Texans for Parental Choice in Education

On Tuesday night… the Compton Unified School District rejected a parent [trigger]  petition to change McKinley Elementary into a charter school.

What follows is our translation of the legal jargon littering the rejection letter, along with video of a CUSD board meeting, to help illustrate the long history of utter incompetence and resistance to reform that plagues the failing district.

• First, district officials found that only 250 of the 275 students represented in the petition are active non-duplicates. (Parent Revolution, the organization that helped parents file the petition, has gone back over its signatures and cannot locate any of these alleged discrepancies.) In any case, 250 of the school’s 445 students are enough to push the petition through.

• Next, district officials found that each signature page did not contain a date and the complete heading.

• Next, district officials found no evidence of a “rigorous review process” of the proposed charter school by the signers. This is not possible to document.

• Finally, district officials found they couldn’t verify 55 parents because there either weren’t previous signatures on file to compare the new ones to, or the signatures didn’t look like the ones they did have on file.  All of these findings should have been followed up by calling the phone numbers provided on the signature pages.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under School Choice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.