A Very Special School Is Threatened Again

“We are not going to continue to merely sit back and watch our students, staff, and community suffer. We understand our rights.”

– The Lokrantz Community

My reputation as an independent journalist who covers the LAUSD in ways that the corporate media will not has resulted in the receipt of some interesting pieces of mailing coming into my inbox. Some, like the copies of email messages sent by David Fehte to parents at El Camino Real Charter School just before the Daily News released an article exposing corruption at the school piqued my curiosity and fueled my coverage of the scandal. The copy of the lawsuit against North Valley Military Institute made my blood boil. Last week when I received a copy of an email sent to LAUSD Board Members from members of the Lokrantz community it brought tears to my eyes.

Lokrantz is a Special Education Center that serves the District’s most vulnerable students, many of whom have severe health challenges. The campus was built to be physically welcoming to these students and to meet their needs. The first thing that I noticed when I visited the school was that the curbs in the bus drop-off area were even with the door of the bus to accommodate students with mobility issues. The campus includes a hydrotherapy pool and facilities for physical therapy. The playground is wheelchair accessible.

When I first ran for School Board in 2015, the incumbent, Tamar Galatzan, was pushing to close the campus to force the students onto general education campuses. With the election of Scott Schmerelson, the school found a champion, but parents still had to file a lawsuit against a School District that claimed that “special education centers are unnecessary because the District can ‘provide all supports and services...at a general education site”.

In the years that followed, the school began to once again flourish. The last time I attended an event at the school, the principal announced that they were looking to expand the age ranges that could be serviced on the campus. Unfortunately, the COVID crisis provided an opportunity for foes of the school within the LAUSD bureaucracy to attack the school once again.

With each of the students requiring specialized assistance, the operations of Lokrantz are extremely complex and require a strong principal who is experienced with the services that these children require. The District decided, instead, to make the school share a principal with another campus. Even worse, the other school the current principal is assigned to is a Career Transition Center, which also has a student body with specialized needs that require a full time principal.

The lack of full-time leadership is contributing to the decay of the campus facilities. According to the letter sent to the Board of Education, the “therapy pool has been broken for many, many years with no real progress being made to fix it.” The “much-loved playground is falling apart” with a replacement for a broken piece of equipment “sitting in the local district parking lot for a year.”

The student body is once again shrinking with only 50 students currently attending the school. According to the community, the district staff is once again being told to not offer this highly qualified school to parents during the IEP process. Reportedly local district offices are telling parents that Lokrantz is “not an option.”

To make matters worse, the school’s advocate is no longer its Board Member. The shifting borders from the redistricting process places the school in Nick Melvoin’s Board District 4. This is the same board member who tried to kick a CTC off another campus to make room for a vanity project.

A week after reading the email, my sadness has been replaced by anger, as this school should have already been protected. My proposed “Improving Special Education Within the LAUSD” resolution was influenced in part by past battles fought to keep this school open, including the requirement “that the Special Education Centers will continue to be operated on specialized campuses, will be fully funded, and will not be co-located on general education campuses.”

Another aspect of the proposed resolution would require that a magnet school serving students who have an interest in careers related to special education be created to operate on a Special Education Center campus. With enrollment declining at Lokrantz, district staff has moved into areas that are not being used for classroom space. This space could have been used instead for the magnet school which would have satisfied the goal of promoting inclusion in a way that allowed children with special education needs to maintain access to facilities created especially for them.

I have brought the idea of a magnet to Board Member Schmerelson on several occasions and each time he has agreed to look into the concept without taking further action. He also remarked that the idea sounded “like a fantastic new frontier that should be opened in the LAUSD Magnet program” in his candidate questionnaire for the 2020 election.

During the last election, Dr. Rocio Rivas, the representative for Board District 2, agreed to sponsor and support the proposed Special Education resolution. She also stated that the concept of a special education related magnet school was “an idea worth exploring.”

The community at Lokrantz needs your help in persuading the Board to take immediate action. Please contact your representative (look up your Board District here) and ask for them to assist in keeping this and all the other Special Education centers fully funded and available as an option during IEP’s. Also, if you have not done so already, please sign the petition asking the board to pass the proposed “Improving Special Education” resolution.

• Board District 1: (213) 241–6382 [email protected]

• Board District 2: (213) 241–6020 [email protected]

• Board District 3: (213)241–8333 [email protected]

• Board District 4: (213) 241–6387 [email protected]

• Board District 5: (213) 241–5555 [email protected]

• Board District 6: (213) 241–6388 [email protected]

• Board District 7: (213) 241–6385 [email protected]

This is the letter that was sent to the LAUSD Board by the Lokrantz community:

Dear Board Members,

​​The parents, staff, and students of Lokrantz need your support immediately. For many years now our school community has suffered. We do not get the support or frankly the respect we deserve. We are not going to continue to merely sit back and watch our students, staff, and community suffer. We understand our rights. Please take the time to read over these important comments from our community. We should not be worried year after year of our campus closing or losing its valuable resources and supports.

