McKinley Elementary parents and organizers seeking to convert the school into a charter school have won the first round of parent trigger litigation.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction Thursday preventing Compton Unified officials from verifying petition signatures in ways that the parents asserted violated their constitutional rights.
Judge Robert O’Brien ruled that the district cannot require parents to show up in person to verify their signatures and to present an official photo ID. He didn’t rule on the parents’ request to require the district to verify signatures by comparing parents’ petition signatures with those on file with the district and to phone parents only when they couldn’t verify the signatures.
Parent Revolution, a non-profit whose workers organized the parents, collected the signatures of 62 percent of the school’s parents, although some are now in dispute, as both sides accuse one another of misleading tactics and coercion. A majority of parents of students must sign the petition demanding a turnaround strategy in order for the district’s school board to act on it. McKinley is among the lowest performing 10 percent of schools in the state.
This is the first petition to be filed under the year-old parent trigger law.
Pro bono attorneys for the parents are suing the district, charging that Compton Unified first violated children’s constitutional right to a quality education and then, through harassing tactics and excessive requirements for signature verification, denied their First Amendment rights to remedy a bad education.
The district (which can hardly afford more extensive litigation) issued a statement expressing confidence in its position.
McKinley parents acted on temporary parent trigger regulations that the State School Board adopted last fall. Next week, the Board will discuss proposed permanent rules on the parent trigger process, although it’s not expected to take immediate action.
