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Your Taxes At Work

A pending lawsuit against El Camino Real Charter High School exposes a publicly funded private school in chaos, leaving students in danger.

“We had — had already taken — Joe [Wyatt], being one of them, was already broken down. He was already taken out.

So the next step was the easy one. Once Brad got these pictures, Billy was next in line.”

– From the deposition of Sukhbir Dhillon

The conversion of El Camino Real from a publicly controlled LAUSD high school to a publicly funded private school left behind a deeply divided community. One side argued that the school was already highly regarded and feared its stellar record would be compromised by becoming a charter school. The other was envious of its crosstown rival, Granada Hills High, which had already gone down the road of privatization, ridding itself of unpopular policies like bussing minority students onto its campus.

When being deposed as a witness in a lawsuit against El Camino, Sukhbir Dhillon, who teaches science at the charter school, described the division in this way:

“So the school…ended up being divided up. And the red team was made up of people that were basically pro UTLA, but really against the administration.

And we felt, because I was probably more — I leaned more blue team, we felt that they were actually against our school charter, as well.

And the blue team were people that were pro El Camino. We didn’t want to be part of the union, but we wanted an alliance.

So there was that divide there that occurred. And the two sides did not get along very well.”

These divisions were exasperated in 2016 after former “Executive Director” David Fehte was caught with his hand in the charter school’s cookie jar. What started as a story centered on extravagant spending at the taxpayers’ expense quickly became an example of outright corruption. Not only was the public paying for Fehte to dine at expensive…