CHARTER SCHOOLS: September 2010 Archives

ICEF Public Schools, the operator of 15 charter campuses mostly in South Los Angeles, is facing financial insolvency, according to reporting today from the LA Times' Howard Blume. A group of big-name L.A. philanthropists are rallying to save the charter management organization.

ICEF runs two schools in Inglewood: ICEF Inglewood Middle Academy and ICEF Inglewood Elementary Academy. Both opened in September 2009 and are chartered by Inglewood Unified.

Billionaire businessman Eli Broad and former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan are working with a group of local philanthropists to save the respected charter management organization, which faced a $2 million deficit this year, Blume says. Riordan will become chairman of the ICEF board, and Caprice Young, former head of the statewide California Charter School Association, will take over as part-time CEO. Founder Mike Piscal will remain to oversee academic programs, Blume reports.

Riordan is contributing $100,000; Broad $500,000, and philanthropist Frank Baxter $100,000--jump-starting a short-term $3-million campaign to stabilize ICEF. All are longtime supporters of charters and frequent critics of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

ICEF is one of the groups that have applied to run South Region High School No. 4, a new campus that's rising in Long Beach. Still under construction, the campus is set to accommodate about 1,800 students from Banning and Carson high schools.

As I reported in a story that ran over the weekend, LAUSD officials are in the process of writing a plan to retain control of the campus, which is subject to the Public School Choice process that lets outside groups bid to control new and troubled campuses.

ICEF has also applied for control of seven other campuses under this year's Public School Choice 2.0. Three of those schools were recently removed from takeover consideration because of marked improvement on API results earlier this month.

Apparently ICEF's quick expansion over the past decade contributed to its financial troubles, Blume writes. It's not clear how or whether the current restructuring will affect ICEF's bids for Public School Choice campuses.

Port of Los Angeles High School in San Pedro received a boost from local dignitaries on Wednesday, with the visit of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilwoman Janice Hahn and City Attorney Carmen Trutanich.

School official say they have the support of the trio in seeking to purchase their campus from a powerful landowner: the Port of Los Angeles.

School Executive Director Jim Cross said he believes the Harbor Commission will vote early next month on the school's offer to purchase its building, a former shipping company office structure on West Fifth Street. To the frustration of POLAHS officials, there have been multiple delays since negotiations began in fall 2008.

Cross and other POLAHS officials consider the building's purchase vital to the future of the six-year-old charter school. It currently pays about $800,000 per year in rent to the port.

Meanwhile, the school this fall is celebrating having reached its goal enrollment of 850, and recent achievements on state tests.

It earned an API of 778 this week -- a gain of 47 points that it put it well above all of LAUSD's traditional comprehensive high schools in the South Bay and Harbor Area. In results released in August, POLAHS also outperformed those campuses on results from the California High School Exit Exam: 93 percent of 10th graders passed the English section on their first try, and 91 percent passed math.

Next Wednesday, the school will host a ceremony marking the dedication of a new science classroom to FTR, the firm building the new port police headquarters next door. FTR made an in-kind donation of about $90,000 to the school by constructing a new sewer line. The dedication is the fifth such ceremony for the school, which recently built five new classrooms on its once-empty second-floor space.