second floor.

For the fledgling Watts Learning Center charter school, these strained quarters in a former Catholic girls school on Manchester Avenue actually represent a big step up from the home it began in 18 months ago.

Only the second school granted a charter from the Los Angeles Unified School District to start from scratch--with no students, no staff and no home--the Watts Learning Center has struggled to survive.

Despite backing from one of America’s richest families, the school has been hobbled by state and federal laws that set its funding at the same level as that of other charter schools, which use public campuses and thus pay no rent.

“We’re always in a position of chasing dollars,” said Eugene Fisher, a governmental consultant and president of the Watts Learning Center board.

As a new state law opens the door to hundreds of new charter schools, the funding issues that have hobbled the Watts Learning Center promise to emerge as one of the major legislative debates of the coming year.

Advocates of charter schools argue that schools which must rent their own facilities should receive extra state compensation.

“The No. 1 legislative item is to get facilities funding for start-up schools,” said charter advocate Reed Hastings, president of the lobbying firm Technology Network Inc.

The Watts Learning Center was conceived by a small circle of South-Central Los Angeles businesspeople and professionals, who were increasingly displeased with the quality of public education.

“It started with the fact that we were not happy with the performance of the children in our community,” said Eugene Fisher, a governmental relations consultant. “What could be done to make that improve?”

They found their answer in California’s charter school law, which allows individual schools to break free of most constraints of the state education code without losing public funding.

Rather than seek a charter for an existing campus, a process that would require a majority vote of its teachers, the Watts group wanted to build its school from the ground up. Fisher views it as “a private school for free.”

They would find space in the community, hire their own staff, pay their own bills and set their own rules. Students would take standardized tests each fall and each spring to measure how much they learned.

“We do want to be able to demonstrate performance,” Fisher said. “That’s the reason we’re here.”

Nira Long, a longtime activist now deceased, was a key organizer of the school. Through her association as a consultant for the Walton Family Foundation, it gained a commitment of $100,000 a year for start-up costs. The money came from School Futures Research Foundation, the conservative educational organization funded by Wal-Mart scion John Walton, who backed the unsuccessful 1994 California school voucher initiative.

The Los Angeles Board of Education granted the charter in June 1997.

Plans to open that fall in the converted basement of a Watts church fell apart when construction costs were estimated at $1.2 million. A shopping mall location was rejected. Others sites fell through.

At a loss, the school opened in a bungalow at the Hacienda Village housing project in Watts, sharing the cramped space with a Head Start program.

On opening day there were three teachers, a principal, an office staff, but only two students.

“We found that we weren’t able to recruit students,” Fisher said.

A Tough Sell

Prospective parents told them bluntly the problem was the location. Some said they couldn’t go near the housing project because they would be targets of gangs. Others were afraid for their children.

Without new students, the school would face a financial meltdown. State school money as well as federal anti-poverty funds are apportioned on a per-student basis.

The board of directors considered surrender, but hung in.

“We had a soul-searching meeting,” Fisher said. “All of us rededicated ourselves.”

Finally, the board made a deal with the Soledad

Enrichment Action High School for at-risk youths to share the former St. Michael’s school and worked out a schedule to prevent the primary-age children and adolescents from coming into contact.

At last, the school appears to be thriving. Enrollment has climbed to 60 each in kindergarten and first grade, and it appears there will be no trouble completing its plan to add one grade level per year through fifth grade, as space allows.

With some modifications, the former Catholic school may accommodate next year’s new kindergartners, but it cannot house the 240 students needed to reach the break-even point. So another move is inevitable.

“We’d like to have a school with grass on the yard and equipment to play on where the students can grow and develop,” Fisher said.

Under current law, that is unlikely.

Part of the problem has been a quirk of federal law which pays anti-poverty funds based on the prior year’s enrollment. For a new school, that means no money until its second year. For a growing school, that means funding will lag behind enrollment. Charter advocates expect that problem to be corrected next year.

The squeeze in state money is greater.

The school receives about $3,600 a year for each student enrolled, but has expenses of nearly $6,000, said Sandra Porter, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District principal who ran the school in its first year and is now treasurer.

The difference has largely been made up by the School Futures Research Foundation, which is attempting to start charter schools across California. Spokesman Jim Blew said the foundation had to double its grant this year to $200,000.

That still leaves no funds for enrichment such as art and music classes and tutoring. Volunteers help out there, Fisher said.

The other start-up charter school in Los Angeles sidestepped the facility crunch with a rare stroke of good fortune. Clothing designer Carole Little and her estranged husband and business partner, Leonard Rabinowitz, gave their $6.8-million former headquarters and warehouse south of downtown to the 80-student Accelerated Charter.

In Los Angeles, more than 20 regular schools have voted to adopt charters, compared to only two started from scratch.

Nonetheless, a survey conducted last year by the California Network of Educational Charters concluded that 56% of the 156 charter schools were not using public school campuses.

The California Businesses for Educational Excellence, a new education lobbying group, has identified the funding plight of these schools, and hundreds more expected to emerge under the new charter law, as one of its four top legislative priorities.

Hastings, a member of that group, said a proposal is being modeled after laws in several other states that provide start-up charter schools with an extra $1,000 per student to help cover the cost of facilities.

“If you look at the five-year cost picture, it would save a lot of money in classrooms not being built,” Hastings said.