November 9, 2017 Board of Education — Special Meeting

No official minutes and no agenda are on file for this meeting. This page is built from the meeting transcript alone, so — per this archive's policy for minutes-less meetings — it does not attach any name to anything said or any position taken, including the names public commenters gave when introducing themselves. Viewpoints, counts, and roles are described namelessly instead.

Closed Session: A Grade-Change Appeal

The board convened in closed session for about seven minutes at the top of the meeting to consider a family's request to change a student's grade. Coming back into open session, the board reported that it had upheld staff's earlier decision denying the request and had adopted findings supporting that decision 1.

The Allegiance STEAM Academy Thrive Hearing

The board then opened a public hearing on the Allegiance STEAM Academy Thrive charter petition — a proposed K-8 school organized around science, technology, engineering, arts, and math 2. What followed was well over an hour of public comment: a long, mostly unbroken procession of speakers, the clear majority of them elementary- and middle-school-age children reading prepared remarks, punctuated by parents, a handful of current and former educators, and the school's founding group of parent-petitioners.

Why children and families showed up

The hearing opened with one of the evening's first speakers, a self-described high schooler, telling the board "I know the importance of school choice," describing how attending a school of choice had shaped his own education and expressing hope that his younger siblings would have the same option 3. That theme — wanting for younger siblings, or for the whole community, what a speaker felt they had personally gained from school choice — repeated across dozens of turns at the podium that evening.

Younger children spoke about specific draws of the proposed school. One elementary-age speaker said technology "is future for all of us" and described looking forward to a hands-on STEAM lab 4. Another spoke about gender and science, telling the board that "girls can do anything boys can do" and arguing that more girls would pursue engineering and science if they were shown early on that those fields were open to them 5.

The pitch from the school's founders

The petition's own founding parents took the podium in sequence to lay out the case in detail. One lead petitioner, describing a professional and academic background in the sciences, argued that STEAM was not simply a subject but a philosophy meant to run through everything the school does — an approach intended to give students the interdisciplinary skills she said the 21st century demands, drawing on partnerships she described with university engineering programs and industry 6.

A parent of a child with a rare medical condition described the school's planned special-education approach in detail: a full-inclusion model, referred to internally as "the think tank," meant to "embrace all student differences as part of our school culture" and to fully integrate students with disabilities into the school's general programs in line with state and federal law 7.

Another founding parent described the outreach effort behind the petition — walking the streets near a nearby elementary school on four separate occasions, recruiting bilingual volunteers, producing materials in Spanish and English, and setting up information tables at local supermarkets to reach families who might not otherwise hear about the option 8. Petitioners also described the petition's governance structure, which would require that a fixed minimum of the school's board seats always be held by parents of currently enrolled students 9. One founding parent said the group had offered to fund a paid liaison position with the district, at a salary of up to $150,000 a year, to keep communication open 10.

Speakers were consistent that the effort was unpaid and personal: several petitioners told the board there was no financial motive behind the petition, framing it instead as a volunteer project by parents who wanted another educational option in the community. A number of speakers also placed the petition in the context of the district's recent loss of Oxford Preparatory Academy, describing themselves as families connected to that closed school who wanted to rebuild something for the community.

Not every comment was purely celebratory. Late in the hearing, one speaker who said she was not a petitioner herself — "I'm not a petitioner. I'm nobody," she told the board — asked the board to work with the petitioners to fix any problems in the petition rather than deny it outright, saying she was saddened by what she understood the staff's recommendation to be 11.

After the run of public comment, the board closed the Allegiance hearing without taking a vote that night 12.

The Sycamore Preparatory Academy Hearing

The board then opened a second public hearing, on the Sycamore Preparatory Academy charter petition 13. Only two people spoke, and both pushed back directly on the staff recommendation to deny the petition.

A representative of the California Charter Schools Association argued that several of the staff's stated reasons for recommending denial were not legally valid grounds under the Education Code — for example, faulting the petition's budget for not including a specific state startup grant that had not yet been released, or objecting to language about the petition's instructional theory as a matter of staff preference rather than legal compliance. "At best they are opinions," the representative told the board, "at worse they are lies" 14.

The petition's lead petitioner spoke next, disputing the staff's finding of insufficient public support. "We submitted more than the required number of parent signatures with our petition," she said, "that in itself demonstrates public support," and cited a separate facilities request that she said had drawn hundreds more signatures 15. She also challenged the specific schools the district had used for academic comparison, arguing they weren't the schools her students would otherwise attend and weren't demographically comparable to her existing school's population 16, and said her school's academic results outperformed those comparison schools while serving a meaningfully larger share of students in special education 17.

After the two speakers finished, the board took a motion, seconded it, and voted to deny the Sycamore Preparatory Academy petition 1718.

Context: A District Wary After Oxford's Collapse

Both petitions arrived in the shadow of the same recent event. The district's prior charter operator at that site had its charter renewal rejected in 2016 and closed in June 2017 after its founder was found to have diverted several million dollars in funds; the closure displaced students and left a wave of would-be charter founders — including, by their own account that night, several of Allegiance's petitioners — looking to build something new for the same community 19.

The board's posture that fall reflected real caution about anything resembling a successor to that closed school: a different charter proposal explicitly framed as a revival of the same campus was rejected the week before this meeting 20. Allegiance STEAM Academy Thrive would go on to win conditional approval from the board about a month after this hearing. Sycamore Preparatory Academy's petition, by contrast, was turned down by the district board on more than one occasion; the charter later won approval at the county level and opened to students beginning in the 2019–2020 school year 21.