Such questions were being posed locally in December at a meeting held for concerned parents by Silver Lake resident Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Charter Schools in which low-income, high-risk youth are achieving high academic performance.
    Barr founded Green Dot in 1999, and since that time has opened 10 charter schools in the Los Angeles area, many of which serve South Los Angeles and other areas like Inglewood, Venice and Boyle Heights. The 47-year-old who was co-founder of the 1990 Rock the Vote effort and is currently a state Board of Education appointee to the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools also recently received a $10.5 million grant from the Eli Broad Foundation to open 21 new high schools in Los Angeles over the next four years.
   “Let’s be the squeaky wheel holistically,” said Barr. “We have a lot of land and a lot of demand and we know what works.”
    Based on his success with Green Dot, which has a formula of smaller schools, longer school days, high academic expectations, parent involvement and local control, Barr is now organizing communities through a secondary organization called L.A. Parents Union to put significant pressure on the Los Angeles Unified School District to adopt the Green Dot model and implement it on a large scale.
    With that in mind, he recently tapped Silver Lake residents Christie Hind and Patrick McEneany to head up the local chapter of that group.
   “We’re interested in getting parents together to make our middle school and our high school and our other elementary schools great,” said Hind.
    Locally and throughout Los Angeles, many families have opted out of the public school system—especially at the middle school level—faced with overcrowded campuses, year-round schooling and declining test scores.
    One option locally to keep families from jumping to private schools was the possible creation of a “span” school for 1,000 students from 6th through 12th grade.
    But with diminishing hopes of striking a deal with Los Angeles City College of building the school on LACC property where a golf driving range now stands, board member David Tokofsky is heading secondary efforts to seek another site for the much needed school.
    Tokofsky, who moonlights as a paid advisor for Green Dot and was present at the December meeting welcomed ideas from parents such as adding more grade levels at elementary schools that have declining enrollment such as Micheltorena and Mayberry to help relieve King Middle School of overcrowding.
    Those interested in finding out more about L.A. Parent’s Union or Green Dot should contact Hind at mchind@earthlink.net.
   “I think if you really break it down, everyone has the same vision,” said Hind about wanting to keep kids from falling through the cracks of public education.
   “It depends on bureaucracy.”