Founding Father

In getting a charter school started, I learned how to make people really angry

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Illustration by Tomasz Walenta for TIME; PencilsGetty Images

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After meeting all these nice, smart people and having nice, smart conversations about all the nice, smart things we were going to do, I was surprised at how much hatred we inspired. At a neighborhood-council meeting at the public school where our charter school had been given some unused classrooms, I sensed the other parents felt I was part of an insurrection to destroy their school from the inside, mostly because speaker after speaker stood and pointed at me and yelled, "You are part of an insurrection to destroy our school from the inside!" I sweated and realized that, while I love a presidential debate, local politics is way too intense for me.

I figured parents would be fighting to join our new school; I did not figure I'd be spending weekends at Thai street fairs failing to persuade them to send their kids to a school without its own building, without bus service and without all their neighbors attending. Plus, I speak no Spanish, Thai or Armenian. You try to mime "loophole to get out of restrictive union hiring rules." It looks dirty.

Our charter school opened this fall, and despite my intentions, I feel as if I helped my community. Unlike me, other founding parents don't have other options, and they can now send their kids to a school that--if it turns out like the Larchmont charter school we largely copied--will have a waiting list of 2,900 applicants and significantly higher test scores than the average L.A. public school's. And I'll be a part of it, by putting in 60 hours a year to help build the school. I'm assuming I can count this column as 10.

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