Court sides with parents in battle with district over lousy school

Officials fought parents for years to keep children in a failing Anaheim school

Parent-trigger warning

In 2015 parents at the Palm Lane Elementary School of the Anaheim City School District turned in far more signatures than needed under the Parent Trigger Law (authored by former State Sen. Gloria Romero as Ed. Code sections 53300-53303). The goal of the law and the parents at Palm Lane was to convert a public school that had failed their children for over a decade into a charter school.

But the district, as a pretext to denying the Parent’s Petitions, improperly disallowed many signatures. The process of killing signatures struck trial court Judge Andrew Banks as “procedurally unfair, unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious.”

Judge Banks also found the district had ignored many attempts by parents and Romero to cooperate with the district to confirm all of the signatures turned in. The law requires the district to work with the parents when they turn in a petition to convert the school into a charter school.

On Friday, April 28, the Court of Appeals issued a 34-page opinion that upheld in full the trial court’s ruling in favor of the parents and against the Anaheim Elementary School District. The Appeals Court found the trial court’s ruling, including the court’s findings of the bad faith tactics of the district, was correct in all aspects.

This Appeals Court ruling is an important rebuke to heavy-handed school boards and administrators who may attempt to deny such a petition using similar tactics. Districts cannot use bad-faith methods to ignore their duties under the law to cooperate and help the parents achieve their goal of obtaining a better education for their children under California’s Parent Trigger Law.

CPC congratulates the Parents of Palm Lane and their legal counsel at Kirkland & Ellis.

Craig Alexander is General Counsel for California Policy Center, Inc.