Parent Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado is a parent at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California. This is the school–the only school in California–where the billionaire-funded “Parent Revolution” has been able to wheedle enough parents to sign petitions to close the school and hand it over to a charter school. When some parents who had put their names on the Parent Revolution petition asked to withdraw their signatures, the organization went to court and won a ruling that signing a petition was like an election and they couldn’t rescind their signature. When the court battles ended, only 53 parents in the school of more than 600 students voted to choose a charter school. Guzman was one of the parents who opposed the takeover and closure of her children’s neighborhood school. This is Guzman’s description of the last graduation day at Desert Trails Elementary School:
How the Trigger Left Our Community
It was a beautiful Thursday morning in Adelanto, CA. Sixth graders were dressed in their Sunday best, parents were lined up with balloons and everyone was preparing for a wonderful ceremony. So why was there a table set up across the street for recruiting parents to the new charter school? This was a sixth grade promotion… All students would be transferring to junior high. Why the need to harass parents on such a special day? Desperation? Harassment? Lack of a Spine?
This is just one of the several times we have had to endure harassment from the people who have been hired to take over our school. Desert Trails Elementary was home to thousands of families, some having been there for several years, some arriving as early as this month. Today these families watched their students cry their eyes out and mourn loss of their second family – the teachers, staff, principal and even parent volunteers of Desert Trails Elementary. I was fortunate enough to share this day and many others, filled with great memories, with these families and am truly thankful for the time I spent there.
I can say this about the DTE family – they are loved by thousands, probably tens of thousands, of students and their families. Grateful for what they have done for them. For attending those Wednesday night Little League baseball games, or private tutoring them on their own time, for working with them until they have gone from a second grade reading level to fourth grade reading level – in less than a year. These are just a few of the many, many things these families will remember.
What they won’t remember is how Desert Trails Prepatory Academy set up a table across the street from the sixth graders promotion ceremony, right under the No Stopping Any Time sign. They may have not even noticed how when confronted with how low and pathetic a parent felt they were for disrespecting the ceremony they smiled and waved back at that parent. They will definitely not remember how they stopped parents exiting the parking lot to force a flyer on them or how they remained there until long after the last student had left for the school day. They won’t think twice about the parents who Parent Revolution used to pull the Trigger and how most of them have been long gone.
What I will remember… the RIP Desert Trails Elementary 1995-2012 written in chalk in the quad… The many, many I will miss you’s that were said that day. The kids chanting Once a Coyote, Always a Coyote. Most of all, I think I will remember standing in the driveway waving to the last few students driving off – looking back at their school with swollen red eyes and tears streaming down their cheeks knowing they will never see their DTE family again.
Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado
Brief biography: I am a parent who was concerned for the well-being of our community and school when Parent Revolution brought in their organizers in 2011. After doing much research on the funders, Ben Austin and the previous trigger, I started speaking up against them. After a few days, more and more parents came up to me and wanted to know more. After meeting with several parents I learned I was correct in speaking against pRev. I continued with my fight against them, collecting rescissions and getting parents to speak up. Unfortunately, we lost in court. We did the only thing we could – moved forward with our children’s school year and let the lawyers and politics work themselves out. I was voted PTA President this last school year and ran Desert Trails Elementary’s Journalism Club. I was on campus, almost daily, since 2008 and have been extremely involved at the school.
Thank you for your time. I hope this helps others realize the real impact it had on us.
Thank you again.Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I really hope that the appeals court will look differently at this issue.
Appeals take money, and their district couldn’t afford to further combat pRev’s pro bono legal team which includes huge firms like Gibson and Dun.
Am I reading this right, only 53 parents out of 600 can decide to close a school with the parent trigger? That can’t be right…I must be misunderstanding this….or……
Cee Mor: only a bare majority of parents at a school need sign the parent disembowelment petition; that was the case at Adelanto. After that, only those who signed the petition can vote on the legally limited alternatives; out of that number, it only requires a bare majority of those who actually vote. Please read below.
