Olive Grove Charter School, the small charter that’s fought tooth and nail to stay open over the course of the year, has new digs—a sunlit suite of offices in Orcutt. It’s been a little more than a month since the state Board of Education approved its charter petition, and stakeholders have been scrambling, all-the-king’s-horses-and-all-the-king’s-men style, to put their program back together again.
“We have 11 staff that were at Olive Grove before who are staying with us now,” said Olive Grove science teacher Laura Mudge. “That’s most of our staff. The ones who signed contracts [with other school districts] can’t get out of it.”
Most area districts have already kicked off the school year. Still, Olive Grove is getting a steady stream of students still interested.
“Most of our students are coming back,” Mudge said. “We just last week had them fill out their enrollment packets.”
A quick history of the tumult that’s rocked Olive Grove over the course of the past year: In April of 2013, as recorded in the minutes of Los Olivos School District’s board meeting, the decision was made to dramatically shrink the program—a decision that compounded, eventually becoming a plan that would essentially kill the charter. This, the board figured, would push the district toward basic aid status, raking in more money from the state.
Olive Grove, however, didn’t want to close. Faced with redistricting 280 students and laying off several classified personnel, they drew up a new charter and looked to the Cuyama Unified School District for sponsorship. But Santa Barbara Unified School District’s superintendent threatened to sue over the location of one of the charter’s campuses, forcing Cuyama to reject the petition. That decision was appealed to the Santa Barbara County Board of Education, which wanted nothing to do with the mess—it upheld the rejection, effectively punting the decision to the California State Board of Education.
It was there that Olive Grove finally found success. The Advisory Council on Charter Schools, which advises the state board, recommended that the state approve the petition. Then, in a hearing on July 12, the board did just that. Olive Grove became newly chartered under the state and cleared to offer education to students across Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
The only problem? That hearing came on July 12—halfway through the summer. Olive Grove had no facilities and few resources. The school year was to start in a month, and many of Olive Grove’s students had registered with other school districts and charter programs. Some of the teachers had found other jobs, signed contracts, and moved on with their careers.
Still, by order of the state, a re-chartered Olive Grove was to open.
The staff bounced back to square one and set about the task of getting the basics in place. One of the first items? Finding locations for Olive Grove resource centers. The one visited by the Sun, a former office for a financial firm, overlooks a wide, wooded canyon south of Clark Avenue in Orcutt. Locations in Santa Barbara and Lompoc are underway.
Finding a place to put a school the month before students go back to class is tough. The Olive Grove crew is still nailing down the details of where their resource center in SLO County will be. And with the Cuyama district, the program ran into another hurdle: the fear that plopping down a site there would compromise the status of the town’s high school as a “necessary small school,” stepping on the hose of small-school funding from the state.
Mudge learned about this worry when she got a text from Paul Chounet, superintendent of Cuyama Unified, during the state board hearing. “I can’t stop this,” she remembers thinking. “What the heck are we going to do?”
That fear is settled—California’s education code has enough breathing room between bylaws that a blended independent study program like Olive Grove can operate out of Cuyama without messing up the necessary small school funding. The charter entered into a memorandum of understanding with the district and is in the process of getting a resource center up and running.
A resource center is a start, but schools need things like textbooks, phones, furniture, and computers.
But where to get them? On June 8, while still waiting on the appeal decision at the state level, the Los Olivos School Board sat down with the Olive Grove team and representatives of Family Partnership, a similar charter program in the area, to decide how to handle the school’s assets.
Olive Grove’s status was still up in the air, and Family Partnership looked to some like a viable area alternative. So the decision was made to split the assets.
“The new independent Olive Grove Charter School received the assets from the Santa Barbara and Lompoc sites,” said Los Olivos Superintendent Bridget Baublits in an email to the Sun. “Family Partnership received the assets from the Santa Maria and Morro Bay sites, where they had opened up new Family Partnership locations.The assets that were located on the Los Olivos School District campus were retained by the district.”
Those textbooks and desks were a start. Phones and Internet were trickier. For a while, everyone was calling Mudge’s personal phone. “I never knew how to answer,” she said. “Are they calling for the school or are they calling for me?”
A scramble, too, has been the school’s database software—boring and complicated, yes, but the crucial invisible connective tissue that keeps 21st century schools running.
“It’s everything,” Mudge said. “All these things that you can do for yourself at home are multiplied because you’re now doing it for a school. How many lines do we need? How’s that going to work? Everything takes longer with more phone calls than you expected.”
And, once the database is up, there’s more—health insurance for teachers, entering the students into the newly minted database system, finishing out the roster of teachers, solidifying the curriculum, and, in a month—starting class.
“We already know what to do,” Mudge said, pausing to take a deep breath. “We’ve already done it. It’s just getting all these things in place that we know how to do. Our next steps are finishing enrollment and doing better—doing more for our students.”
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 3, 2015.