At Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California, the “parent trigger” law is taking effect after court battles.
Parents who asked to take their name off the petition to hand their school off to a charter chain were told by a judge that they were not allowed to remove their names.
Now, it turns out, only parents who signed the petition in favor of a charter will be allowed to participate in choosing the charter operator. The others have no voice.
And, hmm, the parent who has been most vocal, will not be a parent in the school when the charter takes over.
Desert Trails is overwhelmingly populated by children who are low-income and English-language learners.
Below are charters that want to run Desert Trails.
This will be interesting to watch over the next few years.
Desert Trails API
http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/Acnt2012/2012GrowthSch.aspx?allcds=36675876111918
LaVerne API
http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/Acnt2012/2012GrowthSch.aspx?allcds=36750440118059
Norton Space(run by the Lewis Center)
http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/Acnt2012/2012GrowthSch.aspx?allcds=12629016007983
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know, I’m not a parent in this district, so maybe I can’t say, but if I were, I don’t think I’d want to participate in selecting the charter operator anyway (I would certainly not have been one of the parents voting for it). That seems to give an air of democratic legitimacy to the whole charter takeover. I’d try to find other ways to protest.
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Before pulling any trigger, make sure you know where the barrel is pointed.
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Please take note that the article states that “Diaz said she likes that LaVerne’s proposal included a more formal structure for parent involvement, and that its school has demographics that resemble Desert Trails, a predominately Hispanic and black school where 100 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.” She is either totally ignorant of the facts, or is intentionally distorting them. The demographics of LaVerne are not even close to being comparable. Too bad the parents were so badly represented by this woman, who is so obviously being supported in her efforts by Parent Revolution. I wonder if they secretly paid her.
There should be a lawsuit filed by the parents who were left out of the vote. What a sham!!! I can’t believe this is part of the law.
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I wonder if parents can use the Parent Trigger law to sign a new petition and choose the district as its operator, if they wanted.
The real problem is that this is being sold as democratic and parent-empowering, when it is anything but. It’s having a locally selected and elected school board that is democratic and parent-empowering. If the district is not responsive, then we can talk about remedies, but here the district was basically ignored. The new principal at Desert Trails seemed terrific, and I don’t think it will end up a positive to create more disruption there.
The irony is that all the money that was spent by outside entities on the legal battles probably could have hired the nurse and the other extra staff that the parents wanted.
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I suggested that a month or so ago to Chrissy Alvarado, who it the current PTA President at Desert Trails. They were hoping that Austin and Co. would stop trying to railroad through the charter conversion.
I hope she and the majority of the parents reconsider and petition to have a public school.
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Are any of these proposed charter management organizations for-profit companies?
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Wow… that’s a terrible precedent, and a strategic coup for the privatizers—because they’ll start telling parents who don’t want to pull the “parent trigger” to sign the petition anyway, just so they won’t be shut out of the process entirely if it wins… and then use that petition to claim that even more parents want to privatize.
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Wallmart democracy: ONLY 53 people in a city of 31,765 ( 0.16% of Adelento residents) got to vote on privatizing a public school. That is the so-called Parent Trigger in action. Ben Austin and Gloria Romero have accomplished what the Walton, DeVos, Koch, and Broad families have been dreaming of for decades.
The above “ironies” contain some powerful facts about this unfortunate event. One fact it doesn’t contain is that pariah Doreen Diaz, who Austin and staff handpicked to front their “parent” efforts, will have no children enrolled in the school when the private operator takes over the school. That is the biggest irony of all.
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53 parents get to take thousands of taxpayer dollars to send their kids to a private school? How crazy is that?
Calling a private school “public” does not make it a public school.
The “lawmakers” should be diagnosed…they must have a serious mental health problem
Perhaps the team of experts revising the DSM will be adding a chapter on” Educational
Oppositional Deformity”. Let’s hope.
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