To quote from one charter-friendly newspaper article from 1-9-13 [click on link below]: “DTPU held an election in October, in which parents who signed the petition could vote on which charter school they wanted to see take over Desert Trails. Only 53 of the original 466 parent petitioners voted, and amongst those who did, the vast majority voted in favor of LaVerne Prep.”
Link: http://www.vvdailypress.com/articles/trails-38493-adelanto-approved.html
From a more recent LATimes [6-18-13] article: “The proposal also urges changes to the state law, including giving all parents at a targeted school the right to vote on their chosen overhaul option. At present, only parents who signed the petition may vote; last fall, just 53 parents among 400 families at Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto voted in an election to decide which charter operator would take over their school.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-parent-trigger-20130617,0,7828780.story
The discrepancies between 466 “parent petitioners” and 400 “families” [please read the two excerpts above] is that a “family” with two parents has two votes, a family with one has one vote. Hence, just by numbers alone it is weighted against single-parent families, so that it is possible that a minority of families can have a majority of votes.
That is how over 600+ potential voters can be reduced to 466 and then to 53 [minus the ones who didn’t vote for LaVerne Prep!]—democracy in action, a la Parent Revolution.
Just remember the above when you hear Ben Austin mouthing platitudes about the wonders of pRev:
“The road to perdition has even been accompanied by lip service to an ideal” [Abraham Lincoln”]
Welcome to ALEC and Eli Broad’s conception of “democracy,” where a tiny minority hold complete sway over the many… Which is really the system we’ve always had, it’s just more transparent in this case.
53 parents of 600 students. They only needed a 51% vote and the sad thing is these parents were told they (Prev) didn’t want a charter school at all they were just using that threat as leverage. Once parents found out they were decieved that’s when they wanted to take back votes but we’re told no by the court.
The Adelanto School District tried its best to stave off Parent Revolution. The difference was “deep pockets”. When Parent Revolution didn’t get the outcome they wanted, they filed a law suit supposedly using pro bono lawyers. ASD simply did not have the financial resources to launch an appeal, even though two different petitions were circulated and the disfavored one for a charter school was the only one submitted. Also, statements about coercion and harassment were presented, but the judge ignored anything and everything that challenged the actions of Parent Revolution. I sometimes wonder if Parent Revolution targeted Adelanto knowing ahead of time that they would have access to a “friendly” judge in the event that they had to go to court.
As for the rescissions, the judge decided that he could not declare that they are totally illegal, since that is not stated in the law. Instead, he made a decision that rescissions have to be submitted “BEFORE” the petitions are delivered to the school district. Of course, that assumes that all parents will know exactly when that will happen and most likely would severely reduce the time to gather them.
This month, the LAUSD board passed Steve Zimmer’s resolution calling for open meetings and information presented to parents in advance of them being asked to sign a petition. It also calls for legislative relief to clarify the law’s myriad of misleading and missing guidelines.
So far, there is evidence coming in that parents will not chose to pull a trigger once they understand what can happen at their school. With the above reports coming in from Adelanto and the negative outcome at Weigand Elementary, Parent Revolution will have a harder time convincing parents to blindly go along with such a destructive process.
In the fall, when school starts at the new Desert Trails charter, we will learn more about what population the school is serving, and whether the teachers are of higher quality than those they replaced.
The national media needs to follow this story just as they did when “Won’t Back Down” crashed and burned at the box office. The Parent Trigger legislation has so many potholes in it, that there is virtually nothing left to support it.
My heart goes out to Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado and all the Adelento families whose hopes were gunned down by pRev’s Parent Trigger. As an advocate for public schools and social justice, I will never stop informing people about, and creating resistance to this virulent form of neoliberalism.
