The Arkansas Board of Education decided Monday to hold hearings next month on applications for two proposed charter schools - one previously approved by the state Charter Authorizing Panel and one turned down by the panel.
The hearings for the proposed Quest Middle School of West Little Rock - planned for a site on Rahling Road and opposed by the Little Rock School District - and the Redfield Tri-County Charter School in Jefferson County are set for Jan. 10.
The Education Board accepted the Charter Authorizing Panel’s Nov. 13 and14 decisions on more than a dozen other charter school applications or amendments to the charters of already existing schools.
That included ratifying the Authorizing Panel’s approval last month of the Exalt Academy of Southwest Little Rock for kindergarten through eighth grades scheduled to open next August off Geyer Springs Road and the expansion of KIPP Delta Public Schools’ Blytheville campus.
The Education Board also accepted with very little discussion the panel’s decisions from last month to deny charter applications for proposed schools in North Little Rock, Springdale, Osceola and Sunset, a community near Marion in Crittenden County.
Until this year, the Education Board was the sole authority on the establishment of taxpayer-supported charter schools, which are public schools operated according to the terms of a charter, or contract, with the state. The contracts exempt them from some state laws and regulations, allowing charter schools to experiment with ways to raise student achievement. They can be operated by either traditional school districts or by independent nonprofit organizations.
Act 509 of 2013 makes the Arkansas Department of Education and its Charter Authorizing Panel of agency leaders the authorizer of new charter schools. But the new law also gives the state Education Board the right to review the Authorizing Panel’s decisions and, at its own discretion, conduct a hearing on any of the applications for new or amended charters before making a final decision, either upholding, altering or reversing a panel decision.
The Education Board can decide on its own initiative or can grant the request of a charter school organizer or an affected school district to hold a hearing on a proposal. The law does not specify what grounds or standards of review the Education Board should use for determining that a hearing is warranted.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” Education Board Chairman Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville remarked as she and her board colleagues began working through the list of charter proposals, including listening to brief presentations by supporters or opponents to the proposals on why or why not a full hearing was warranted.
Jeremy Lasiter, lead counsel for the Department of Education, suggested that the board consider setting a hearing on a proposal if a majority of members needed additional information about a proposal or believe an error was made by the Authorizing Panel.
Ellen Smith, an attorney for the Little Rock School District, told the Education Board that the Quest Middle School is basing its budget on a projected enrollment in which 50 percent of its pupils would be eligible for free- and reduced- price school meals. She said that figure was “grossly exaggerated,” based on the percentages of students eligible for subsidized school meals at nearby Baker Elementary where 19 percent of pupils qualify and Roberts Elementary where 25 percent of pupils qualify.
Schools qualify for state categorical aid based in part on percentages of students who qualify for subsidized meals. Greater amounts of money per student are granted for those schools in which 70 percent of students qualify for subsidized meal, and the amounts increase again for schools in which 90 percent of students qualify.
“We think the economic model they put forth is not accurate,” Smith said. “We don’t know what the basis for that 50 percent is,” she said.
Smith also said that organizers of the Quest school have said that the innovation to be offered by the charter school is that it will provide students in west Little Rock an opportunity to go out of their attendance-zone schools.
“With the affluence of west Little Rock, the effect of that is going to be taking affluent students out of the district and allowing them to go to school with other affluent students,” Smith said.
Sam Jones, an attorney for the Pulaski County Special School District, which has borders close to the site of the proposed charter school, told the Education Board that it “has considerable experience with [charter] applicants pledging to have a significant enrollment of free- and reduced-lunch kids and a significant enrollment of minority kids, and then a year or two years later you look around and say, ‘Well, they didn’t show up.’
“One reason they don’t show up is that this applicant, like the others, isn’t going to provide any transportation,”Jones said.
Jones said it would be appropriate for the Education Board to get assurances from the applicant “that it will actually get even close to realizing” what it represents it will do in terms of diversity in student race and economics.
