Space Crunch for Charter Schools

Like a child outgrowing his clothes, the Watts Learning Center chafes in its tight rented quarters. The sparse blacktop does triple duty as playground, parking lot and lunch area, and there is no space for the added classrooms that would allow the popular, high-achieving elementary school to take more students and expand to sixth grade.

“All we need to grow is a bigger facility,” said Gene Fisher, the South Los Angeles charter school’s co-founder and board chairman, “and finding one is like looking for hen’s teeth.”

Locating real estate -- and the money to pay for it -- is the biggest obstacle for California’s publicly funded, privately run charter schools, leaders of the 12-year-old movement say. And, once campus space is identified, charter organizers say they are overwhelmed with bureaucracy and red tape.

At least five charter schools have closed because of facilities problems, and many others around the state have had to settle for cramped or ill-suited campuses, according to the California Charter Schools Assn., a lobbying group that helps its member schools with such issues as finance and management.

Charters are essentially public schools that operate free of many state regulations in the expectation that they will provide successful, innovative alternatives to traditionally run campuses.

They are increasingly popular -- 78 new charters opened this fall, bringing the total to 512 throughout California, although that is still a fraction of the state’s 9,000-plus public schools. Charters, which tend to be small, tailor their programs to students’ special needs or interests.

Charter schools have some leeway in finding sites for their campuses. Because these schools are exempt from the Field Act, a longtime law that requires earthquake safety inspections during public school construction, they can operate in such places as rented churches, former strip malls, office buildings or YMCAs. Green Dot Public Schools, for example, bought a closed hospital on Manchester Boulevard to convert it into classrooms for its Animo Inglewood Charter High School.

Those sites, however, are not often easy to come by, particularly in such cities as Los Angeles, where land is scarce and pricey. Schools are forced to compete for space with tax-producing businesses or even low-cost housing developers.

Once they have found a site, charter operators must comply with strict building and safety requirements -- and sometimes even satisfy neighborhood concerns -- before welcoming students.

Ivy Academia, a Woodland Hills charter, held classes in hotel meeting rooms and other makeshift quarters for nearly two months this fall. City officials held up the school’s occupancy permit, saying the school had not completed safety inspection requirements for its site in a former bingo hall and men’s suits warehouse. Initially, 40 families in the 285-student school dropped out.

Some attempts have been made at the state level to ease charters’ facilities problems. These include a state-funded grant program and Proposition 39, the 2000 voter-approved ballot measure that requires school districts to provide facilities for charters within their boundaries. The grant program, open to charters serving mostly low-income students, is threatened by the state’s continuing fiscal problems.

And Proposition 39 is hampered by what charter advocates say is a refusal by many school districts to comply, forcing costly court battles or causing cash-strapped charters simply to give up on obtaining district facilities.

“It has no teeth,” said Caprice Young, the charter school association’s president. “There is not a school district in the state that is actually complying with Prop. 39. They ignore it or say they have no facilities -- even the districts that are closing schools are saying that.”

A charter operator’s only recourse is litigation, and even those who receive district facilities must reapply for them each year, Young said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has made some facilities available, Young said. But she contends that the district “picks and chooses which charter operators it wants to work with. There is no rhyme or reason to it.”

District officials disagree, pointing to a methodical application process that has resulted in some charters receiving facilities, especially in parts of the district that are not overcrowded. They also point out that their latest facilities bond measure, as well as the state’s, both approved last March, earmarked money for charter schools.

Gregory L. McNair, an attorney for the district, said Proposition 39 was vaguely worded and did not address at least one key issue: what to do when there are not enough facilities to accommodate students in district-run schools. Los Angeles Unified has embarked on a $14-billion building and renovation program to allow students to attend schools in their own neighborhoods and to take campuses off a shortened calendar, he said.

In adopting its policy for implementing Proposition 39 earlier this year, McNair said, district officials tried to “create that balance between fairly distributing facilities among those kids currently in district schools and those in charter schools.”

“What the courts may well have to decide is whether a district student, say, from Roosevelt High [on the Eastside], will have to be bused to the San Fernando Valley to make room for a charter school that wants a piece of the Roosevelt space,” he said.

Charter advocates say their schools reduce -- not increase -- overcrowding because these campuses enroll students that districts otherwise would need to accommodate.

While the debate over the law plays out, charters continue to scour neighborhoods for space. Aurora Charter School in the Bay Area won an early court case on the measure but went out of business by the time an appeals court upheld its victory. It had lost its lease on a former warehouse and could not find another location.

Eagles Peak Charter School in San Diego County moved six times in 18 months and now has a lease through mid-June at a Boys & Girls Club, charter academy officials said.

When seasoned high school teacher Paul McGlothlin won approval to start Renaissance Academy in Pacific Palisades, he said he had no idea how difficult the facilities problems would be.

The charter sued Los Angeles Unified when it turned down McGlothlin’s request for what he said was unused space at Palisades Charter High School and signed a five-year lease in an office building in the Palisades Village neighborhood. He used about $400,000 in taxpayer funds for renovations, even as the Palisades community lashed out against the addition of a high school in a neighborhood that already has several school campuses.

Neighbors also objected to the school’s use of a park, community library and other facilities. All the while, Renaissance officials did battle with city building and fire officials over campus renovations. The landlord, saying the school had violated the terms of its lease, recently served an eviction notice, effective mid-June.

The school is suing the landlord and looking for another site in case it loses in court. Some of the school’s 300-plus students are attending classes at a private home, a YMCA and a recreation center because the school cannot use all of its leased space for classes.

“All I wanted to do was have a good school,” McGlothlin said. “I thought [opening a charter] was a way to escape the education bureaucracy, but now I am dealing with multiple bureaucracies.”

Neighborhood leaders, however, said McGlothlin brought his problems on himself by not involving the tight-knit community in his plans in the first place.

At the Watts Learning Center, Gene Fisher says he is grateful for a benevolent and supportive landlord -- the Olivet Baptist Church, which not only leased its own classrooms but also allowed school officials to bring in portable buildings. The location near the Harbor Freeway is convenient.

Fisher, who has had to move the school three times in its eight-year existence, dreams of more space and modern facilities owned by the school.

The school’s latest score on the California Academic Performance Index, 786, shows its student achievement not only exceeds that of neighboring campuses but also surpasses the statewide average of 729 for elementary schools. The school won California Distinguished School honors earlier this year and a separate award for campuses with predominantly low-income students.

Fisher cites the autonomy granted charter schools as a “foundation of our success.”

“Our remaining big challenge,” he said, “is finding a permanent home.”