CHARTER MIDDLE SCHOOL FINDS VALLEY SITE.Byline: David R. Baker Staff Writer After a nervous summer spent searching for a home, creators of a new charter school in the northeast San Fernando Valley San Fernando Valley Valley, southern California, U.S. Northwest of central Los Angeles, the valley is bounded by the San Gabriel, Santa Susana, and Santa Monica mountains and the Simi Hills. have found a building to house their fledgling program. If all goes as planned, Community Charter Middle School will open Sept. 7 in four classrooms at California State University, Northridge CSUN offers a variety of programs leading to bachelor's degrees in 61 fields and master's degrees in 42 fields. The university has over 150,000 alumni. It's also home to a summer musical theater/theater program known as TADW (TeenAge Drama Workshop) that leads teenagers through an , before moving in October to a long-term location in San Fernando San Fernando, city, Argentina San Fernando (săn fərnăn`dō), city (1991 pop. 144,761), Buenos Aires prov., E Argentina. It is a district administrative center in the Greater Buenos Aires area. . The brief stay at CSUN CSUN California State University Northridge will give Community Charter time to put finishing touches finishing touches finish npl the finishing touches → der letzte Schliff finishing touches npl → ultimi ritocchi mpl on the other building, a former preschool at the intersection intersection /in·ter·sec·tion/ (-sek´shun) a site at which one structure crosses another. intersection a site at which one structure crosses another. of Celis and Huntington streets. Finding space for the new school hasn't been easy. In May, a site in Lake View Terrace was ruled out after school district officials learned the building also held an outpatient clinic for the mentally ill. The charter school director, Jacqueline Elliot, said she is confident there will be no similar problem at the San Fernando site. ``With everyone so involved this time, I'm sure we're going to get through this,'' she said. Los Angeles Unified School District The Los Angeles Unified School District (the "LAUSD") is the largest (in terms of number of students) public school system in California and the second-largest in the United States. Only the New York City Department of Education has a larger student population. staff officials have recommended that the board approve the school's new location. The vote is scheduled for Tuesday. Finding the San Fernando location was an immense relief, parents said. Edwin Ramirez of Pacoima said he is so pleased with the school's rigorous curriculum that he was willing to wait for Elliot to find a suitable site rather than register his 11-year-old son, Ivan, at another school. ``It was worth waiting for,'' Ramirez said. ``His education is the most important thing for me. I thought it would be a risk placing him in another school.'' Elliot, a former Montague Charter Academy teacher, started drafting plans for Community Charter after deciding the Northeast Valley needed a charter middle school to match its charter elementary campuses. While still part of the public education system, charter schools operate independently. Elliot got advice and office space at CSUN, where she crafted a curriculum and outlined a process to create a new public school. When Elliot realized she would need someplace some·place adv. & n. Somewhere: "I didn't care where I was from so long as it was someplace else" Garrison Keillor. See Usage Note at everyplace. for classes before the San Fernando building would be ready, university officials said the middle school students could use classrooms for free. ``This has the psychological benefit of giving the young kids at (Community Charter) a vision of college,'' said Elliot Mininberg, interim associate education dean at CSUN. But the university doesn't have enough room to give the school a permanent home, he said. ``We are ourselves space-poor,'' he said. |
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