Marchers Urge Remaking L.A. Campus Into Charters

Armed with about 10,000 signatures from South Los Angeles parents, students and other residents, hundreds of marchers converged on school district headquarters Tuesday, calling for the district to relinquish control of struggling Jefferson High School and transform it into six independent charter schools.

Los Angeles school district Supt. Roy Romer countered with his own plan to reform the troubled, overcrowded campus, proposing to remove 800 students next fall in order to return the school to a traditional, two-semester calendar and divide it into six “small learning communities.”

“We share your urgency,” school board President Marlene Canter told the enthusiastic crowd after she, board member Mike Lansing and Romer stepped outside the district’s Beaudry Street headquarters to address the marchers.

Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools, the charter company pushing to take control of Jefferson, said he was encouraged by the reception the crowd received Tuesday and board members’ promise “to work with us.”

But Barr said he would push ahead with his plans for the six charter schools and next week will begin recruiting for the fall’s ninth-grade classes. Charters are publicly funded, independently run schools.

Romer reiterated his opposition to Barr’s plan.

“His deal is he wants to take over the whole school and I’m not into that,” Romer said in an interview.

Instead, Romer said he expects to relocate 800 Jefferson students to four other area campuses. The move would lower enrollment at Jefferson to about 3,000 students, enabling the school to switch from the multi-track, year-round calendar it now uses to a traditional schedule, Romer said. The superintendent also called for the campus to be divided into six smaller units. Four would be run by outside education companies and one by Green Dot or another charter group. The sixth would be a joint effort between the district and the teachers union.

Although he does not need the board’s approval to enact the plan, Romer laid it out to the board members in a closed-door meeting Tuesday and said he expected the program to be refined with input from board members over the coming weeks.

Lansing said Romer’s idea was well received at the meeting, but questioned whether the superintendent was pushing aggressively enough on reform for other low-performing high schools in the 727,000-student district. “We do not want to look at Jefferson out there by itself,” he said. “We need to look at what we have to do to bring in some bold reform for all our troubled schools.”

Unless the two reach a compromise, Barr and the district could be headed for a showdown over Jefferson. If the board turns down Barr’s charter applications, he could appeal to the state Board of Education. On Tuesday, Barr said he would prefer to work out “a local solution.”

Marchers began their spirited but orderly two-mile march at a church parking lot south of downtown. Police closed off streets as marchers moved through traffic, waving signs in Spanish and English and chanting, “What do we want? Small Schools!” and other slogans. Barr held his 3-month-old daughter in a carrier strapped to his chest, while many others pushed their children in strollers.

Former Mayor Richard Riordan, long an advocate of small, self-governing campuses, joined in, telling a post-march rally that the alliance plans for Jefferson “can turn around these schools in half the time” it took to rebuild the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Riordan was widely credited for leading efforts to get the collapsed freeway reopened in five months.