Is LACOE Failing Again?

“An organization that has been in operation for nine years and that is holding over $12 million in public funds should be able to articulate what actions have taken place and what actions are planned in the near future to utilize money that was apportioned for the benefit of students”

– Lashon Governance Review 2021-22

Last August, the families at the North Valley Military Institute (NVMI) were left scrambling when the charter school was forced to shut down just one week into the new school year. The impending failure had been obvious for months with a teacher telling students in April to “start looking for a new school.” However, the school continued to gaslight parents throughout the summer, convincing them everything was fine. Instead of stepping up to ensure an orderly closure, NVMI’s authorizer, the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), failed to take decisive action, allowing the chaos that accompanied the school’s demise.

NVMI should not have been allowed to operate as long as it did. It was one of the few charter schools rejected for renewal by the LAUSD, but LACOE’s Board ignored its own staff’s warnings of operational deficiencies and academic failures to overturn the District’s decision. Years worth of inadequate oversight by LACOE allowed the school to avoid the consequences of permitting the sexual abuse of students, the harassment of a child with special education needs, and the failure to follow the education code.

The chain of events that led to NVMI’s eventual demise began in April of 2023 when it rejected an offer for space by the LAUSD under PROP-39 saying that it planned to move its operations to the Los Angeles Mission College. However, when the Community College District learned of NVMI’s checkered history, it refused to sign the proposed lease leaving the school without a campus. In a last-minute attempt to stay open, it signed a lease for space at a church facility but did not have enough time to secure the proper permits from the city or the needed Material Revision from LACOE and was forced to surrender its charter.

Like NVMI, the Lashon Academy was also rejected for renewal by the LAUSD and saved from extinction by LACOE. Once again, it did so without taking the necessary steps to ensure the issues that led to the school’s rejection would be fixed.

The Lashon Academy, the charter school’s San Fernando Valley campus, provides an example of a “White Flight Charter” with a student body that is vastly different from the public schools it occupies by using PROP-39. The student body of Valerio Street Elementary is 1.4% white and at Robert Fulton College Preparatory 1.2% of the students are classified as “White.” In contrast, Lashon claims that 35.6% of its students are white.

At Valerio, 97.1% of the students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Similarly, 96.5% of the students meet this same classification. In comparison, 52.7% of Lashon’s student body are socioeconomically disadvantaged.

At the Lashon Academy City campus, none of the students are classified as being White and 75% are Hispanic or Latino. However, students with disabilities are severely underrepresented. While nearly 12 percent, of California’s public school students receive special education and related services, only 4.2% of students at this school do. Having ⅓ of the average number of students decreases the costs of providing these services, passing the expense to neighboring public schools.

Reducing its costs for providing Special Education services may be one way that Lashon has been able to amass a $12 million reserve. These are millions of dollars that were supposed to be used to educate children but have instead been squirreled away into their bank accounts. Since the law only requires a 3% reserve, regulators have questioned why the charter is holding 195.62%. However, LACOE has not taken any public actions to ensure that these funds are actually spent on educating students. The spending is needed as under its current budget it will “take students with disabilities 156 years after the 2023-24 school year to reach 100% proficiency in ELA and 240 years in math.”

Following in the footsteps of NVMI, Lashon has decided to forgo some of the space it receives from the LAUSD under PROP-39 to move some of its operations to a private facility. Not learning from the mistakes that resulted in NVMI’s demise, Lashon has done so without taking the necessary steps to ensure this move is possible. While it is already advertising its new campus, the public hearing for the Material Revision to the charter needed to make this move is not scheduled until July 9, 2024. The LACOE Board will not vote on it until August 6. According to the School Calendar published on Lashon’s website, they are holding Student Orientation on August 8th and the First Day of School is August 12. What will the school do if the Material Revision is rejected or even delayed?

LACOE has an opportunity to show how much it learned from last year’s NVMI debacle. It needs to immediately determine how many students Lashon can serve in the space specified in its charter and ensure that the charter’s enrollment does not exceed this amount. Families that cannot be served need to be warned so that they have the time to make other arrangements. Otherwise, the chaos seen by the closing of NVMI is at risk of being repeated.

“My kids tell me: ‘Mom, I don’t like the school… Mom, I don’t want to go.’ I’m a single mom and I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t know what to do. They don’t want to go to school.”

- NVMI Mother amidst the chaos of its closure

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Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.