Book follow up #1 : [FLASHBACK] Frying Pan News "Why Charter Schools Are Tearing Public Campuses Apart."

The book on the CWC Mar Vista co-location at Stoner Elementary is coming along. I'm not a full time writer. So, these things take time. There are revisions, fact checking and other details to look into before sending the book to press.

Archive.org capture of the Frying Pan article "
Why Charters Schools are tearing public campuses apart"

     In doing my due diligence on the matter, I came across an article in the Huffington Post titled with the question  "Is Charter School Co-Location Tearing Public Schools Apart?" The article was published on July 17, 2013.  It contained one sentence that mentioned the then up-coming co-location of CWC on the Stoner Elementary school campus for 2013/14.

     I'm an avid HuffPo reader and I read this article in the Los Angeles section when it came out.  Back then, it didn't mean anything to me. I thought, "Good, a charter should come in and fix things around here. Stoner...pfft! What kind of school is that?"

   Recently, I looked a little deeper into the article and found the original version that was published on the Frying Pan News. It had a slightly different title "Why Charter Schools are Tearing Public Campuses Apart" which is a statement as opposed to the question in the HuffPo version. The Frying Pan version included a cartoon by political satirist and my favorite cartoonist, Lalo Alcaraz.

    In the cartoon [click here to see], Alcaraz captures exactly what it felt like at Stoner during the co-location. Our local little American community school house was being squeezed off campus by a corporate "Saks Fifth Avenue" charter school giant that did not "play well with others" and was taking more than their fair share of the public resources yet claimed to be thankful we were "sharing."
   This article and cartoon foreshadowed many of the problems we would later see in the co-location of Citizens of the World Charter Mar Vista at Stoner Avenue Elementary. It is interesting that this article that came out a year and a half ago and meant nothing to me then, stands out and resonates so strongly now. I can confidently answer the HuffPo article title and state "Yes, charter school co-locations are tearing public schools apart." It's too bad I didn't understand this hot message when it first came straight off the Frying Pan.