The school board is set to decide Tuesday night whether the trigger moves forward.
Support from left and right
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The politics underlying parent trigger laws are complex, with support from an unlikely mix of progressives and conservatives.
“The left, particularly minority groups, see it as a way to shake up the school system,” said Jack Jennings, founder of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “They’re frustrated that their kids are getting such a poor education and not much is being done about it. On the right, it’s just another way for conservative forces to trim back the power of the teacher unions.”
Last year, similar trigger laws were enacted in Mississippi and Texas, and a milder version was approved in Connecticut. A Maryland lawmaker proposed legislation but withdrew it, saying he needed to build political support. This week, the Florida Legislature is voting on a parent trigger, and at least a dozen other states are weighing similar measures this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The federal No Child Left Behind law requires failing schools to gradually face escalating penalties, including closure. Trigger laws put that process on steroids and let parents decide the schools’ fate.
In Adelanto, the 666 children who attend Desert Trails are mostly black and Latino, and nearly all meet the federal definition of poor. The school lacks a full-time nurse, a guidance counselor and a psychologist. About one in four students was suspended last year, nearly twice the district average. Desert Trails has had three principals in the past five years.
One is Larry Lewis, who helped launch the trigger effort out of frustration with teachers who, he said, resisted his efforts to improve classroom instruction.
“Adelanto is known as the armpit of the high desert,” said Lewis, who resigned in October for health reasons. “And Desert Trails is the armpit of Adelanto.”
Teachers, who filed a dozen grievances against Lewis, have a different view. “We have a great school district, serve great kids that live in a great community,” said LaNita M. Dominique, president of the Adelanto teachers union.
Unions and others say putting parents in charge doesn’t guarantee better schools.
“I have my college education, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable if someone said, ‘Here’s a school — run it,’ ” said Yuan, one of the parents opposed to the trigger.
‘I started to feel scared’
Adelanto,a working-class community of 31,700, sits 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. It boasts one shopping center, a federal prison and acres of empty brown desert interrupted only by hulking steel lattice towers tethered together by high-voltage electric lines.
When she moved from Los Angeles County three years ago, Cynthia Ramirez didn’t think twice about the schools. “We just assumed everything is fine,” said Ramirez, who has a 3-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. “But here, there are no after-school activities. They’re only teaching math and reading. There is no science. I started to feel scared for my daughter.”
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