The termites among the bookshelves in her classroom at 99th Street Elementary did it for Janet Lee.
When the third-grade teacher alerted authorities at the South Los Angeles campus, "the note I got back was: 'The termite exterminator came yesterday,' as if that would somehow solve my problem," Lee said. "What do I do to get that situation taken care of if I've already notified the proper people?"
That sort of frustration led Lee and other teachers at 10 schools to vote themselves out of everyday control by the Los Angeles Unified School District and turn instead to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school-reform effort. The mayor's group, the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, is the scaled-down result of his once-sweeping plan to take control of the nation's second-largest school system.
Classes began today at the mayor's year-round high schools, Roosevelt in Boyle Heights and the Santee Education Complex, south of downtown.
This experiment, which takes place at some of the district's lowest-performing schools, has a mandate to help more than 18,000 students. The vast majority of them perform below grade level; more than half are destined to drop out before graduation.
But starting today, each ninth-grader will enroll in a college-prep curriculum, and students who can't keep pace are supposed to get extra support during and after school.
Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union, also have much at stake. They want to demonstrate that massive school improvement can happen when teachers share authority with administrators and without the dismantling of complex, restrictive labor agreements.
The path was cleared for the partnership when Villaraigosa's fundraising helped elect a majority of allied school-board candidates, who took office a year ago.
Since then, 10 schools voted to join with the mayor; six spurned the idea.
Many characterized their votes for the partnership as, essentially, a rejection of L.A. Unified.
"What are we getting ourselves into? We don't know," Lee said. "But I decided, 'Let's jump off this ship.' "
Jumping ship is likely to mean more money. Through philanthropy, the partnership plans to increase spending at those schools by about 5%. It's also negotiating with L.A. Unified for more control of dollars that are managed at the district's downtown headquarters. That adds up to as much as $1 million, depending on the school. The partnership envisions each teacher with a personal computer and high-tech projection equipment for every classroom.
