It was a night to celebrate successes in education in late June, as Mentor LA Partner Schools organizers and ardent supporters gathered at Paperfish for a meeting of the minds. Joachim Splichal’s newest eatery in Beverly Hills was packed with familiar faces on the Los Angeles education scene, including L. A. Unified Superintendent of Schools David Brewer and Mike McGalliard, the president of MLA Partner Schools. MLA Partner Schools is a nonprofit organization working to improve schools and empower neighborhoods in some of the most disenfranchised communities in Los Angeles. MLA creates high performing urban schools that combine innovation, equity and access to offer a quality education to every child in the surrounding neighborhood. The schools are a hybrid, where public and private sectors work in partnership to operate a fully public school. The first of these is West Adams Prep, which, with the help of a
$4 million grant to MLA from Amgen and a board of dedicated members, has had an admirable success at motivating both the students and the community to excel far and beyond other public schools in the L. A. Unified system. “This is the model we need to move forward,” Superintendent Brewer told a high-powered audience that included MLA Board Chairman Megan Chernin, her
husband Peter Chernin (Chairman of Fox), Kevin Sharer (Chairman of Amgen), State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas, actress Jami Gertz, and 20th Century Fox Film executives Jim Gianopoulos and Tom Rothman. All enjoyed a delicious dinner donated by Splichal, and a lively discussion among the educators and others on hand as to how the MLA model can help make our city’s public schools into places that foster educated, college-bound students of every economic and racial background. MLA’s next partner school is Manual Arts; for more information on the program, go to www.mlapartnerschools.org.