East Hollywood Charter School Opens

His voice booming and his eyes bright despite months of nonstop work, Principal Andy Johnson stepped up Monday to a microphone set up on the playground at Santa Monica Boulevard Community Charter School and shouted a question: “Can you guys say ownership?”

“Ownership!” the 900 students seated in neat rows before him roared back.

Johnson beamed. “This school belongs to your moms and dads and teachers,” he said. “It belongs to you.”

Though the east Hollywood campus has been at Santa Monica Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue since 1910, Monday marked its first day as a charter school, independent of most restrictions by the Los Angeles Unified School District or state of California. With 1,500 students attending year-round, the school is the nation’s largest independent elementary charter school, according to district officials and state consultants.

From now on, the school will still get about $4,500 per pupil from the state as do other public schools, but it will be able to spend the money as its leaders see fit. The campus also will receive federal money, adding to an annual budget of about $11 million.

All across the cramped blacktop, which has slowly been eclipsed by portable classrooms to accommodate ever more children from the surrounding immigrant neighborhoods, that freedom fueled different dreams.

For Rolando Garcia, long frustrated with the education his second- and fourth-grader have received, it means he is going to hold off putting his children in private school and give the charter campus a chance.

Fifth-grader Yaneli Luna had some ideas of her own.

“At a charter school, you can make your own rules,” the 10-year-old said. “Maybe now we can eat on the playground.”

Her principal smiled, but indicated this was not the kind of reform he spent the last two years yearning for as he struggled to design the school’s charter, even as he was working there as an assistant principal. Johnson will be in charge of instruction, and co-director Vahe Markarian will head up operations.

For Johnson, 32, becoming a charter school means his teachers won’t be forced to use Los Angeles Unified’s reading program, Open Court. The campus can instead adopt alternatives.

It means keeping the unusual configuration of some classes, which group three grades in one room with one teacher for three years. It means paying instructors 5% more than Los Angeles Unified teachers earn. It means “no more fried chalupas from the LAUSD cafeteria,” Johnson said, because now a private company will be contracted to provide school lunches.

Broken doorknobs, nonfunctioning computers and punctured soccer balls all can be fixed immediately instead of waiting weeks or months for the district to respond, he said.

Charter schools, which receive state funds but are exempt from most state and local regulations, have been permitted in California for the last decade. The reform was designed to reinvigorate public education by forcing local school districts to compete for students, give local educators more freedom and provide innovative models for districts to emulate.

Typically, as in this case, charters are granted by the local school district, but county and state boards of education also can create them. As a sign of support from the Los Angeles school board, its president, Caprice Young, attended Monday’s opening.

About 5% of the state’s approximately 400 charter schools have been shut down for everything from not attracting enough students or failing to live up to standards to misusing public funds and teaching religion, said Gary Larson, a spokesman for the California Network of Educational Charters.

Believers insist that schools such as Santa Monica Boulevard can provide beacons to guide the public education system toward improving.

“I’m very gung-ho,” teacher Debbie Stern said. “As a teacher, I should have the right to do something more than just walk in and walk out. I should have a say in how a school operates. I want that opportunity.”

Except for a handful of teachers who chose to leave because they were uncomfortable with the charter concept, most of the staff agreed, Stern said.

Parents are enthusiastic as well, officials said. Neighborhood children have the right to attend the campus just as they did before it converted to a charter, and officials say that to their knowledge, no one has transferred.

Johnson said he is nervous but not very worried. “It’s put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is time. If things don’t go well, there’s no one to really point the finger at,” he said. “We don’t know what’s in store. But it’s going to be good.”