Accountability Delayed (Again)

“This feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

– LACOE Board Member Theresa Montaño, Ed.D.

While Jerry Brown’s lobbying efforts may have delayed the closure of the North Valley Military Institute (NVMI), he does not appear to have changed the rogue charter school’s trajectory. He was able to get the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) Board to cancel its scheduled vote to revoke the charter at its August 15, 2023 meeting. However, this motion was replaced by consideration of yet another Notice of Violation. The postponement will only harm the students as it allows the charter school to leave them in a state of limbo instead of helping them to transition to new schools in an orderly manner.

Digging in against NVMI’s politically connected supporters, the staff at LACOE presented to their board a detailed case of how the charter school continues to be plagued by systematic structural failures. The evidence was so overwhelming that it resulted at times in audible gasps from the audience.

Swayed by the evidence, the LACOE Board voted unanimously to issue a Notice of Violation giving the school until August 30, 2023, to fix the multitude of violations or face charter revocation. While NVMI’s charter is still technically active, the charter school was specifically told that it cannot lawfully open.

With LAUSD schools having already started the new school year, NVMI’s students are falling further behind every day that the charter school pretends that it will open again. LACOE’s Superintendent, Debra Duardo, implored NVMI to inform parents that they should immediately enroll their children in new schools.

Before the meeting, I sent the members of the LACOE Board a letter detailing the reasons why they should have skipped giving NVMI another opportunity to fix their long-standing issues and, instead, shut the school down immediately:

What harm is inflicted upon a child when he is given a diploma that is not worth the paper it is printed on? While the North Valley Military Institute (NVMI) boasts of a 94% graduation rate, the report submitted for Tuesday’s meeting states that only 1% of the charter school’s 11th-grade students met or exceeded math standards on the CAASPP. For English Language Arts, 26% of students met or exceeded standards, an improvement over the 14% who did so the previous year. With these results, how can future employers have confidence that any of these graduates have the basic knowledge to do their jobs?

Last year, NVMI’s lawyer told the LAUSD that 100% of its Seniors are accepted into four-year colleges. Did this include the 6% who did not even graduate? Was the school just pushing to drive applications without providing any support for actually receiving a college education? This seems to be the case as only 39.5% of its students go to any two or four-year college.

As stated in your staff’s report: “it is evident that NVMI is failing to serve its students.” This is a failure shared by LACOE. A previous iteration of this board ignored both the LAUSD and its staff to extend this charter despite the warning signs that it was failing to meet the needs of its students five years ago. The CAASPP test results declined precipitously in the 2018-19 school year, but no real action was taken by the LACOE board at that time. How many students were harmed in the years the school was allowed to continue operating despite its obvious incompetence?

While NVMI was supposed to start its new school year yesterday, it still does not have an approved site even though its Memorandum of Understanding with the County required this to be in place by July 3. The site the charter school proposed has yet to be inspected by your staff, lacks the proper Certificate of Occupancy (COO) needed to operate a high school, and is not specified in the charter. This puts LACOE in a position of allowing the school to operate illegally or ignoring the fact that its students are not in school when they should be. This makes the proposed August 30, 2023, deadline untenable. If the school does not have an approved campus, it needs to be shut down immediately.

It should also be noted that NVMI’s request for a Material Revision is incomplete as it does not include any comparison data for the schools in the neighborhood it is moving into. Under AB-1505 the charter school’s authorizer is obliged to determine how a proposed charter school will affect other publicly financed schools, both public and charter, in the area. These comparisons are impossible without this type of data. The failure to provide it will extend the time needed to evaluate the request and further delay the ability of the school to legally operate.

By your staff’s admission, NVMI has still not cured the Notice of Violation issued on July 7, 2023. Why would there be any expectation that another two weeks will result in anything different? Giving the charter school a new deadline only delays the inevitable result and allows continued harm to children.

According to the paperwork submitted by the staff of LACOE, this board can immediately revoke NVMI’s charter if it “determines, in writing, that the violation constitutes a severe and imminent threat to the health or safety of the pupils.” Not having an approved location means NVMI’s students will not be in school, and will, therefore, possibly be unsupervised during school hours. Furthermore, an extended closure of the school will leave students, many of whom are already considered “at-risk” vulnerable to dropping out of school altogether. Additionally, 20.8% of students who have disabilities will not be receiving services required by their IEP.

With students’ health and safety jeopardized, LACOE must act immediately to revoke NVMI’s charter and help students begin the transition process into other schools. Any delay threatens the well-being of these children.

____________________________

Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.