We, the undersigned parents and guardians of students, together with teachers and other community stakeholders of Louis Armstrong Middle School (previously known as Robert A. Millikan Affiliated Charter and Performing Arts Magnet and SAGE Middle School), demand that High Tech Los Angeles Charter Middle School cease all interest in petitioning to co-locate at our campus.

Since 1959, Louis Armstrong Middle School has been a vital part of the community and a safe haven for our students.  We will do what is necessary to protect and defend our school from charter co-location, for our neighborhood and magnet students and their families!

Co-location at our school will impact our many programs designed to give our students an enriched school experience.  We need our classrooms and school site resources for our students to be able to continue to enrich their experiences using our library, labs, and other shared spaces for dance, musical theater, debate, and academic pentathlon to name a few. etc. Our afterschool programs, like Beyond the Bell, would lose their space to help children with homework club. Co-location would also impact our partnerships with LACC ( Los Angeles City Colleges), LA Mission College Dual program; as students meet twice a week after school per semester and require space and opportunities to do so. The Art classes we offer as part of our partnership with  UCLA would also be impacted. These classes not only provide students with enriched learning opportunities but also allow students to earn college credit. We pride ourselves with providing opportunities for students to take enrichment classes and do not want to jeopardize losing the space needed for these opportunities. We have worked hard to build partnerships that would enrich and support pathways to student success in and beyond the classroom; co-location would hinder our ability to do this. These programs provide reasons why our neighborhood and Magnet students want to come to middle school, specifically Louis Armstrong Middle School. We are fortunate to have the many programs on our campus that meet the needs of our diverse student population. Co-location would significantly impact the reputation we have worked so hard to establish in our community. 

Moreover, our Parent Center is host to Adult ESL Classes, Parenting Classes and many parent focused meetings throughout the week. By eliminating the designated spaces for these meetings and workshops, we are effectively hampering the success of our parents and therefore our local community. 

Co-location would also impact our physical location- it would bring traffic concerns with the addition of more cars into an already congested area! It would also bring other safety concerns to our school by potentially leaving half the school as an open campus , and potentially leaving our students vulnerable to strangers entering the campus. We would have to share an already crowded shared- space school setting. The library, cafeteria, auditorium, bathrooms, and parking lots would have to be shared, and they are all areas which typically function at maximum capacity without co-location concerns. The education and safety of our students would be compromised as a direct result of co-location.

This co-location would offer HighTech Middle School all the benefits of public funding without any of the costs associated with using them. As a public school we are tasked with creating spaces that promote educational equity through funding, access and opportunity- co-location would hamper those objectives by pulling from already underfunded areas. It creates a completely inequitable environment for families, students, staff and community. 

We will not stand by while our students have resources taken from them so that an elite charter school can move in. By signing this petition we stand behind the mission of Louis Armstrong Middle School to provide educational equity through funding, access, and opportunity. We stand against the co-location of High Tech Los Angeles Charter Middle School at our school site.