​While you read this and I hope you read it all the way thru, keep in mind that Lokrantz serves the “neediest” of LAUSDs students and they do it well, full of love and dedication to the school and students while working tirelessly with no recognition or appreciation. Years ago there were hundreds of students enrolled in programs at Lokrantz Special Education Center but now it has dwindled to less than 55 students. We now only have one type of program to serve our medically fragile students with multiple disabilities. In the past, Lokrantz SEC served students with many different levels of needs. We now only have 7 classes for students with multiple disabilities (all labeled MDO) BUT this campus is a perfect fit for many alternative curriculum classes like AUT-ALT, ID, ED, PSC, and many more. All our “empty” space has been taken over by district staff. Leaving the campus to be run more like a district office than a school. Kids are no longer at the center of the campus but simply occupy a small portion of classrooms. This is simply heartbreaking.

​ For those who are not familiar with Lokrantz’s campus, it was built for these students specifically. I urge you to come visit or simply google Lokrantz to see the unique history and value it has to offer our students and district. The whole campus is welcoming and wheelchair accessible. There is a full-time nurse as well as many health care professionals on-site for the students. There is even a medical therapy unit on site so parents don’t have to go far to get them the physical therapy and medical attention our students need. Another fun fact is that the district often sends newly hired employees such as LVNs and nurses, to our campus to observe and be trained by what we (and I am sure I am being a bit biased) consider to be the experts with these students and their unique needs. Yet over and over again this community is disrespected and ignored.

​ During the pandemic, it was decided that Lokrantz would SHARE a principal with a local CTC that is located on another campus. We have given it a chance now for a couple of years but it is NOT working. We are already on our second principal in 3 yrs.

​ Before moving on, may I also point out that Lokrantz is a LIS which means it is an LAUSD Local Initiative School which among many things means we should have had a say in the hiring of principals and other key staff, which the school most definitely did not. We should also have a Local School Leadership Council (LSLC) which we do not have. This is a shared decision-making body, composed of elected parents, community members, school personnel, and students which should be in place but has NOT been in place for many years now. This is a violation of our community's rights and we want this error or oversight to be addressed immediately. Asking a principal to be in charge of two schools is ridiculous and impossible, especially for a school as unique as Lokrantz. Each school deserves its own principal no matter how big or small. Currently, the principal is on our campus ONE day a week (don’t let her tell you otherwise. This is a fact and there have been many weeks she has not been on campus AT All!) and when she is on campus our experience is that she never leaves her office. She flat-out ignores staff and parents' requests to meet with her among many other actions that lead us to believe she is not a good fit for our school. I dare you to see if she even knows any of the students' names. We doubt it.

​ Yes, Lokrantz has 50 students but each student equals 5 to 10 (or more) “typical students”. On paper, I am sure Lokrantz looks like a money pit because our students have so many needs but honestly the district needs to understand that Lokrantz is saving them money by dealing with these students that others schools simply can not.

​ I urge you to speak to families, staff, and administration to get the real truth about what is happening at Lokrantz. The morale is at an all-time low. If these students were on a typical campus it simply would not work. It would be much more expensive. For example, due process cases would rise and the need to update campuses and purchase needed equipment and staff would be nonstop. Why do that when parents WANT their students at Lokrantz?

​ That leads me to ask you - Why is Lokrantz such a secret in the district? District staff has no idea we exist and if they do know they are terrified to mention us to parents because they have been told by local district offices that we are “not an option”. The district pushes for LRE but for many students, Lokrantz is their LRE. We realize that Inclusion is a HUGE priority for the district, wanting 80% of all students with IEPs to be in Gen Ed classes for 80% of the school day. That is simply ridiculous. Inclusion is not for all students. Again it is not one size fits all. Again I urge you to visit Lokrantz and see why it is the place for our students (and many more in the valley).

​ Let’s look at why Lokrantz needs your support and attention. The community has been fighting to get many programs and supports back that have gone away under the last couple of principals. For example, our therapy pool has been broken for many many years with no real progress being made to fix it, CSUN music no longer offers its unique and valuable music therapy program on our campus, and our much-loved playground is falling apart. Especially our much loved “merry-go-round” that was broken by kids in the local area and has sat broken for years now. There is no excuse for this since a new merry-go-round was purchased and has been sitting in the local district parking lot for a year! This is inexcusable. Also, the MOVE program is a needed program that has successfully run on the campus for many many years but since the pandemic, no new training has been given to the many new staff members. At this point, most staff is no longer comfortable with using this program. This is heartbreaking as this program is a key part of the Lokrantz philosophy and NEEDs to be consistently used in all classes on campus. There are so many things that had once made Lokrantz a specialized and unique school for our most fragile students that have simply disappeared. Have we addressed this with the principal you ask? That is a resounding YES and nothing has changed.

​ This brings us back to the need for a principal who is solely responsible for Lokrantz. A principal who will fight for what our students deserve. We can not function without a principal who is equipped to serve our very unique population. This person has to be passionate about Lokrantz and has to have unique experience and interest in our students and their success. This is currently far from the case. PLEASE we beg you to look into this and support us. We ask for the recall of this principal and for the community to be included in the hiring of a full-time principal who has a shared vision of the future of Lokrantz and its community.

​ Thank you for your time and attention to this very important matter.

​ The Lokrantz Community

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Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs. He was elected to the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and is the Education Chair. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.