(See pdf below)
So much for sleepy summer meetings of the School Board.
They will bang the walls and toot noisy horns in attention-grabbing ways at Tuesday night’s 7 o’clock meeting in School District headquarters with three moves that will catch eyebrows on their way up or down:
• Approving new Supt. Dave LaRose’s decidedly uncontroversial three-year contract at $190,000, starting in 22 days.
• Interim Super Eileen Carroll’s one-month contract between Patti Jaffe’s June 30 retirement and Mr. LaRose’s arrival. She will be paid $17,500 for July, which would scan out to $210,000 for a year. However, she will return to her more modest regular salary.
• It is expected that the School Board will embrace a District staff recommendation to reject the most creative charter school petition in recent seasons – the Innovatory School for Professional Youth – a virtual school for at-risk students and professionals, actors, musicians and athletes.
Four reasons were sternly, if not harshly, listed for the turndown:
• The petition fails to provide a reasonably comprehensive description of all required elements of a charter petition.
• It presents an unsound educational program for the pupils to be enrolled.
• The petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement their program.
• The petition doers not contain the number of signatures required by the statute.
Kathy Paspalis, who will lead the meeting in the absence of Board President Karlo Silbiger, was direct in her assessment:
“Completely inadequate application lacking in basic information and data that would lend any credibility to their application.
“I am just upset that we have to waste staff time (and therefore our resources/money) on such a poorly constituted application. I wish there was some way to charge these applicants for this.”
In a firm-jawed, and personalized, response, Jessica Jacobs, co-director of the school known as ISPY, said this afternoon:
“We plan to resubmit our petition to CCUSD at your next Board meeting (with all of your concerns remedied). We also will submit to the County. Please expect ISPY to open for students in Culver City one way or another. Again, we can be a school you are proud to call your own. Or we can be a source of curiosity for city residents wondering why CCUSD continues to work ‘inside the box.’
“We take issue with several of the claims put forth in the review document. Several will be addressed in detail in writing, but some stark inaccuracies deserve attention immediately. Our petition was reviewed by attorneys intimately familiar with California charter law and also went through the rigorous petition process with LAUSD. Almost all of the objections raised in the staff report are unreasonable and inaccurate. They utilize subjective aspects of the Education Code. An example, the report criticizes us for referring to CCUSD as ‘the District,’ and uses that as an indicator to claim we had not designed our program to meet the unique requirements of CCUSD and that we are ‘shopping for a charter authorizer.’ Every community member we engaged with during the last month (homeschool families, families of dropouts, business members, members of DBA, Chamber of Commerce members, City Council members and others) will concur. We chose Culver City with intention, and the city WILL BE our home.”
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