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Alarmed by what he fears will become a flood of high schools seeking to break away from the Los Angeles school district, Superintendent Roy Romer called last week for creating some type of "charter district" within the nation's second-largest school system.
In a closely watched controversy that has been complicated by racial tensions, Mr. Romer has raised strong objections in recent weeks to plans by three large, relatively high-performing high schools to cut loose from the 750,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District and become autonomous, publicly financed charter schools.
Following the Los Angeles school board's vote last week to grant independence to two of those schools, Mr. Romer said he wants to find "some way to develop some kind of charter district of our own" as an alternative to the current process to convert existing public schools to charters.
"I take this present method as a very serious threat to the whole district; therefore, I have to seriously think of an alternative," he said in an interview with Education Week. "What I'm saying is if everybody wants to go this charter route, then let's network the charters. I'm just really worried about the piecemeal thing."
Mr. Romer's comments followed a May 13 meeting at which the district's seven-member board voted 5-1, with one abstention, to grant a one-year charter to Granada Hills High School in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. With more than 3,800 students, it will become the largest existing school in the nation to convert to charter status, and the nation's largest single-campus, bricks-and-mortar charter school, experts say.
The school board also agreed to let another relatively high-performing school-the 2,400-student Palisades Charter High School in the Westside section of the city-switch its status from an "affiliated" to an independent charter school, thereby freeing it from district personnel, budgetary, and other policies. The vote was identical to that on Granada Hills High, with the board's only African-American member voting no and its sole Hispanic member abstaining.
As unhappy as Mr. Romer and other top district officials were to see those schools leave, they hope the conversions will spur the district to address a trend that they see as having major repercussions for the system's long-term educational and fiscal viability.
"Nobody has...