Within days, attorneys for Everest Public High School, a new charter school set to open in September, are expected to sue the Sequoia Union High School District after alleging “disparate treatment and blatant disregard” for charter school student rights.
The attorneys refer to the district’s offer to install portable school buildings on a street in East Palo Alto instead of offering one of several existing buildings in Redwood City, as Everest officials requested.
“We feel very confident,” Everest founder Diane Tavenner said in an interview. “We’re hoping that, with this case, the district will be told very clearly what the law is and that they will follow it.” She said she expects Everest’s attorneys to file suit by May 15.
The Sequoia district said it expects to prevail. “The district’s offer is legally compliant and can and will be defended as such,” Assistant Superintendent James Lianides said in a letter received by Everest officials on May 7 and reviewed by The Almanac.
A court battle would be the next chapter in a nine-month saga during which majorities on the Sequoia district board and the San Mateo County Board of Education denied Everest a charter. The reasons include economic hardship for the district and an unbalanced mix of students in charter schools, with a particular lack of low-performing students.
Everest petitioners hope to clone Summit Preparatory Charter High School, also founded by Ms. Tavenner and notable for its very high four-year-college acceptance rate, its ethnically and academically diverse student body chosen by lottery, and its low-budget operation.
The state Board of Education and its charter school advisory panel disagreed with the Sequoia and county boards and backed Everest’s petition unanimously. The school received a charter in March.
Everest opponents also claim that charter schools embody a discriminatory effect: parents who choose a charter are inherently more involved, thereby draining traditional schools of such families.
Everest backers counter that traditional schools segregate students by academic ability and deny average kids the advanced-placement classes and the attention that allows them to thrive.
New claims
In his letter to Everest, Mr. Lianides notes that the Sequoia district’s East Palo Alto offer now includes access to a nearby new 30,000-square-foot YMCA gym equipped with a climbing wall and pool.
“It’s a nice facility (but) incredibly busy,” Ms. Tavenner said. In negotiating with such gyms for Summit Prep use, she added that “it’s really hard to get your kids in there because these facilities are very heavily used.”
Everest rejected the East Palo Alto site in April and has leased an 18,500-square-foot office building at 955 Charter St. in Redwood City for $300,000 a year, plus about $1.2 million in improvements over three years. (Everest is engaged in fundraising.)
Everest plans to open there in September with a freshman class of about 100 students.
Everest proposed the Charter Street site as an alternative, but the district refused. In his letter, Mr. Lianides said it has toxic contamination problems, including PCBs, that would put the district at a liability risk.
Ms. Tavenner acknowledged the buried PCBs, but said that Redwood City is well aware of them, that a “special safe cleanup” will not endanger anyone — including Summit Prep in a district-owned building a block away — and that, as an extra precaution, it would be done during an Everest vacation break.
“Really what we have here is the district attempting to create alarm with the community when they don’t have accurate information about it, and they’re trying to thwart our efforts,” Ms. Tavenner said.
Sequoia district spokeswoman Bettylu Smith attributed the information about contaminants to the Redwood City Planning Division.