Edwin Strickland, Arkansas director of Responsive Education, the group that is proposing the Quest school, told the Education Board that the Charter Authorizing Panel examined the school plan thoroughly, including budget and curriculum issues raised by the Little Rock district.
“Our chief financial officer was here. The panel members asked very detailed questions about our budget. They asked about the free- and reduced-price lunch rates. They asked about transportation,” Strickland said. “All of those issues were answered during that review process. We believe it’s actually redundant for them to raise the same issues again. We think the state board should honor that application since it was vetted on a very detailed basis.”
Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne, the board’s newest member, questioned why education isn’t the state board’s focus rather than “parent color and ability to pay.” She noted that the KIPP Delta Schools in Helena-West Helena and Blytheville have a nearly all black enrollment.
Gullett responded that KIPP was set up to work with the demographic of students it is indeed working with. She said other charter schools say they want to work with a diverse student body but don’t provide transportation or subsidized school meals.
“It’s been the responsibility of the board to keep these charters honest,” she said.
Board member Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock said that a vote to hold a hearing on the merits of the application, during which the charter planners and the opponents would present their arguments for and against the school, doesn’t mean that a decision has already been made about the proposal.
He said it has troubled board members in the past when charter schools turned out to be something other than what was presented to the board.
“They are the ones who put numbers in. I don’t write these,” Ledbetter said about the applications. “If they come in and say they are going to have 70 percent of students qualifying for free- and reduced-lunch - they put that out there. They are the ones that set the standard. The question is how will they meet the standard, because we’ve had others that said the same thing but they don’t do it. They do just the opposite. That happens because there was a lack of really drilling down into why they think this is the model for their school.”
Ledbetter said the Quest planners could have said that the proposed school would reflect the demographics of nearby schools, which is where he believes the charter school will draw students from if there is no regular school bus transportation.
The board voted 5-2 in favor of the hearing. Those voting for it were Ledbetter, Jay Barth, Toyce Newton, Alice Mahony, Mireya Reith. Those opposedwere board members Zook and Vicki Saviers. Zook attended the Charter Authorizing Panel meetings and Saviers said she watched those proceedings online.
Gary Newton, chief executive officer of the Arkansas Learns organization, which is an advocacy group for parental school choice, was a leader in inviting the Responsive Education charter school organization out of Texas to develop a west Little Rock school.
Newton said after the meeting he was surprised by the Education Board’s decision to hold a hearing on the proposal because the Authorizing Panel had done its job in conducting a rigorous review. He also said he was dismayed that the Little Rock district “did not respect the process enough” to send its superintendent or School Board members to Monday’s meeting.
He also said that the six elementary schools in the Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts that are likely to feed pupils to the proposed Quest middle school have a combined 51 percent minority enrollment. That figure includes not just black students but also Hispanic and Asian students. That diversity will likely be reflected in the charter school enrollment, he said.
In contrast to how Newton looks at demographic groups, the Pulaski County school districts typically group white, Hispanic and Asian students together as one group and compare black students in another in evaluating the diversity in schools. That is based at least in part on the focus on black students in a long-running federal school desegregation lawsuit in Pulaski County.
The Education Board vote was also divided Monday in support of conducting a hearing on the proposed Redfield Tri-County Charter School that the Authorizing Panel denied earlier because of concerns about the finances of the proposed school and a lack of a defined curriculum.
Amanda Kight, a chief planner for the proposed “grassroots” school, told the Education Board that she believed that the Authorizing Panel members were looking at a budget for a different charter school application when they questioned her about budget concerns. She said that the Redfield charter school is projected to have a year-end balance in excess of $80,000 as the result of a donation.
Kight also said the school planners will work with the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to develop the curriculum. The planners misunderstood that the curriculum should have been more fully prepared when the proposal went to the Charter Authorizing Panel, she said. Kight said the planners believed the approval of the charter was a first step and then came the development of the curriculum.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/17/2013