What a sad story. The bottom line is that the election was illegal as the signatures were illegal as at LAUSD. That is why Zimmer put up the motion. I sent this information to every board member and the L.A. Times and there was the op ed and then the Zimmer resolution all based on the law, rules and regulations as written in California. Read the law, rules and regulations. That is the only way to fight them along with using that law properly to get away from criminal districts like LAUSD. You do not need to use a charter school or some other privatizer corporatizer for the trigger. The parents can do it themselves with the assistance of the teachers and community. All you have to do is read and you will know, just like students. When do we stop learning?
Parent revolution’s tactics are about as subtle as the Westboro Baptist Church. Any group that behaves like this should be avoided like the plague.
I have a hunch that those parents who were instrumental in the takeover will have buyer’s remorse by December. I hope that someone chronicles life at Desert Trails after the takeover and shares this story with parents who are thinking of using the parent trigger law to “reform” their children’s schools.
Schools have to be places for children, not administrators or even only teachers. A small minority stood up and confronted the fact that at Desert Trails their children were not being served as they deserved and that nothing would change if they didn’t persist, even going back to court again. I can’t wait to see how this school will be turned around–at last.
If a small minority thought the school needed to change, does that mean the vast majority of parents were satisfied with the school? This seems to be the way our country is headed, post-Citizens United. Yes, let’s just wait and see how this school gets “turned around”. Turned inside-out may be the more apt phrase.
Turned around? Substitute teachers, “waste” level pants, a spec of special ed (speech only), and requiring a very poor community to buy the teachers supplies to save them money as well as new uniforms. Our community can’t afford to go to this new “public community school”!
I do understand the concerns of the community when it comes to the education of the children. For years, many students and staff have been involved in each others life. Almost to consider it a family. However, behind the scenes, it was chaotic. A great deal of dysfunctional characteristics was tearing down the moral and ethical fiber of the school. Yes, teachers may have great relationships with children, but what about the educational needs, the fundamentals for success, the social and life skills needed in today’s society. Not providing the students with the essentials of basic education allows for a flawed society, thus, resulting in the “fallen through the cracks” theory. If you have 75% of elementary students who do not posses the basic academics skills of their current grade level, then there is a problem. When you don’t have a union and administration team meeting eye to eye on the in making functional decisions that are to benefit the student, then there is a problem. The school was ran by the union and the government. Many decisions made were to cover the assets of the administration and continue to allow the union to choose the greater interest of the school. With this, the school remained in the bottom rankings for many years.
Change is hard. Many adjust to it with resistance while others adapt. Children are very impressionable. If presented with negativity and shown the what not’s of something, many times, the children will carry that with them. The healing of this transition will take time. Looking at the bigger picture will allow for the opportunities afforded to the students education to be able to create a positive experience for the students. Meeting everything head on with resistance and not keeping a full understanding of why things go to a transitional state will not allow growth. Remember, the statistics and results from the state of California concluded that the system the school was currently in declined yearly. If you take the success of the program that is being presented to the school, not only will the school begin to adjust, but positive results will follow. More importantly, allowing for the transition and small speed bumps to be worked out will ease anxiety and slowly diminish the “wanting” of the school to fail to prove a point. Create a positive experience to the transition for the students so that there pre-made opinions will not cloud the bigger picture, The school still has the major part of the name to keep the memory alive as the new school year begins.
Amen. It will be to everyone’s benefit when the new school succeeds, especially the children’s. You are right when you say the school was run by the union plus the (top) administration. Principals, even though those who sacrificed to move to Adelanto to make a difference, were stifled and/or fired. The new principal will not be under that tyranny.
The new school is run by the principal and HER elected administration. With only 2 parent seats, how do parents have a real voice? When parents are unhappy who do they turn to? They will have to complain about what they don’t like to the people making those decisions. I guess it’s true what they say… Ignorance is bliss.
Better the school be run by the principal who was hired to run the school and who has a good track record, don’t forget, than by top administrators who don’t know what’s going on at the school. Nobody’s forcing anyone to attend the new Parent Trigger school, and Adelanto has new top administrators whom I also wish well. The “old guard” have all dispersed or gotten out of town at the first inklings of a challenge to help serve the students of Adelanto.