Author: Patsy Crawford | Posted: 27. July 2012 05:57
California parents attempting to exercise the State’s 2010 “Parent Trigger Law” received a boost from a July 18, 2012 Superior Court ruling. The Parent Trigger Law empowers parents of children attending a persistently lowest-achieving school to require the local school district to implement the parents’ choice of one of four interventions, including converting the school into a charter school. Under the law, at least 50 percent of the parents must sign a petition requesting the intervention. Seventy percent of the parents of students attending Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, classified by the State as a failing school for the previous six years, signed a petition to require the Adelanto School District to convert Desert Trails into a charter school. For various reasons, as outlined in the Court’s ruling, the school district rejected a large number of the signatures, reducing the count to only 37 percent of the parents; the petition was denied. Nearly half of the signatures rejected by the school district were rejected because the district “received a number of requests from parents who assert that they signed the petition under false pretenses, misunderstood the petition, or otherwise signed the petition in error.” The school district allowed those parents to revoke their signatures. The Court ruled that it was inconsistent with State regulations and an abuse of discretion for the district to allow the revocations. As a result, the parents had sufficient signatures to require the school intervention. According to a July 23rd L.A. Times article, only two parent trigger campaigns have been launched since enactment of the law; “in both cases, some parents have revoked their initial support of the petition after the campaigns became embroiled in bitter charges and countercharges of deceit and harassment.” One stakeholder said that Court’s ruling “takes away a key tactic of defenders of the status quo: to bully and trick parents into rescinding their signature.” A July 25th Education Week article reported that seven states now have some type of parent trigger law. Some opponents believe that such laws divide communities and cast unfair blame on teachers.
