09/15/2021
I’m writing to share news that some, perhaps many, of you already know: California Collegiate Charter School permanently closed on June 30 of this year, after our charter renewal was denied by LAUSD and the Los Angeles County Board of Education.
Our school’s closure after five years was heartbreaking for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because we were doing some of the best work we’d ever done. We weren’t only achieving tremendous academic growth, outperforming our neighborhood schools and being ranked in the top 20% of similar schools across the state. We were engaged in the deep work of building a truly excellent school. In California Collegiate’s last two years in particular, our team worked relentlessly to better shape our school to our students’ needs, and to build a wholehearted community that could support students and teachers in building meaningful relationships, provide students with rigorous and relevant curriculum, and embed a responsive and restorative approach to harm and conflict throughout the school.
The work was by no means done, and we spent much of our time from May 2020 on reckoning with some of our past choices and working toward becoming a truly antiracist institution that could offer our students the comprehensively excellent education they deserve. Much of my work and reflection these days includes gratitude and apologies--gratitude for those who pushed us early (even when I wasn’t a very receptive audience) and apologies to all those impacted by detentions and demerits and my, at times, dangerously narrow view of education. I will be forever grateful to our students and our staff for their vulnerability and initiative in driving this growth forward. Sadly, our work was cut short.
Why? The answer is both complicated and simple. Was it charter-district politics? Yes. Was it the COVID-19 pandemic? Yes. Was it because of the design of AB1505, which took effect last July? Yes. Was it because we moved campuses twice in two years? Yes. Was it because we made mistakes, especially in our early years? Yes.
Ultimately, it was the combination of all of these forces: the global pandemic, a new state law, two campus moves in as many years, charter-district politics, and the typical challenges of start-ups together made our path to renewal far more difficult than we had hoped.
Our story is a story of perseverance and failure and growth and redemption. We worked every day to make California Collegiate a better school than it was the day before. We were blessed to work in South LA, one of the most amazing communities in Los Angeles, and to have incredible students and families who came to us as they were, hoping for something better and ready to work with us to get there. I cherished every moment that we spent together, whether it was moving a dumpster across a parking lot to clear space for dodgeball, watching our 6th graders write persuasive essays on whether Confederate monuments should be removed, running down the street to break up a fight after students texted me for help, singing “To the left, to the left” with our 7th graders as we navigated a number line, walking for hours with a student in crisis and helping them get back to baseline, listening to students lecture each other about sustainability and overfishing, learning more than I ever wanted to about Zoom bombings and cyber security, watching 8th graders confidently follow Winston Duke at our Black History Month celebration to deliver their extraordinary poems, and seeing the excited faces every time a new requested book came into our school library.
And so, to all of you who helped make our school a reality in one way or another--thank you. My hope is that you can hold two truths simultaneously: our school’s closure is devastating and unfair--and we did tremendous work in the past five years that cannot be undone. From where I sit, it was worth it.
- Sue Andres-Brown, Founding Head of School
