In a huge victory for parents in Los Angeles and throughout California, the
California State Board of Education approved emergency regulations
for the Parent Trigger. These regulations, which lay out clear and common
sense rules and guidelines for how parents can go about using the Parent
Trigger, were critical for empowering parents to actually use this new law.
The parent trigger is an historic new law that allows parents to transform
their failing neighborhood school simply through community organizing.
Specifically, if half the parents sign a petition, they can trigger radical
changes, including bringing in new leadership and staff, or converting their
school into a charter school.
For the first time in the history of america, parents now have the power to
transform schools that have been failing neighborhoods and communities for
generations — and in doing so give their children the education they need
and the future they deserve.
A large group of parents and community leaders most of them traveling all
the way from Los Angeles spoke passionately before the Board, urging them
to pass the regulations immediately. Parents from every corner of Los
Angeles the Valley, Westchester, Southeast Cities, and South LA spoke
about their ongoing efforts to organize parents at their schools for change,
and how badly they needed the regulations in order to establish clear rules
of the game. As Reverend K.W. Tulloss of the Weller Street Baptist Ministry
put it, "How can you ask me to play baseball without giving me a bat?"
The regulations establish several very important rules for parent
organizing, including provisions that ensured single parents and foster
parents an equal voice in the process, gave parents the power to choose
exactly which charter or in-district partner would help turn around their
school, and established guidelines to ensure the actual petitions would be
legally formatted and not thrown out on a technicality.
Some defenders of the status quo, of course, wanted nothing more than to
slow down this process. Again and again, lobbyists representing bureaucrats
and other special interests claimed there was no "emergency," that all of
this could wait another year or two. But their voices, for once, were
drowned out by real parents parents whose children are stuck in these
failing schools, and who are desperate for change. For parents, there is no
greater emergency than even a single year of their child stuck in a failing
school.
By passing these regulations, along with Open Enrollment rules allowing
parents to transfer out of the lowest performing schools in California, the
State Board took a giant step forward in parent empowerment yesterday.
There are many challenges and roadblocks remaining, but parents are now one
step closer to having the power to give their children the education they
need for the future they deserve.