Your Friends in Public School The lengths they’ll go to deny kids and parents an education choice.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-friends-in-public-school-1494189665
A California appellate court has unanimously rejected an attempt by the Anaheim Elementary School District to throw out a petition by parents to convert a failing school into a charter using the state’s parent trigger law. The district wasted two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting parents. Can the parents sue for damages?
California’s 2010 parent trigger law allows a majority of parents whose kids attend a failing school to catalyze reforms. In January 2015, Palm Lane Elementary School parents with the help of the law’s author Gloria Romero and education activist Alfonso Flores filed a petition with the school district. The teachers’ union abetted by district officials then used dirty tricks to thwart parents, including accusations of bribery. When intimidation failed, district officials tried to reject the petition on technical points, every one of which was dismissed by the appellate court.
The district claimed Palm Lane didn’t qualify as failing because California had obtained a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education that exempted schools from Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks for the 2013-2014 school year. Yet Palm Lane had failed to meet those benchmarks for nine of the prior 10 years.
The appellate court affirmed the findings of Orange County Superior Court judge Andrew Banks who in July 2015 ruled in favor of the parents on all counts and blasted the district for being “unreasonable, arbitrary, capricious and unfair.” The school district appealed.
Maybe district officials were hoping that parents, who were represented pro bono by Kirkland & Ellis, would drop the case once their kids moved to middle school. But in the two years that the case has sat on appeal, the district and parents have racked up more legal expenses. And students have continued to be deprived of a quality education.
The appellate court ordered the district to cover the parents’ legal fees, but that won’t make up for the lost education. The district will merely pass on the costs to state and local taxpayers including Palm Lane parents who own homes in the district. The outrage is that this disgrace generates no outrage.
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