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[quote=Anonymous]That’s where Two Rivers comes in. The school’s founders discovered early on that they posed a threat to a similar group of urban pioneers with slightly deeper roots: parents at Capitol Hill Cluster School. The Cluster School was founded in 1986, the product of a prolonged effort by parents to merge three Hill schools under a single administration. It now has a long waiting list of out-of-boundary Hill families. Some Cluster parents see charters as an affront to the cluster.

“If people are encouraged to pack up and start their own schools all over town, it’s going to impact the neighborhood school,” says Gina Arlotto, a Hill parent with three children at the Cluster School. Arlotto, who co-founded the anti-charter Save Our Schools coalition, is one of the city’s most vocal critics of charter schools—she’s been quoted in a dozen news stories on schools in the past 10 months. Save Our Schools was initially started to oppose charter sprawl, but it now spends most of its energy fighting the inevitable mayoral takeover of the school system.

Save Our Schools is the lead plaintiff in a discrimination lawsuit against Two Rivers. The suit alleges that Two Rivers engaged in discriminatory admissions because the student body has a larger proportion of white students than the rest of the public school system. A number of those white students are the offspring of the school’s founders.

According to the complaint, the Two Rivers student body initially was 45 percent white, 40 percent black, 10 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian, while DCPS as a whole is 84 percent black. Two Rivers parents, the complaint reads, created the school “specifically with the objective of not having a school that was ‘too black.’?”

Last year a federal judge dismissed most of the claims, but the suit is crawling forward; later this year Save Our Schools will present evidence for its claim that the District’s funding of Two Rivers amounts to discrimination.

The Two Rivers folks won’t talk about the suit on the record. They defer to Robert Cane from FOCUS: “This suit is completely fraudulent,” he says. “These are rabid anti-charter people… they like to blame the charters for all the ills of the school system.”

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/777/diy-charter-school[/quote]

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