More than five years ago, Ivy Academia's campus was a Hilton hotel. Students poured water from silver pitchers and teachers used ballrooms as classrooms, taping paper to the walls as modified blackboards.
The Woodland Hills charter school today has four locations, and officials are still fighting the Los Angeles Unified School District for a permanent campus. And they, like many other charters in the district, aren't having much luck.
The Board of Education voted Jan. 27 to open a shuttered San Fernando Valley school for a magnet rather than turn it over to a charter, which would have paved the way for Ivy Academia to apply for the space. The move angered the charter school and its advocates and left the board member who oversees the area shaking her head.
"I just wish it was a little more fleshed out . . . in terms of the funding, in terms of the educational plan," said Tamar Galatzan, who campaigned on the promise of opening four closed campuses in the Valley and pushed to have all of them designated for charters. "I feel it was done in haste," she said of the magnet plan.
The district closed the campuses in the 1980s because of declining enrollment. Three have been designated for charters -- schools that are independently run but receive public funding. L.A. Unified is bound by a 2000 law to provide facilities for charters, but Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said recently that the district has "a responsibility to provide space, and there are other spaces available."
School board member Marlene Canter went further, saying charters may not "necessarily get the schools they ask for."
It's not about preferential treatment, board members said, but about giving parents options on the types of schools their children attend.
"We're responsible for all the kids and all the programs," said Canter, who heads the district's charter committee. "There are lots of parents in our districts that want their kids to go to charters and there are lots of parents in our district that want their kids to go to magnets."
Still, charter school supporters say the fight over the closed Collins Street Elementary School in Woodland Hills underscores the problems charters are having in getting space from the district.
"When the rubber hits the road, here's another example of them shortchanging charter schools," said Gary Larson, spokesman for the California Charter Schools Assn.
