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This story was originally published on EdSource.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s board overreached in declaring hundreds of schools off-limits from sharing their facilities with charter schools, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled. 

Judge Stephen Goorvitch wrote in a June 27 decision that the trustees of the state’s largest school district broke state law when they categorically denied access to as many as 346 campuses of Priority, Black Student Achievement Plan and community schools. The board’s policy thwarted the intent of Proposition 39 “to treat District and charter schools equally with respect to the allocation of space,” Goorvitch wrote. 

Prop. 39 also requires that districts provide “reasonably equivalent” facilities to charter schools.

Goorvitch’s decision hands a big victory to charter advocates and the plaintiff, the California Charter Schools Association, which has been battling the district over adequate facilities since voters passed Prop. 39 in 2000. 

“Charter school students are public school students. They deserve equal treatment and equal opportunity to learn in safe, suitable facilities, in the communities they serve,” said Keith Dell’Aquila, the association’s vice president of local advocacy in greater Los Angeles, in a statement. 

“This illegal policy sought to discriminate against charter families and disproportionately harmed Black and Latino students in LAUSD,” he added.

Declining enrollment 

The charter school association also claimed that with drops in enrollment, LAUSD has adequate space to serve everyone. A report published by the nonprofit Available to All also found that enrollment had decreased by 46% over the past couple of decades at 456 district elementary schools. 

More than 200 schools saw a decline of 50% or more, with some campuses having even greater reductions, according to the report. 

But supporters of LAUSD’s policy, including United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union with more than 35,000 members, have claimed the policy was an effort to protect the district’s most vulnerable students and campuses. 

Black Student Achievement Plan and community schools, for example, may need additional space to provide specific services for a particular student — ranging from additional counseling to enrichment programs, to wraparound supports like food pantries and basic health care. 

“They all require space in order to implement some of the things that the programs call for,” said United Teachers Los Angeles Vice President Georgia Flowers Lee. “A restorative justice room is something that a BSAP school has, but it also requires space … the (Pupil Services and Attendance Counselors) have to have space to work. These people can’t all be working out of the library at a round table.”

Supporters of LAUSD’s co-location policy also claimed that forcing district schools to share a campus with a charter leads to hostility between both schools — and takes critical resources and spaces away from students, including at Lorena Street Elementary, which Flowers said has seen a growth in enrollment but nowhere to expand, and 24th Street Elementary, which Title I coordinator Hadrian Carter said is struggling to find room for a laundry program as a community school. 

When Lee taught at Saturn Street Elementary, there was a possibility of co-location. And while there were empty classrooms, she said the school had a large portion of special needs students — leading to a series of unique challenges. 

“We have students with orthopedic impairments, students with sensory disorders,” Lee said. “Are we now going to have to put them on the second floor of a building? What does that mean for their safety?

“There has to be some consideration of the needs of the students who are there, the student body that already exists on this campus,” Lee added. “Are they forced to lose in order to do something else?” 

According to Ed-Data, about 28% of LAUSD students attend charter schools, which are independent public schools run by nonprofit boards of directors. Julie Umansky, the charter schools association’s executive director of the Charter Schools Legal Defense Fund, said in an email that they “expect LAUSD to immediately cease implementing those parts of the Policy that the Court deemed unlawful, including the Policy’s prohibition on charter school co-locations at the nearly 350 LAUSD campuses designated as community schools, priority schools, and Black Student Achievement Plan schools.” Priority schools are the 100 high-needs schools that the district designates for receiving additional resources.

The organization did not challenge specific site offers and doesn’t expect to see any changes in charter allocations until the 2026-27 academic year, Umansky added. 

What the lawsuit says

In its lawsuit, the California Charter Schools Association claimed that LAUSD’s policy discriminated against roughly 11,000 charter school students. 

Goorvitch emphasized that the district retains the right to deny charter schools access to campuses where co-locating is not feasible due to inadequate space or safety concerns. A clear-cut scenario would be to avoid mixing elementary and high school students on the same campus. But these decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis, Goorvitch wrote. 

The charter schools association also argued that the district violated the California Public Records Act by improperly denying requests for documents that could show that the district could have accommodated charters at various locations, including campuses like Rosemont Avenue Elementary, which the report found to have experienced a 91% drop in enrollment over the past couple of decades. Goorvitch ordered the district to justify its decision to withhold documents and for both sides to try to resolve the dispute. He set Oct. 15 for a hearing to rule on unresolved questions.

LAUSD responded to the decision by asserting that charter advocates had misinterpreted the ruling.

“Los Angeles Unified has carefully reviewed the court’s ruling and is evaluating all available options. We are very pleased with most aspects of the court’s ruling, which denied all of the charter association’s contentions aside from two lines in the policy,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource. 

The charter association “significantly mischaracterizes the plain language of both the policy and last month’s ruling. We remain firmly committed to serving the best interests of all students in our school communities while continuing to meet our legal obligations,” the spokesperson added.  

But Eric Premack, the executive director of the Charter Schools Development Center, a Sacramento organization that advises charter schools, said the ruling was unequivocal. 

“The district’s policy favoring district-run schools over charter schools clearly violated the letter and intent of the law,” he said in a statement to EdSource. “This situation is one in a long string of the district’s efforts to evade this law.”