The board made the decision at a meeting Monday night, in a room packed with students and supporters of Desert Trails Preparatory Academy, which occupies the campus of the former Desert Trails Elementary School.
“You’ve got close to 500 scholars that are Adelanto kids and they are learning,” school director Debra Tarver, who runs the LaVerne Preparatory Academy charter school in nearby Hesperia, told the board prior to the vote. “Where are we going to put them? Out on the streets?”
Prior to the changeover, Desert Trails Elementary had the worst test scores in the district and three out of four students weren’t reading at grade level, according to state records.
California’s 2010 Parent Trigger law allows parents who gather signatures from more than 50 percent of a failing school’s parents to invoke the penalties in the federal No Child Left Behind law, including the ability to hand it over to a charter school operator.
But the process bitterly split the High Desert city and led to months of legal battles. Those ended in July 2012, when San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that 97 signatures that AESD had sought to disqualify had to be included, putting parent-trigger proponents over the 50 percent mark and making the Desert Trails effort the Parent Trigger movement’s — which includes many of the major movers and shakers in California charter schools — first success.
On Monday, school supporters said the district violated the law with its short notice to the school — given the day before Thanksgiving — as did a three-year renewal cycle, rather than the five-year cycle they said state law required.
“We got a letter from their council on the night of the 18th (which) said you have to make a decision by the night of the 19th,” Tarver said Tuesday afternoon. “When you’re not there, (the charter school board) can’t have a meeting over Thanksgiving.”
District officials said they only had 60 days to vote on the issue after Tarver submitted her charter renewal application in September.
The problem isn’t with what’s happening academically at Desert Trails Prep, school board president Teresa Rogers said Tuesday, but with what’s happening administratively.
“They were back office issues, but they’re issues that need to be addressed,” Rogers said Tuesday. “We can’t rectify that and we can’t ignore it, either.”
Tarver and other officials had failed to file the necessary paperwork for multiple issues, Rogers said, putting the school and district afoul of state regulations.
“Everyone wants to make the board member the villains,” Rogers said. “We tried to rectify it, but to our surprise, they rejected it. They didn’t want that.”
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