Charter Forces Gain A Seat in L.A. School Board Race

LAUSD sSchool Board candidate Patricia Castellanos.

Los Angeles Unified School board candidate for the 7th District, Patricia Castellanos issued a statement conceding the race to Tanya Franklin Ortiz, who was buoyed by the financial resources of Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Bill Bloomfield. The wealther political financiers have been pouring millions to push charter schools and more liberal policies favoring charter schools for more than a decade. Franklin-Oriz garnered 78,209 or 58.07% of the vote to Castellanos’ 56,463 or 41.93% of the vote.

The following is statement from Patricia Castellanos Campaign:

Though the results of last night’s election were not what we wanted, I’m so incredibly proud of the campaign that we all built together. As a parent and community organizer, I am honored to have had broad support from labor and community organizations as well as the support of many local elected and civic leaders. Over the last year of this campaign, we brought together parents, community leaders, educators, classroom aides, librarians, and more. We fought for every vote up until the last minute and engaged voters about a vision of a quality public education for ALL of our students. Thank you to my amazing campaign team and the hundreds of volunteers that spent hours engaging voters over the last few months.

Unfortunately, we could not overcome the amount of money poured into this race by outside big money. As critical stakeholders in public education in this district, we must continue to work together to ensure that our policy makers are accountable to our local communities and making decisions that are in the best interest of our children and their education.

I wish Ms. Franklin the best of luck. She will have many challenges ahead as the new School Boardmember for District 7 and will need the support and partnership of the broader public school community to ensure our students succeed.

The District 3 race yielded more positive results for those looking for more regulation of charter schools with the victory of Scott Mark Schmerelson who won with 112,568 votes or 54.17 percent of the total to Marilyn Koziatek’s 45.83 percent of the vote.

Terelle Jerricks

During his two decade tenure, he has investigated, reported on, written and assisted with hundreds of stories related to environmental concerns, affordable housing, development that exacerbates wealth inequality and the housing crisis, labor issues and community policing or the lack thereof.