One of the county’s newest charter schools, Redwood Prep is housed — for now — at Fortuna Church of the Nazarene.
to rigorous academic standards while learning the importance of social responsibility, emotional development and community involvement. The school day lasts nearly an hour longer than at traditional schools, and each family commits to 30 volunteer hours per year. According to the charter, students develop long-term relationships with teachers who tailor their approach to each child’s needs. While Redwood Prep’s enterprising methods have proved popular, some in the community are less than happy with the impact the school has had on the rest of the district. The grumbling began even before Redwood Prep opened its doors. The five women who founded the school all used to work at Ambrosini Elementary, a K-4 traditional .public school in the same district. (Both schools were part of the Rohnerville School District until it was consolidated with the Fortuna Union Elementary School District last July.) As the women began developing the charter, one had been laid off — a result of funding cuts and deferrals, declining enrollment and her lack of seniority. Not long afterward, three of the other four were also given pink slips. Now they’ve started their own school, and some of the teachers who remain at Ambrosini feel bitter. When parents started pulling their kids out of Ambrosini in favor of Redwood Prep, a lot of veteran teachers were laid off, according to Fortuna Elementary School District Superintendent Dr. Patti Hafner. With the charter school siphoning off students, Ambrosini lost scarce state funding, which is based on average daily attendance numbers. “They laid off eight or 10 people who had been teachers for a very long time. We’re talking years. That’s where a lot of the hard feelings came from originally.” Lisa Jager, the director of Redwood Prep, disputes that account, saying staff cuts would have been made regardless of the charter school, and indeed some of the teachers were laid off well before
planning had even begun for the school. “Lawyers were involved and the whole school atmosphere was very tense,” she said in an email. Regardless, many in the community are now complaining that Redwood Prep is elitist, attracting mostly wealthy, welleducated families and exploiting their resources to buy iPads and take field trips while the traditional public schools are left to deal with the learning disabled kids, the poor kids, the English learners and other students who require more resources and tend to score lower on standardized tests. Last school year those resentments mostly simmered in private conversations. But in the fall, that all changed. Administrators at Redwood Prep approached the district with a request. The school, they said, was growing. It began as a K-5, but this year it’s a K-6; the plan is to keep adding one grade level per year until 2014, when it will be K-8. Attendance is now up to 125. Teachers and students are running out of room at Fortuna Church of the Nazarene. It was time to invoke Prop. 39. Introduced by ballot initiative in 2000, Proposition 39 requires every school district in the state to provide facilities for any charter school that has at least 80 full-time, district-resident students. The reasoning goes like this: Charter schools may be run privately, but they’re publicly funded and thus still considered public schools. And all public school students in a district should be entitled to reasonably equivalent classrooms and other facilities. And so here was Redwood Prep, asking for space either at Ambrosini or one of the district’s three other traditional public schools. Ideally, administrators said, they could use 10 classrooms, an office and a large auditorium/multi-purpose room. Prop 39 dictates that the request must be granted; Redwood Prep is entitled to space. The Fortuna Elementary School District Board has yet to determine exactly how to accommodate the request. A six-person committee has been formed — with an administrator, a teacher and a board member from both Redwood Prep and the traditional schools — to examine the possibilities. But while these bureaucratic accommodations proceed in an orderly fashion, a number of parents and teachers in the district are positively livid about what’s happening. They’re outraged at continued on next page
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northcoastjournal.com • North Coast Journal • Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013
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