‘Charter’ School Law Perplexes Officials : Education: A Pacoima elementary may be one of the first to become largely self-regulated under the reform.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials, tackling a broad but vague new law that allows campuses to free themselves from local district control, said Thursday that they are embarking on an educational reform test in which there are pages of thorny questions but no ready answers.

“There are no answers--it’s uncharted grounds,” Joseph Rao of the district’s office of instruction told school board members at a meeting of the Education Reform, Restructuring and Curriculum Committee. “And it’s in your hands.”

Rao briefed the committee on California’s new “charter” school law, which allows up to 100 taxpayer-financed campuses to exempt themselves from nearly all local and state educational regulations to become largely self-regulating bodies.

At issue are a host of difficult problems would-be charter schools must negotiate with the school board, including who would be liable for student injuries on campus, the contractual relationship between the district and its employees and other operational matters. The new legislation, which takes effect Jan. 1, charges the schools and the district with sorting out those details.

Rao told the committee that the answers to those questions will be difficult to come by until charter petitions are submitted by schools.

Vaughn Street Elementary School in Pacoima, where teachers voted last week to draft a charter petition, may be among the first to submit such a petition. A magnet school on the Westside and a Los Angeles alternative education center also have begun writing petitions, officials said.

“It’s so vague,” board member Julie Korenstein said of the legislation, approved by state lawmakers last September. “There are so many loopholes.”

The law requires the school board to vote on the charter petitions, which are to be crafted by school personnel and must win support from a majority of a school’s faculty. The charter must spell out the school’s educational goals, its curriculum and how it is to be governed.

But the legislation does not tell the school board what criteria to use in judging a charter request, except that the level of support for the proposal by teachers and parents should be considered. In addition, schools serving low-achieving students are to get preference over those that do not.

The school board also may revoke a charter during its five-year duration if campus officials mishandle their finances or fail to meet their educational goals. Financing for the schools comes from the state through the district, in what officials described as an “umbilical cord” arrangement.

Petitioning campus personnel may appeal a denial of their proposal to the county office of education.

If they are allowed to become charter schools, however, the campuses would tailor their educational programs to their students without being regulated by the state’s 6,000-page education code.

“That code governs everything from teaching kids to be kind to animals to how much square footage you need to allow per child,” said Sue Burr, a consultant with the state Senate Education Committee who helped draft the legislation in response to complaints from educators about such “prescriptive” regulations.

“We’re going to . . . let you show that getting rid of them will enhance the process of learning,” she said.

Burr said the state has no model charter school in mind and that petitioning campuses can be as radical or as conservative as they wish in their proposals. Each campus can decide how it would hire staff, evaluate its students and administer teacher pay, health care and retirement benefits.

The only requirements are that charter school students must take certain statewide standardized tests and that the schools cannot contravene federal and state case law banning discrimination based on ethnicity, sex, disability and religious beliefs.

Los Angeles teachers union representatives said this week that they also are studying the law and advising schools such as Vaughn Street about what issues to consider as they draft petitions.

“At this point we’re as fuzzy about this process as anybody else,” said union Vice President John Perez. “We’re not going to stand in anyone’s way who wants to do this. What we’re doing is informing them of the pitfalls of this overly broad law that allows so much leeway that important things can get lost in the cracks, like a person’s health benefits, seniority, and the right to due process if somebody wants to fire you.”

Meanwhile, the district committee also received a report prompted by board member Roberta Weintraub’s motion last September calling on the district to reconsider its year-round calendar. The board is scheduled to take action on the issue next month.