Jeff Sweeney is Fillmore Unified School District's Superientendent.

After months of controversy and outspoken community opposition to the petition to convert Piru Elementary School in the Fillmore Unified School District (FUSD) to the Piru Charter School (PCS), the State Board of Education (SBE) will make the final decision on the charter in early May. Started by a small group of only nine teachers, and with minimal community and parent support, the PCS charter was unanimously denied by the FUSD Governing Board and the Ventura County Board of Education.
The PCS charter proposes serving the same students who currently attend Piru Elementary. The charter specifically proclaims that PCS already has “strong parent support.” However, the petitioners fatally miscalculated the amount of parental support. Since September Piru parents have made very clear that they actively and overwhelmingly oppose the conversion to PCS and will not send their children to PCS should it be approved.
Hundreds of parents, and the vast majority of District employees, have expressed their opposition by signing petitions and/or appearing in person at FUSD and County board meetings. They did so again earlier this month at a hearing in Sacramento before the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools (ACCS), a purely advisory state body.
Piru Parents with Power, a grassroots organization, submitted a petition to the ACCS opposing PCS. This petition was signed by 260 parents/guardians, representing 200 current Piru Elementary School students.
Amazingly, approximately 60 parents/guardians, Piru community members, and FUSD employees also made the long trek to Sacramento to assure that their opposition to PCS was made known. Most of them got to Sacramento on a private bus, paid for through their own community fundraising efforts, including taco and garage sales.
PCS continues to try unsuccessfully to convince the State that the parental support they claimed in the charter exists. PCS recently submitted outdated intent to enroll forms, despite knowing that many of the parents who had originally signed the forms had specifically withdrawn their interest in enrolling their children at PCS. PCS also submitted numerous letters of support, but despite PCS’s unrelenting efforts to garner local parent support, only 14 of those letters, representing 26 students, are actually from parents whose children currently attend Piru Elementary.
PCS continues its quest to divert attention from the deficiencies in the charter and the massive opposition to PCS by trying to cast FUSD as the villain. PCS has repeatedly claimed that FUSD has masterminded the opposition, allegedly providing misinformation and manipulating the parents and the community. PCS’s repeated and unsupported assertions that the Piru community has been manipulated into opposing PCS and/or that they will actually enroll their children at PCS despite their statements to the contrary, condescends to that community and ignores their capacity to make their own decisions.
PCS is correct that the FUSD opposes the PCS conversion request, but is absolutely wrong about why. First, FUSD opposes the charter because it is flawed and legally deficient. Additionally, the budget and financial documents are unrealistic and unworkable. Also, the overwhelming parental opposition to the charter proves that the proposal in PCS’s charter will not be implemented.
The ACCS ultimately voted 5 to 2, with a sharp dissent based on the charter’s deficiencies, to recommend that PCS be approved. ACCS’s recommendation is contingent on numerous conditions, including a whole host of additions and revisions to the charter. Even the ACCS members who voted to recommend that the charter be approved voiced concerns, specifically including budget and educational issues, as well as significant concerns about the parental opposition to PCS. One ACCS member summarized by stating, “This school simply does not rise to the level of a school going to the state board.”
Unfortunately, we believe the ACCS recommendation of approval was based on an apparent mistaken belief that it could not recommend denial of the charter on the basis of parent opposition. What the ACCS members failed to acknowledge is the direct link between this opposition and the fact that without the support and, ultimately, the enrollment of these families, PCS is doomed to fail to meet its charter’s stated purpose: To educate the Piru area students.
It should be clear to everyone that a small group of teachers does not and should not have the power to take a neighborhood school away from its students. Such an outcome would contradict the purpose of public education − to educate students − as well as the charter school movement and the new Race to the Top program, both of which call for parental empowerment.
FUSD representatives, numerous Piru parents, FUSD employees, and community members will be making one more trip to Sacramento in May when the SBE considers the PCS charter. We continue to have faith that this fatally deficient charter, which has created such controversy in our community, will again be denied on appeal. We believe that such a result will be in the best interests of the Piru students.