Takeover Plan Sparks New Debate

Debate over how to fix struggling Jefferson High School escalated Thursday after a charter operator’s call for a takeover of the South Los Angeles school sparked organizing by teachers and anxious district officials.

Drawing parents, students and community leaders to the first news conference of the day, charter schools operator Steve Barr and the Small Schools Alliance he founded launched a campaign to build support for their plans to restructure the 3,000-student school.

They want to divide Jefferson into as many as eight autonomous charter campuses, each with a rigorous curriculum, involved parents and higher-paid teachers.

But district officials, at an impromptu news conference on the campus’ tree-shaded front lawn, touted their own plans for transforming Jefferson and the district’s other struggling high schools.

And inside the school’s historic Streamline Moderne main building, union leaders lobbied Jefferson’s teachers to oppose Barr’s charter plan.

In many ways, the debate over Jefferson reflects the broader questions of how to improve public schools, how they should be run and even who should run them.

Jefferson has struggled for years with low test scores and graduation rates. Its troubles burst into public a few months ago, when at least three melees broke out between groups of black and Latino students.

Barr, whose Green Dot Public Schools operates five small charter high schools in neighborhoods similar to Jefferson’s, believes parents and community leaders will support revamping the school. “We’ll sign up as many families as there are kids at Jefferson,” Barr said.

Charters are independently operated public schools that are allowed greater flexibility in exchange for a pledge to improve student achievement.

They are popular with some parents, but critics say they drain money and good teachers from traditionally run schools and cannot offer solutions for all students.

District officials said they have made progress at Jefferson and have more improvements in the pipeline, which they want to work on with teachers and parents. Starting last month, students began wearing uniforms -- green polo shirts -- and teachers say that has improved decorum. The school’s new principal, Juan Flecha, said adding a second lunch period has helped ease the crowding and tensions that led to the first melee, which began at lunchtime.

Additionally, the district has begun dividing Jefferson and several other of its large high school campuses into what it calls “small learning communities”: semi-self-contained academies aimed at making school more personal and relevant to students. Jefferson has six such academies and by next school year expects to have 450 students grouped with 16 teachers in each, Flecha said.

“We have lots of work to do,” Flecha acknowledged. “It’s a difficult transition.”

District officials said they would be interested in having Barr’s organization operate one or more charters at Jefferson but were cool to the idea of turning over the whole school to a charter operator.

A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, a vociferous critic of charter schools, urged Jefferson teachers not to sign Barr’s petitions. And he told reporters after the union’s lunchtime faculty meetings that several teachers are starting their own petition drive to oppose Barr’s proposal.

“The really sad thing,” Duffy said, “is [Barr] coming into a school that looks like it’s finally beginning to fix some of its problems.”

But Barr said Thursday at his press conference, at a church across the street from the school, that, although he is disappointed with the district’s reaction, he still hopes to “work collaboratively” on a solution for the school. He did not repeat his earlier statement that he would seek a charter from the state Board of Education if the Los Angeles school board denies his charter conversion plan for Jefferson.

Thursday’s Small Schools Alliance rally also urged support for a bill by state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) that would give the Los Angeles mayor control over the school district, largely through replacing elected board members with mayoral appointees.

By linking the controversial issues of Jefferson and mayoral control of the school district, some said, Barr is taking a political gamble.

Barr said, however, that he believes having the mayor in charge would provide an important guarantee that the district would follow through on its reform promises. “It’s an insurance policy,” he said.