After months of searching for a Mar Vista-Venice area location, organizers of a pilot school are happy that they have been accepted at Playa Vista Elementary School for 2013-14.
“I’m very happy,” said Sujata Bhatt, a teacher at Grand View Elementary School in Mar Vista who designed the so-called Incubator School. “I’m looking at the magnitude of work ahead of me, but it’s very exciting.”
Pilot schools are a combination of charter schools and traditional public schools. They have the freedoms of charter schools but are under direct school district control. They tend to focus on a particular theme and the Incubator School’s is geared toward entrepreneurship.
The Incubator School has received hundreds of letters of support from parents of potential students and Bhatt hoped to originally set up shop on the campus of Venice High School.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education approved three pilot schools March 9, including Bhatt’s. But an amendment by LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer, who represents District 4 schools, made sharing the campus with Venice High possible only if the school-based management group, parents and teachers at the high school voted in favor of it.
A deadline of April 2 was given and the school-based management group could not reach a quorum March 29, leaving the Incubator School to search for a new location.
“We are so grateful to Playa Vista. They have been so open and welcoming,” said Bhatt, a nationally certified teacher.
A large contingent of parents at the high school were opposed to proposal for the Incubator School, described as a “21st century learning community, engaging both students and teachers in active learning designed to address the dynamic complexities of the world in which we live.”
Bhatt will transfer from Grand View in order to be at her new school by August.
“I am also so grateful to our parent community for their outpouring of support and their help in securing our new facility,” she said.
The Incubator School will be at Playa Vista for only one year, which is why Bhatt’s search for a more permanent location has not ended, she said.
“Our goal is to be in the Venice-Mar Vista area,” she reiterated.
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Good luck to the Incubator School. Access to appropriate facilities remains one of the most daunting challenges to schools chartered in the Los Angeles area, regardless of the will of the voters, as Mr. Zimmer’s granting of veto rights to the public’s LAUSD property at Venice High makes clear.
Thank you. We agree that access to appropriate facilities is a major issue. We’ll face it again next year as our co-location with Playa Vista is only temporary. We think it’s time the LAUSD school board led the way with a real discussion of how to manage uneven enrollment/interest in its different programs. The board needs to lead on thinking through the process of change and growth.
Agreed. L.A. Unified has been behind the curve on educational change for some years now. That may have been defensible when the district needed to focus on mere survival in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but now it appears that it will have new opportunities to return to a position of national leadership in managing educational reform, and schools like yours will, I hope, have the opportunity to help mould that reform in the right direction.