Bullis Charter School

People should not lose sight of the main effect of Bullis Charter School as it has grown over the last 9-10 years. There has been growth in the district, and the district reopened a 7th elementary school during that time. This was Covington, which is the biggest elementary school parcel of land so it allows for a lot of growth. There were just 3900 kids in LASD back between 1999-2004 and now today with Bullis included, there are around 4900 in district students in LASD. 480-580 or so attend BCS this year and next, from inside LASD. So basically, BCS has handled around half of the student growth during that time. Without BCS, LASD would have needed to hire around 30 more teachers and administrators, and a lot more support staff too. So the idea of blaming BCS for growing and trying to take over is not logical. It may be attracting back 10% or 20% of its students from Private school, but that's not clear, nor is it a clear bad thing. It operates as one school and draws students from every neighborhood of the district. It provides an option to offload all of the LASD campuses at once, and this has benefit several of them that would otherwise be deemed by LASD to be overcrowded. A lot of people are aghast that the fairly affluent parents found overall in LASD are availing themselves of the state laws which allow them to form and attend a charter school. I don't see this point. Because the district is overwhelmingly affluent, it doesn't seem to me that it harms anyone for this choice to exist. There are arguments that it attracts the cream of the crop, but it seems likely that LASD is truly largely cream. True, there are 100 or so special education students in LASD that are extremely expensive to educate, and BCS is not attracting any of these students. But BCS only gets about half of the funding per student that LASD has, so that leaves behind $4,000 to $5,000 per BCS students. The cost of the SDC special education program is about $1000 per LASD student (4500), so BCS is contributing or leaving back more than enough to fund its share of this important cost. In the end, the facilities issues will apparently be decided by the courts. The law just says that the charter students deserve a share of whatever level of facilities LASD can afford. LASD spends a lot on facilities. It has enough to rent space to several preschools on district campuses. I suspect the courts will require that LASD share equal space with BCS, but in the meantime, we do not have a problem caused by BCS growing. We have a problem caused by LASD's failure to creatively utilize all the many acres of land that it owns. Covington for example is 16 acres in size and LASD uses much of it for overhead functions not related to the school. Even without BCS, LASD should be looking to better utilize Covington. Many, many districts have located 2 schools on one site, and to me this seems to be the best option for Covington, and perhaps Santa Rita and Egan, in order to handle the LASD population growth. If it can afford to buy land, it should buy some land in the North of El Camino Area, but that would be very expensive and it would require more organization that LASD has demonstrated in creatively accommodating the district growth to date. Were it not for BCS, LASD would be in quite a pickle with its current student count.