Parent Trigger Update

In a huge victory for parents in Los Angeles and throughout California, the California State Board of Education yesterday approved emergency regulations for the Parent Trigger. These regulations, which lay out clear and common sense rules and guidelines for how parents can go about using the Parent Trigger to transform their schools, were critical for empowering parents to actually use this new law. (Click here to read the Daily News article about this).
A large group of parents and community leaders from Los Angeles spoke passionately before the Board, urging them to pass the regulations immediately. Parents from all over Los Angeles - the Valley, Westchester, Southeast Cities, and South LA - spoke about their ongoing efforts to organize parents at their schools for change, and how badly they needed the regulations in order to establish clear rules of the game. As Reverend K.W. Tulloss of the Weller Street Missionary Baptist Church put it, "How can you ask me to play baseball without giving me a bat?"
The regulations establish several very important rules for parent organizing, including provisions that ensure single parents and foster parents an equal voice in the process, give parents the power to choose exactly which charter or in-district partner would help turn around their school, and establish guidelines to ensure the actual petitions would be legally formatted and not thrown out on a technicality.
Some defenders of the status quo, of course, wanted nothing more than to slow down this process. Again and again, lobbyists representing bureaucrats and other special interests claimed there was no "emergency," that all of this could wait another year or two. But their voices, for once, were drowned out by real parents - parents whose children are stuck in these failing schools, and who are desperate for change. For parents, there is no greater emergency than even a single year of their child stuck in a failing school.
By passing these regulations, along with Open Enrollment rules allowing parents to transfer out of the lowest performing schools in California, the State Board took a giant step forward in parent empowerment yesterday. We at Parent Revolution are dedicated to working with each of you to figure out how to best use these powers to help your own children get the great public education they need for the future they deserve.


*Sent by the Parent Revolution. For more information contact Lydia Grant, STNC Parent Representative at fivegrants@msn.com