2008 Campus-Community Partnerships

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Making Good Choices: A University-Community Partnership to Ensure Educational Equity across the Belmont Zone of Choice

Abstract: The Pico Union community faces a critical need for engaged scholarship around public school choice-making to ensure that students and families are actively engaged and equitably distributed across the growing number of schools in their central city neighborhoods. In 2006, anticipating new school openings, Local District 4 of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) created a neighborhood public school choice plan called the Belmont Zone of Choice (BZC). The proposed project is structured to build the capacity of the district and community in ways that will improve the school choice-making and assignment process across the BZC tackling head on the risk of social stratification and inequity that policy researchers associate with such school choice plans. Working as partners, UCLA and CARECEN will create and support a BZC Youth Organizing Council that will collect data on the choice-making process, hold two community-based Informational Sessions, and mount an educational campaign to better engage families in the choice-making process. Complementing this effort, this project will support the creation of a Belmont Zone of Choice database to monitor and help ensure the quality and equity of the Belmont Zone of Choice for years to come.