Above: Logan unity at the September 16 pickets

The Logan Academy of Global Ecology community is demanding that the Gabriella charter operator co-locating their campus pay the $800,000 they owe in facilities charges and that the school board review the long-standing debt when considering the charter’s renewal. 

Logan educators learned about the debt just last month, after LAUSD finally provided requested copies of contracts and fiscal documents.  

“We were outraged when we heard about the money,” said Chapter Chair Sara Robledo Lucas (left in below photo). “We thought about all the times we wanted to do special activities for our students but we didn’t have the funds. We could have spent that money on field trips, after school activities, extracurricular activities, P.E. equipment — the list goes on. Our students missed out on so many experiences. It’s frustrating that for years Gabriella’s colocation and lack of payment have denied our students so many opportunities. ” 

With Gabriella’s charter up for renewal, the Logan community attended the September 18 Charter School Committee meeting at the LAUSD school board to bring Gabriella’s debt front and center and to detail the impact the colocation has on their school.   

“We have science with an amazing teacher but with more space, there could be more opportunities, like an actual lab,” said eighth-grader Olivia Robledo, daughter of the chapter chair. “As an ecology school, we should have green spaces, but that’s not possible with Gabriella there. One of the eighth-grade PE standards is weights, but we don’t have a weight room, while Gabriella has two gym rooms.”   

The Logan community is calling on the school board to force the charter operator to pay up and refuse to renew the charter because of fiscal mismanagement. They also want to end the highly unusual contract LAUSD signed in 2009 allowing Gabriella to stay at Logan for 30 years — an unprecedented and demoralizing agreement that locks in Logan’s loss of learning space for the foreseeable future. 

Unlike other co-locating charters, Gabriella does not have to renew their colocation at Logan every year, circumventing a critical accountability step through this special contract. At the two other schools Gabriella co-locates, where they do not have 30-year contracts, they have paid all their fees. It’s not a stretch to conclude that Gabriella’s operators could be hiding behind this contract to evade paying their debt to Logan students. 

At the Charter Division meeting, the Logan team presented a legal opinion that the long-standing unpaid debt could be grounds for terminating the 30-year contract. The deadline for the board to vote on Gabriella’s charter is October 14. 

The latest action connects with ongoing organizing by three elementary schools where Gabriella co-locates — Logan, Trinity, and West Vernon. All three school communities are fighting to remove Gabriella from their campuses and recover valuable learning space for the benefit of students and families.  

“I had a hard conversation with Olivia when she was a fifth-grader at Logan,” Sara Robledo Lucas said. “I asked her, do you want to stay at Logan? I talked to her about how another school can offer more — like science labs, art rooms, a gym and locker rooms, a parent center. She decided to stay because she loves Logan, and now she is a voice fighting for the Logan students who will follow her.”