What Teachers and Parents Should Expect About Going Charter

The following is part two of a series of three stories chronicling how Carpenter Community Charter, a successful public elementary school in Studio City, became a new charter school. Teachers will keep their union contracts, but parents may be asked to contribute more.

It took the entire community for Carpenter Avenue Elementary School to become Carpenter Community Charter when it opened its doors in the new school year.

"It could not have happened if it weren't for the full support of the faculty and staff," said Principal Joseph Martinez. "In a way, we had a perfect storm. After everyone researched and studied the options, we were completely in agreement."

The unified front convinced the Los Angeles Unified School District school board representative Tamar Galatzan to also support the idea. Less than a year after the parents and principal thought of the idea of going charter, the school board voted unanimously to approve the charter application.

Carpenter is still in the public school system, and the teachers are all still getting the LAUSD union benefits. Unlike other independent charters, the school will not have to lease the buildings.

"We're not against public education at all, we're just the opposite, we're very supportive," Martinez said. "And we believe that to effectively run our school we need to make the decisions with our funding to best meet the needs of the students of this community."

LAUSD schools have 34 students per teacher in the fourth and fifth grades, and there is talk that the number will go up to 39.  That number is an average and some rooms already can get much more crowded, and some classrooms in Studio City have had so many students that there are not enough chairs or desks for the number of students assigned to the room. They will try to keep that number down to 25:1 at Carpenter.

In the past, costs to test for gifted students was picked up by the district. Now, Carpenter will pick up that tab.

In the past, the school would tell the district how many textbooks they needed and they would be sent over. Now, the school has to pay for their own textbooks.

"Another concern we heard about charters is that we will have fewer minority students, but that is not the case," the principal said. "We strive to have diversity and in our open enrollment we will encourage it as well."

The 74 percent population labeled white or Caucasian is actually misleading, Martinez said, because their neighborhood now has a lot of Russian, Armenian, Middle Eastern and Persian families that are all lumped into the same category. Many of them do not speak English at home, and that presents additional challenges for the school.

"We have I our petition that we can recruit in minority areas," Martinez said. "We will go to neighborhood churches and pre-schools and encourage all sorts of diverse people to apply.  There isn't much that we can do about changing the face of our neighborhood."

Andrew Barrett and his family have lived in Studio City for eight years. His daughter, Emily, has been in the school for three years and Barrett is the new PTA president.

"One of the priorities that the parents have come up with is to reduce class size," Barrett said. The allotment of 39:1 is unacceptable, and the school is trying to add two more teachers to the staff to about 40 instructors.

Carpenter is the 14^th school in the San Fernando Valley to go charter, and there are 161 charter schools in the Los Angeles area, serving 58,000 students.

Colfax Charter Elementary School in nearby Valley Village turned charter two years ago. Some of their books that they use are not part of the curriculum of LAUSD.

Valley View Elementary School in the Cahuenga Pass, which is also a school for Studio City residents, is a small school of 250 students, and Rio Vista Elementary in Studio City has about 400 students, and neither of those are charter.

Carpenter is known for major fundraising, with community businesses doing a lot of donating, and benefits that yield $350,000 for their computer library, gym teachers and music classes. When LAUSD couldn't pay for a broken air conditioner, the Parents for Carpenter fundraising arm of the PTA was formed, and still continues as an active parental branch of the school.

The families are asked for about $600 in donations through fundraisers and memberships, and a year-end event costs $85 a person. About $1,000 a year is asked for by the families at Carpenter, and that number could go up, but it isn't necessarily because of its charter status.

"If someone can't pay for something, there is no problem, but we have a good percentage of families who participate in our programs," Barrett said.

Nearly every classroom has a volunteer involved.

"We still care about state standards, we do not plan any significant curriculum changes," Barrett said.

The school will continue to use the Open Court reading program and the math program used district-wide,  said Michellene DeBonis, who was instrumental in helping Carpenter go charter.

"This will require and encourage parents to be more involved, there's no doubt about that," DeBonis said. "We bought a writing program that will help our students with writing skills."

One of the school programs Carpenter has created is a voluntary after-school supplement to help those who need extra tutoring. Sometimes students are broken into small groups of 20 for specialized in-depth studies.

DeBonis has a daughter who just graduated from Carpenter and is going to the public middle school in Studio City, Walter Reed Middle School.

There was a time when students transferred to Reed or Millikan Middle School and then to North Hollywood High School, but parents have been more hesitant to stay in public schools and have transferred instead to the private schools in the area.

"It was horrible when Reed was a year-round school, the teachers, parents and students all got short-changed, but things are changing, and Reed has a good IHP (honors) program," DeBonis said.

Principal Martinez said he hopes to encourage more of a connection to the upper-grade public schools. "We want there to be more of a natural progression to Millikan, Water Reed and North Hollywood," Martinez said. "There is a big buzz now about the culinary program started at Reed."

Meanwhile, Carpenter Community Charter continues to encourage its dance and music programs as well as its computer lab, and some of it will depend on fundraising by the parents.

"We don't have a windfall of money, but every time you turn around there is another gap of something that needs to be filled by the PTA," DeBonis said.

"The proof is going to be in the quality of education that our children receive, and we will be exposed to fruits of that labor, our kids," she added. 

Also see:

A Charter School How-to Guide: 7 Steps to Going Charter

MONDAY:  Budget Cuts—Real and Expected—Sparks Move Toward Charter School

WEDNESDAY: He Tweets, He Recycles: An Innovative Principal Uses Technology to Reach Students