Local charter school Albert Einstein Academy for the Letters, Arts and Sciences appealed Wednesday to the Los Angeles County Board of Education for its petition on a local K-6 school, according to Jeffrey Shapiro, the school’s executive director.
The school gained approval Wednesday for a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in the Alpine Union School District in San Diego County, Shapiro said.
“We just had an elementary school and a high school approved unanimously, with staff support in San Diego County,” Shapiro said
Shapiro is taking the approval as a good sign toward the school’s petition to the Los Angeles County Board of Education, which received an appeal for Einstein Academy’s charter school in the Santa Clarita Valley.
The school currently operates a junior high/high school chartered by the William S. Hart Union High School District.
“I’m just thrilled that we’re able to offer the educational alternative and the educational quality that Einstein brings for parents and students,” Shapiro said. “I’m confident that our new schools will experience the same success that our founding school has.”
Einstein Academy scored a 908 on the state’s Academic Performance Index scale in 2011, which rates schools’ ability to improve student scores on the state’s annual benchmark testing. In 2012, the school earned a 910 on the 0-1,000 scale.
Locally, the school has received three denials on its petition to charter with the Saugus Union School District for a K-8 school.
At the hearings, SUSD officials expressed concern that the school, if chartered as a K-6, would not have the funding sources it cited in the school’s petition. Shapiro countered that the board has not made a “full faith and credit” effort in dealing with the charter.
The Alpine Union School District is an 1,800-student K-8 district in San Diego, which operates a middle school, three K-8s, a kindergarten and a home school.