Only four parents showed up to hear organizer Steve Wolfson discuss the concept of transforming Malibu High School into a charter school.
By Hans Laetz/Special to The Malibu Times
Despite being shunned by an overwhelming majority of Malibu residents, a small handful of disaffected parents continued their effort to remove control of Malibu High School from both school district administrators and the current groups of parents serving on various site governance and support committees.
Organizer Steve Wolfson spoke at a Friday night charter school-organizing meeting attended by four parents, two reporters and a charter school organizer from the Bay Area. He faulted a school run by a distant school bureaucracy and “a small group of elite parents that is serving a small group of elite students.”
Wolfson is campaigning to convert Malibu’s junior-senior campus into a charter school, a legal change that would remove it from most Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District administration oversight and place parents in localized policy-making roles. Wolfson said he hopes a broader base of parents will run the charter school than the current combination of a site governance council and other volunteer support groups.
Parents active in the site governance council, PTSA, Shark Fund and Athletics Booster Club say they are watching the new charter movement with a mix of curiosity and incredulity. Many have written letters to the newspapers, or to a Malibu High discussion Web site, expressing wonderment at Wolfson’s public emergence in the Malibu High community. He launched his effort with a broadside of accusations in a letter to the local newspapers in January, and claims to be speaking for many parents who are afraid to let their views be made public.
Wolfson blamed the low turnout Friday on the timing of the meeting and a lack of advance publicity, even though 600 flyers had been handed out at the school and the meeting had been listed in The Malibu Times.
Wolfson had arranged for interested parents to meet with Miles Denniston, a charter school design consultant who assists groups campaigning to convert schools into chartered status. Denniston works for the California Charter Schools Development Center.
Charter schools are independent campuses largely divorced from the parent school boards and administrations, Denniston told the parents. They are publicly funded by the same federal grants and state and local taxes as traditional districts, and have to answer to local school boards for test results and compliance with the agreements made in the contract-or charter-when the schools are first created.
The first charter schools were created in 1992, and national media estimate that about 2,100 charters have opened in 42 states. They have shown mixed success, with some collapsing in a mire of poor test scores and adult infighting, and others dramatically improving test scores at formerly decrepit inner-city schools.
“Charter schools are an attempt to increase accountability in education,” Denniston said. “If a charter school does not do well, at the end of the contract, usually five years, it is shut down.”
Denniston told the parents that charter schools could do a better job of applying for federal grants and local contributions, increasing the average $5,800-per-pupil state funding average to as much as $7,000.
One charter supporter at the meeting, Jack Corrodi, said he was attracted to the charter alternative as a prelude to a split in the SMMUSD. “It takes just 12 to 18 months to charter a school, and it would take 36 months to become a separate district,” he said at the meeting. “Santa Monica is a long way from us geographically and economically.”
High school parents active in school organizations said they were not surprised that Wolfson’s meeting gathered just four people. “Some of the things he said in the paper were just not true, and I think people got turned off by that first letter to the editor,” said Shark Fund Board Member Karen Farrer, a parent of a high school student.
“There is no record of Steve Wolfson having ever joined the PTSA at Malibu High, and the PTSA meeting that he attended in February, after he made his charges in the newspaper, was the first PTSA he’s ever attended,” said Farrer.
Wolfson said he did not know how charter school efforts would impact, or be impacted by, a separate effort to split Malibu’s junior-senior high and three elementary schools from the Santa Monica-based district, now under study by a different parents group.
If parents elect to continue the effort, California’s charter schools law directs them to draft a 16-point contract with the SMMUSD school board. If the charter meets state law, the school board is directed by law to approve it. Malibu High’s teachers would also have to approve it with a simple majority vote.