Shameful effort to undermine charter school

San Jose Mercury News Editorial:

Leadership Public Schools' longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.

The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.

Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.

But let's be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.

Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.

Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)

Local Politics: Zig & Zag with the Madison Studio School.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 10, 2008 7:44 AM
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