What's the deal with co-location?
And how we're working to ensure all schools have the people, resources, and spaces they needs to thrive 🌱
We are Reclaim Our Schools LA (ROSLA) and we work to improve access, advance opportunities, and ensure racial justice in public education for all students in Los Angeles. We’re also a coalition made up of four anchor organizations—Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Students Deserve, and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)—made up of students, educators, parents, and community members. Together, we’re on the path to make all public schools into great schools.
If you were to ask us what one of the absolute biggest threats to our mission is, it would be scarcity. Not just a shortage of teachers, or resources, or books, or equipment, but a straightforward lack of space on many of our campuses—campuses that already need every inch in order to meet student and community needs. What’s more, we’re not even talking about spaces that need to be built out or created, but spaces that exist right now within a lot of our public school buildings and campuses across our district.
That’s right, it’s a shortage of access to existing space on many campuses, all courtesy of something called co-location.
Back in 2000, California voters passed Proposition 39 which, among other things, required school districts to provide facilities to charter schools (co-location). Within LAUSD, the divvying up of space on public school campuses for charter school use has been fuzzy at best and deceptive at worst. Last fall, we discovered that the longstanding definition of what an empty classroom means (a key part to the space distribution process) was not, in fact, part of state law as was widely understood, but based on a misleading opinion.
This deceit needlessly cost so many public schools the vital spaces they need to truly serve their students and communities. Many schools lost therapy spaces, forcing staff to meet with students in stairwells and hallways. Even more schools lost art programs, science centers, robotics programs, and parent spaces. One school even had to move their second grade classroom off-site.
Our coalition didn’t take any of this sitting down. Along with public education champions on the LAUSD School Board, we successfully pushed for a limit to co-location on public school campuses serving historically underserved populations. While just the first step in our journey to make sure every school has the people, resources, and spaces it needs to provide a great learning environment for our students, it was a landmark win for our cause.
But why did all of this happen? Why are there two schools on any one campus anyway?
As UTLA reports, “[The privatizers’] agenda is to drain our schools of resources, say they are failing, and then privatize them. Privatization creates a two-tiered education system that does not benefit all students. Co-location is a threat to our children’s right to free and quality public education.”
As we described in our previous Substack on Community Schools (and why we love them), it takes space for all the beautiful student and community-centric programs and services that create environments that truly meet everyone’s needs. Our students, educators, and community members deserve school communities that can recognize and respond to both their assets and their needs.
Charter school students, educators, and families have never been and never will be our foes. Our enemy is the system and the privatizers who seek to divide us and make money off of our communities, with co-location as one of their most powerful tools. And we’re not going to rest until we end the scarcity of space and take our schools back from the money machine.
We invite you to join us in this work (and thank you if you already have!) by signing up for emails to stay informed on important updates, urgent actions, and more.