L.A. District Sued for Not Allowing Transfer : Education: A Watts mother wants her son to go to a ‘safe’ school outside their gang-plagued neighborhood.

A Watts mother of 10 has filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Los Angeles Unified School District for refusing to allow her son to attend a junior high school outside the gang-plagued neighborhood where they live.

The complaint, filed with the Department of Justice, alleges that the district violated Linda Lofton’s right to “educate her child in a safe environment conducive to learning” when it would not bus her son away from his neighborhood to Nobel Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley.

Lofton said she has kept her 12-year-old son, Ramon Atchison, at home since the beginning of the school year rather than send him to the local Charles Drew Junior High School.

“Things are bad, real bad,” she said. “In our neighborhood there is always shooting. It’s not safe. I just recently sent him to the store and some kids jumped Ramon, hit him on the head for fun and told him to ‘watch your back.’ I would love to send him to the neighborhood school, but I can’t, not if I care about his life.”

School officials said Friday that Lofton must enroll her child in Drew before they can consider permitting him to transfer.

“What we have is a non-enrollee,” said Charles Palmer, the district’s administrator for the area where Lofton lives. “She simply wants to transfer her child without first enrolling him. State law requires that the kid has to be enrolled. The school in her neighborhood has never had the child there on campus to be able to do anything for him.”

Even if Lofton enrolls her son at Drew, he would not attend school there because of overcrowding, Palmer said, but would be bused to Mt. Gleason Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley.

“But that is not what she wants,” Palmer said. “She wants to pick her own school.”

The children of Lofton, 35, range in age from 2 to 14. Of the seven who are of school age, three attend Lomita Magnet School in the Harbor area and two attend a local elementary school. Lofton said she would prefer that Ramon, who graduated last year from Lomita, go to Nobel, where her eldest son, Robert Atchison, 14, is a student.

Ezola Foster, chairwoman of Black Americans for Family Values, a Watts-based group that filed the complaint Thursday on behalf of Lofton, said the worried mother is like many other South-Central Los Angeles parents who have turned to busing as a way to save their children from the streets.

“It’s terrible, and when you ask the school district for help they ignore you,” she said. “She (Lofton) has been trying since the first day of school to enroll her child in a safe school, but she has been insulted and ridiculed and sent from one office to the next in violation of her rights.”

Foster’s group filed similar complaints in February on behalf of parents at Jordan High School in Watts, who eventually were granted transfers for their children.

Joyce Brown, principal at Drew, said her school is no different from any other school in the district. “We have occasional gang problems,” she said. “(But) most of the kids are good kids, 98% are normal kids with average everyday problems. Our school is safe. If it weren’t safe, we wouldn’t be here.”