SUPPORT IVY ACADEMIA'S FIGHT FOR FACILITIES

SUPPORT IVY ACADEMIA'S FIGHT FOR FACILITIES - DON'T LET $40 MILLION DOLLARS OF YOUR TAXPAYER'S MONEY GO TO WASTE!

IVY ACADEMIA PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL PROTESTS LAUSD’S REFUSAL TO ACCEPT $40 MILLION TO RE-OPEN COLLINS AND OSO AVENUE CAMPUSES FOR CHARTER SCHOOL SERVING DISTRICT STUDENTS

An October 19th Protest will demonstrate community support for RE-OPENING Collins Street and Oso Avenue sites as campuses for Ivy Academia Public Charter School.

Woodland Hills, CALIF. (October 17, 2007) – Ivy Academia Public Charter School announced today its protest of LAUSD’s refusal to allocate two of the Districts’ unused campuses to the public charter school that currently serves about 700 district students. The protest will be held on Friday, October 19, 2007 between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. at the Collins street site (5717 Rudnick Avenue, Woodland Hills CA 91367) . This is the school’s first public protest in its third year of fighting with the district for suitable facilities to educate LAUSD’s own district students.

“We are striving to create a sense of urgency throughout the community through education, social activism initiatives, and immediacy. The goal here is to acquire suitable facilities that will allow the school to meet the growing demands for its program and to demand accountability from LAUSD,” said Tatyana Berkovich, Founder and President of Ivy Academia.

The protest, with an expected turnout of 500 or more students, parents and community members, is a direct response to the district’s failure to uphold the law. Voter-approved Proposition 39 calls for school districts to allocate unused sites to qualified charter schools that apply. The California Charter School Association and several local charter schools have already filed a lawsuit against the LAUSD for failure to comply with Proposition 39. The district currently has six vacant sites in the immediate area. The two 5-acre campuses that the school has applied for have been closed for the past twenty years, providing no benefit to the community. The Los Angeles City Council has unanimously approved a motion (CP 06-2315 Zine-Reyes-Huizar) that asks LAUSD to allocate closed campuses in Woodland Hills to charter schools. Ivy Academia has applied and is eligible to receive as much as $40 million from Proposition 1D (State Bond) to rehabilitate Collins Street and Oso Avenue campuses. But this FREE MONEY from the State will be lost unless the LAUSD Board of Education acts quickly.

Ivy Academia k-12TH grade Entrepreneurial Public Charter School is a WASC-accredited, API 9, high quality charter school serving over 700 District students in grades Kindergarten through 9th. The school has an API of 848 that is higher than the API of an average district elementary school and significantly higher than the API of an average LAUSD middle school in the area, according to LAUSD’s Program Evaluation and Research Branch. The school has been the highest performing independent charter school in LAUSD for the last three years. The school has an annual waiting list that exceeds 800 students.

Ivy Academia is designed to address the critical need for innovative educational alternatives for students in the Los Angeles community. It is the goal of Ivy Academia to provide students with a rigorous standards-based program while engaging them in community studies and entrepreneurial education. The culture of the school works to create self-motivated, competent, life-long learners. The class sizes average 25.