TogetherApart: Co-location And Collaboration Constrained By Pandemic

In the wake of pandemic, priorities are rearranged.

Prior to schools’ closing in March, 2020, several LAUSD school sites were facing the prospect of sharing their campus with a charter school next year. These forced “colocations” are directed by the District when a “public charter school” requests public space for its operations under legal mandate from a voter initiative passed in 2000.

Proposition 39 addressed schools facilities issues by lowering the passage threshold for local school bond measures from 67% to 55%. With over $10m of vested interest from ubiquitous charter privateers Ann & John Doerr, John Walton and Reed Hastings, the initiative established a facilities payload for the charter industry.  Along for the ride was the ideological position that charter schools had the right to request of the public District “reasonably equivalent conditions” for operations. The specifics for calculating and granting these conditions were litigated through a series of lawsuits (2007, 2010 and 2012) inordinately taxing on the public purse in contrast with that of the billionaire-funded charter school lobby.

Charter schools are publicly funded, while simultaneously privately operated. Consequently their “public” status is arguably ambiguous and at least contentious, though even Forbes, the “defining voice of entrepreneurial capitalism”, hazards that charter schools are not public schools. The demands for space escalate every year, with concomitant resistance by District stakeholders to dislocation. In 2019/20 there were 228 schools chartered independently by LAUSD.

76 District campuses were collocated; five twice and two by three schools (See a demographic study from 2018/19 here). LAUSD operated 51 affiliated charter schools which would not, by definition be co-located.

As in previous years, Several schools organized in opposition to District co-location “offers” this year:  Shirley Ave, Sunrise ES, Monte Vista, among others. Monte Vista, at least reports it will not be co-located after all, even while the teacher’s union calls for a halt to the co-location process altogether in the face of SARS2.

Because “carpetbaggers” are defined by crisis, and much chicanery is afoot in the midst of Covid confusion. The nation’s Secretary of Education, billionaire and charter evangelist Betsy DeVos, has plans to fuel vouchers with Covid stimulus money as a “microgrant”. And charter schools appear poised to receive unmerited subsidized loans. There is techno-confusion surrounding the security of Zoom conferencing widely employed for remote learning. And the scramble to broach this divide leaves skeptics too flummoxed to criticize, even while the infrastructure for making this leap has been long in development.

Therefore while there is no lack of news, still the onslaught is hard to take in, especially under stress.

So considerations change and here instead is a rallying cry of initiative mustered to encourage, inspire, entertain and inform. A list to cross-link the physical divide which separates us, digitally.

Musical links, TogetherApart – Orchestras and Choirs, starting with this most chilling and beautiful piece from Wuhan, ground zero. Following then comes a raft of nationalistic and determined pieces, the brawnier the better:

Academic Entertainment; SARS-CoV-2, Covid And The Study Of Science

Understand And Track The Epidemiology And Course Of The Pandemic:

Pitch In:

Extracurriculars:

Testing And Grading Updates

    • CAASP/SBAC statewide testing is cancelled per executive order of California’s governor.
    • ETS ~ administers TOEFL, GREs, CAASP, etc.; IB exams are cancelled for this school year; SAT and ACT testing is cancelled through April awaiting further developments for future decisions. Do not rely on any, including this, second-hand information – confirm rapidly-changing testing dates (hyperlinks above should be OK) with test administrators directly.
    • AP is providing free remote learning access and is “developing a new at-home testing option.”
    • K12 grading during a pandemic and college admissions is reevaluated.

Academic And Family Resources

Policy/General LAUSD Information:

Governmental Response Including Health Information, Announcements, Public Health Measures

Your favorite resources left in the comments below will be incorporated into future updates. Happy Vernal Holidays Everyone (Easter, Passover, Ramadan, …)!