COMPTON — After a recent legal blow against parents fighting to strip control of McKinley Elementary School from Compton Unified School District and place it in the hands of a charter operator, members of the activist group Parent Revolution said this week they will likely take the matter to an appeals court.

On June 24, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr handed down his decision to uphold CUSD’s denial of the petition based on the involved parties’ failure to include the dates the petitions were signed by McKinley parents.

“The judge’s decision was not based on what’s best for kids in McKinley but on a technicality, a hanging chad,” said a statement from a Parent Revolution representative obtained by The Wave following the court’s decision. “Compton Unified was never able to dispute the fact that the average McKinley child had less than a 2 percent chance of going to college.”

According to the order to deny plaintiffs petition for writ of mandate, the plaintiffs, which are parents — one of which is Shemika Murphy — represented by Parent Revolution attorneys, conceded during a hearing that their petitions suffered from technical deficiencies including, but not limited to, the lack of a date box.

Section 4801(d) of the State Board of Education’s regulation mandates that the petitions have boxes with room for dates.

But the petitioners “argue[d] that since their writ proceeding involves the constitutional right to petition, courts … must resolve doubts in favor of upholding the petitions,” said the court document. They further insisted that their compliance with a portion of the regulation, which requires that a petition must contain signatures on behalf of at least 50 percent of the students, should be sufficient enough to make the date box irrelevant.

In addition, the plaintiffs said they complied with several of the more crucial requirements, and that this small technicality should not interfere with the court’s decision to remove CUSD’s control of McKinley and place it in the hands of a charter operator.

However, the date box, according to Judge Mohr, is pertinent in determining three things: whether the signing parent had educational rights on the date the petition was signed; whether the student was enrolled at the school on the date the petition was signed; and whether the petition was signed before the effective date of a segment of the regulation, which is necessary to ensure that parents or legal guardians clearly understand they are requesting a specific intervention at the subject school — in this case, a request for a charter school under the restart model.

“The purpose of having parents sign and date the petitions in the case at bar is to verify that they have not only an interest in directing certain children’s education, but also the authority to do so,” said the document. “The logical objective of dating a signature is to connect a legally significant fact to a point in time. Dates matter; they have legal effect. … For this reason, the date a parent signs a petition becomes important, and the objective … is not served by entirely omitting the date from all the petitions.”

Plaintiffs in the case further contended that the court misinterpreted the regulation because the proposed regulation defines the operative date as the date the petitions were submitted, not when each person signed. They went on to claim that because all signatures were submitted on Dec. 7, 2010, no other date is relevant.

But “the failure of the drafters to make a date box voluntary when they had the opportunity to do so convinces the court that they intended the provision to be mandatory,” said Judge Mohr’s ruling. “If the operative date was intended to mean the date petitions are submitted, then there would be no reason to include a box on the face of each petition.”

Though the regulations set by the State Board of Education have been unclear in many respects, it is very specific as to how the format should be, which includes adding basic information, such as a date, name of the guardian, etc., so that the district can use the components during the verification process and ensure that parents actually authorized what the proponents are seeking to implement.

Plaintiffs claimed that despite the date box being absent, the district still could have determined whether persons controlled the educational rights of McKinley students using the date the petition was submitted, and that the lack of a date box is gratuitous.

Judge Mohr determined that “It makes little sense for over 250 people to separately fill out petitions with the date box on each signature page, but leave that one box for another person to fill in later,” said the court document which weighed the petitions intent versus purpose. “The court does not believe that the drafters … intended this result. Rather the requirement of a date box in the same section that also requires the pupil’s name implies that the drafters wanted the ability to determine whether the parent had educational authority over the pupil on the date the parent signed the petition. The petitions’ failure to include any date box frustrates purpose.”

In the document, a testimony from Theodore Mitchell, who was president of the California State Board of Education from , was inserted. According to Mitchell’s statement, drafters of the regulation spent “little time discussing or considering the date requirement” and “never discussed the possibility that the requirement would be used to ensure that the signer was a parent, guardian, or educational rights holder as of the date they signed the petition.”

Additionally, Mitchell stated in his court testimony that “we specified important requirements established by Parent Trigger Law” and “specifically did not include a date requirement here.”

However, the school board was said to interpret having a date box as a minimum content that is pertinent nonetheless. And Judger Mohr, in his ruling, agreed.

“As currently written, the regulation requires a date box. ... The district’s denial of the petitions for lack of a date box was based on substantial evidence and was not arbitrary or capricious; thus, the court upholds the district’s denial of the petition,” the order concluded. “The court does not reach this decision lightly. It is aware of the pain, frustration, and perhaps educational disadvantages this ruling may cause. However, the court believes the law compels this result.”

According to Parent Revolution, the organization is still weighing their options and will likely appeal the matter. Despite what appears to be a setback, they are encouraged by a portion of Judge Mohr’s ruling, which states that “there is a controlling question of law as to which there are substantial grounds for difference of opinion, appellate resolution of which may materially advance the conclusion of this litigation.”