If you ask young parents in downtown's South Park area near L.A. Live what their neighborhood needs, it's a decent elementary school, not a professional football team.
The city's revitalized historic core has become a way-station for up and comers, who move to downtown for the night life, the arts, the commute, the cachet … then move out when their children are born.
"You love it here," said Chinmaya Misra, who lives with her husband and daughter in an airy loft in a century-old building at 7th and Olive. "But you look around and realize, 'where am I going to educate my child?'"
For many the answer is somewhere else — Silver Lake, Mt. Washington, South Pasadena. "A lot of our friends have moved for one reason: the schools," Misra said.
Others have opted to commute, driving their children to the high-performing Solano Avenue Elementary near Dodger Stadium, three miles away.
But for a small corps of parents, whose friendships blossomed on weekend outings at their tiny neighborhood park, the idea of a good school their children can walk to is too important to give up.
They have the sort of skills you'd expect in a young, well-educated crew. There's a financial advisor, an urban development expert, a software designer, an educator and a couple of architects.
And they're marshaling those talents to try to launch a charter elementary school that would open in downtown next fall.
"It was sort of naive to begin with; just a couple of parents meeting at the park, bonding over our children," said Misra, who sits on the prospective charter's board with her husband, architect Apurva Pande.
In eight months of weekly play group/dinner party sessions, Metro Charter has evolved from a playground dream to a 150-page proposal, submitted for Los Angeles Unified School District approval two weeks ago. The school board will hold a public hearing in November and make its decision by early next year.
Even with approval, though, the school looks like a long shot. The parents have less than a year to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, recruit students, hire a teaching staff and find a location they can afford.
"We are really trying to make it work," said Misra. A September opening would mean a kindergarten spot for 4-year-old Anvaya.
But she wants more than a good education for her daughter; she wants to strengthen the bonds that neighborhood families have built through park outings and birthday parties over the years.
"If you asked me six years back, when we sold our house in Culver City and moved downtown, 'Do you think you'd stay in downtown after you had a child?' … I would have said no," Misra told me.
She's been surprised by the pull of neighborhood ties — and the revelation that friendships among children can make allies of parents.
There are two elementary schools within walking distance of South Park, serving a population that straddles skid row and the industrial garment district.
Para Los Ninos runs a charter school where achievement is rising. But 99% of its students are Latino,100% are "socio-economically disadvantaged" and two-thirds are not fluent in English. Nearby, on the edge of skid row, a rebuilt Ninth Street Elementary — once a collection of bungalows — will reopen in September, drawing many of its students from rundown residential motels and homeless shelters.
"The performance there has been frighteningly poor," said Mike McGalliard, who once headed the school reform group LA's Promise and now lives in South Park with his wife and young daughter and sits on the board of Metro Charter.
"None of us want to subject our children to that."
Does that make the South Park crowd snobs? I don't think so. But some people do.
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