A Last-Chance High School Program Faces Cuts

Jazmin Aguilar, 17, was one week from being expelled from Woodrow Wilson High School for excessive absences when she found City of Angels.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s independent study program offered her the chance to continue caring for her ailing mother and a baby and still earn high school credits.

The 11th grader is looking forward to graduating from high school next year. She also has set her sights on college and law school.

“I never saw myself going to college,” Aguilar said. “Now that I’m here ... I’m a straight-A student.” At Wilson, near Lincoln Heights, “I failed every class there was to fail,” she said.

Aguilar considers herself fortunate to have found the school. But she fears City of Angels will not be around long enough for her to graduate and for others to have a similar chance to turn their lives around.

A school district plan to cut the program to save $2.5 million has drawn the ire of parents, teachers and students who packed a school board committee meeting last week. Supporters view City of Angels as a last resort for students at risk of dropping out. Its students include mothers, working teenagers, truants and those with substance abuse and gang problems. Home-schooled students also participate in the program.

The proposal to reduce the school’s 3,000-plus first-through-12th-grade students by half and to close 33 of the school’s 41 community-based sites could push out students for whom most other options have failed, proponents said.

The school board approved in January a $3-million overall reduction in the district’s Educational Options program, and the planned cuts in City of Angels would account for most of it. Options is a dropout prevention effort that includes City of Angels. The district has said it must come up with $167 million in reductions to balance its budget.

But City of Angels supporters see an irony in the district’s proposal: They say officials want to cut a program that keeps students in school, which, in turn, generates revenue.

Lloyd “Bud” Jacobs, the district’s Options and high school programs director, said that some displaced students, including 60 in elementary grades and 300 in middle school, could attend their regular schools and that some high school students could enroll at continuation or traditional high schools.

About 1,600 high school students who have verified medical conditions or whose test scores are adequate and who demonstrate the skill to work independently could still attend the restructured City of Angels, Jacobs said. Students would receive small-group instruction instead of the individual attention they currently receive. Displaced teachers would be reassigned within the district, substantially saving on per-pupil instruction costs, Jacobs said.

And parents have the option of enrolling their children in the state’s home schooling program, Jacobs said. Independent study also does not have to exist as a program separate from traditional schools, he said.

“By consolidating, we will have a richer academic program,” Jacobs said in an interview. “Really, it’s a no-brainer.”

Jacobs was critical of City of Angels’ overall performance. He cited poor test scores and instructors teaching courses for which they are not certified. Students need more time and quality instruction in the classroom, he said.

His arguments, however, were lost on the school’s supporters, including some school board members.

Reserving the program for students who are already achieving “will be showing the door to thousands and thousands of students who are dropouts and push-outs,” City of Angels teacher Warren Fletcher said at a board committee meeting last week.

The recommended cuts run counter to a resolution the school board adopted last week to boost graduation rates, Fletcher said. The board agreed to focus attention on dropout prevention in light of a recent Harvard University study that found that fewer than half of the ninth graders who should have graduated in 2002 did so.

Eber Argueta, a 13-year-old who has been a student in the independent study program for three years, told board members that the plan would force students to return to large, impersonal high schools.

“Your decision will affect the future of hundreds of us kids.” Argueta said. “Please do not balance the budget on the backs of students.”

Several school board members balked at the district’s rationale for reducing the program.

“Talking about [classroom] seat time is an antiquated way to look at education,” said board member Marlene Canter. “We could look at all of our secondary schools and not be proud of what they show.”

Board member David Tokofsky said the decision to cut the program was not based on careful study and demanded that district officials provide the board with more “empirical data.” He dramatically waved Jacobs’ report, calling it “rinky-dink.”

Tokofsky said that City of Angels is seeking accreditation, a move that Principal Molly Milner said is necessary for students who plan to attend college. California colleges and universities next year may no longer accept credits from independent study programs unless they are accredited.

“It would be absurd,” Tokofsky said in an interview, if the school district cut the program and then was accredited.

Parent Kathy Estrada, a Harbor City mother who has home-schooled three boys through City of Angels and is home-schooling a fourth, was distressed at the loss of the independent study option for elementary and middle school children. Her two oldest sons are now in college, and the third is in high school.

“If this program did not work, why would I have my fourth son in it?” Estrada asked in an interview.

“We as parents made the choice to teach and educate our children through the City of Angels program because of its strict curriculum,” she said at last week’s meeting later.

The school board has a choice, she added, to build City of Angels into a model program that the rest of the nation could follow “or restructure it and watch it slowly disappear.”