San Diego’s Students Sacrificed in the Charter Lawsuit

In 2015, San Diego Unified and Grossmont Union High School District decided the best use of their time and taxpayer dollars was not more books, more student resources, or higher teacher pay — but a lawsuit. Their target was charter schools serving San Diego’s most vulnerable kids: dropouts, teen parents, refugee youth, and students already written off by the traditional system. Schools like Diego Hills and Julian Charter had become lifelines for young people who had nowhere else to turn. 

The districts’ argument was never about whether these schools were helping students. It was about territory and money. They claimed the schools were “illegally” located because they were authorized by smaller rural districts instead of Grossmont or San Diego Unified. A judge initially sided with the districts, forcing closures which impacted already disadvantaged students. Overnight, more than 200 teachers lost their jobs and 1,600 students were left scrambling.

For nearly six years, the case dragged on until an appellate court finally ruled in 2021 that the schools had complied with the law and were fully legal. But by then, nearly $1 million in taxpayer dollars had been wasted on legal fees — money that should have benefited students, and gone to classrooms. Even today, districts are still fighting to avoid paying the attorney’s fees they owe. The only clear losers were the students. 

So where was San Diego’s paper of record while this was happening? Rather than investigate why districts were squandering public funds, the San Diego Union-Tribune too often acted as a megaphone for their talking points. In 2019, the SDUT ran a story branding these schools “illegal,” comparing a CEO’s salary to the superintendent’s, and claiming “not a single graduate” qualified for University of California or California State University. What readers weren’t told is that these schools serve students who had already dropped out, are often over-age, far behind in credits, and in many cases learning English for the first time. For these young people, the immediate goal isn’t UC or CSU — it’s graduating, finding a job, or simply rebuilding hope. 

Although graduation rates may look low at first glance, they must be understood in light of the students being served. These are young people who had already dropped out, or been written off by the traditional school system. For them, returning to school at all represents a major turning point, and achieving a 30 to 40% graduation rate is not failure but a genuine success against the odds. That critical context, however, never made it into the Union-Tribune’s framing.

And when the appellate court vindicated these schools in 2021, the paper gave the districts the last word, downplayed the waste of public money, and ignored the students and families who had lost their schools. The Union-Tribune’s coverage wasn’t just incomplete – it was complicit in reinforcing a false narrative that justified shutting down schools that served San Diego’s most at-risk kids. 

This is not an isolated problem. Every time a bill targeting public charter schools surfaces in Sacramento – AB 1505 and 1507 in the past, and AB 84 today – negative stories about charter schools seem to reappear in the Union-Tribune. The timing is not accidental. Meanwhile, when district scandals like Sweetwater’s corruption case break, there is no drumbeat to dismantle entire districts. The double standard is glaring: public charter schools are continually vilified while district failures are swept aside as unfortunate exceptions. 

California needs a smarter system for authorizing charters — one that removes the conflict of interest of districts acting as both regulators and competitors. Oversight should be about whether students are learning, not whether districts are protecting their market share. 

At its core, this case was never truly about legality or accountability – it was about power, control, and protecting bureaucratic turf at the expense of students who could least afford it.

$1 million taxpayer dollars later, hundreds of educators gone, and thousands of lives disrupted, the real cost wasn’t measured in court filings or district budgets – it was measured in lost opportunities for kids who were already on the margins. And through it all, the San Diego Union-Tribune failed to ask the hard questions or challenge the official narrative, and instead, echoed it.  

At a time when journalism should have served as a check on institutional overreach, the paper became a passive participant in a campaign that harmed the very students the system had already failed.

The real question San Diegans should be asking isn’t just why the districts sued, but why the press didn’t fight harder for the truth. If we truly believe every student matters, then we must start by standing up for the ones who are easiest to ignore.