Parents Lose Fight Over Inglewood ‘Honors High’

Parents fighting the proposed relocation of City Honors High School in Inglewood were dealt a final blow when school board members voted to house it at one of the city’s under-performing high schools.

City Honors, which offered students college preparatory course work and a chance to earn college credit, will continue to exist, but critics said it will be a far cry from what planners envisioned and parents wanted for their children.

The school originally had been located on the campus of West Los Angeles College in Culver City, but the college’s announcement that it would no longer have the space to house City Honors left district officials scrambling to find a new location.

The solution--to make it an “academy” within Morningside High School--was unacceptable to many parents, who worried about the school’s performance on standardized test scores and about crime on and around campus.

The board voted late Wednesday night to relocate to Morningside, after listening to parents say the district had failed some of its highest-performing students at a key time in their lives.

By placing City Honors at Morningside, parents said, their children would end up at one of the schools they’d tried so hard to avoid. For the last two years, both of the high schools in Inglewood have received the lowest possible ranking--1 out of 10--on the state’s Academic Performance Index.

About 150 students who accepted admittance to City Honors will be affected. About 34 have asked for waivers to attend other districts. Some of the rest said they will use relatives’ addresses to attend schools in other districts.

“I don’t want to put down the Morningside community,” said Destini Ashton, whose daughter Ashli attended City Honors last year. “Just like everywhere else, there’s good and bad. But I, as a parent, don’t have to unnecessarily subject my child to the bad.”

Ashton is not sure what her daughter will do, but she is adamantly against sending her to Morningside. “She’ll go live with relatives and go to school in another state if she has to.”

Other parents are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“As long as she’s there, I’m going to be on top of things to make sure things are being done correctly,” said Peter Blake, whose daughter, Nancy, 15, attended City Honors last year. “She’s going to make the best of it. The environment isn’t going to dictate how well she does.”

In recent weeks, district officials had explored another location, but decided that it would be too costly for the school district.

“It wasn’t something we could recommend in good conscience,” Supt. Paul Possemato told parents at the meeting.

City Honors students will not be in separate bungalows as originally planned, but they will be grouped in the same classes at Morningside, Possemato said.

The district has not yet secured any written agreements with local colleges to teach classes specifically for City Honors students, officials said.

“We’re trying to preserve this program for our young people,” Possemato said. “The faculty at the school is enthusiastic about having them there.”

Parents at the meeting said they were not surprised by the board’s decision. They will take their children elsewhere, they said, and will work to have certain school board members ousted come election time.

“We realize it’s over and we won’t be able to fix City Honors,” said parent Fred Black. “Now it extends further than that. We’ll take this to the ballot box.”

Some parents said they are in preliminary discussions to start a charter high school for gifted students.

The Inglewood Animo Leadership Charter High School, which will open its doors for the first time Aug. 26, is the city’s only charter high school. It accepts students through a lottery system. The school’s founder had to take his case to the State Board of Education when the Inglewood school district rejected his charter proposal.

City Honors was born out of the district’s desire to implement its own reforms.