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Haven’t we been here before?
As we have noted so many times before, charter school opponents will use every tool at their disposal to try and stop the establishment and growth of charters—especially bureaucracy and red tape. In suburban Milwaukee, county officials recently launched a task force to investigate potential uses for the former satellite campus of the University of Wisconsin there, now vacant. Despite a concrete offer and fully fleshed out plan from Ohio’s ACCEL Schools, local charter school opponents have taken to the microphone at public meetings to drop all kinds of vague objections and unsupported accusations to stall the effort while other, less-developed but more-palatable, plans are floated in an attempt to block ACCEL’s purchase.
Same in Dayton
Families choosing charter schools in Dayton were among the targets of a group of public officials (school district, city, bus system, county, library system, etc.) who held a press conference recently to talk about how dangerous it is that high school students use the downtown bus transfer station to get from school to home in the afternoons. If only the district didn’t have to transport charter and private school students, they say, all of their other problems could be solved. Honestly, most of their comments sound anti-student, and each official seems to be thinking more about how to pass the perceived problem over to somebody else’s agency than in actually getting the kids—all the kids—what they really need. Yes; we’ve definitely been here before.
Luckily the news is not all about antagonism
Kudos to the staff, students, and families of Legacy Academy of Excellence in Mansfield. They may be finishing their very first year of operation, but Legacy Academy is already becoming a vital part of the community. We learn in this piece that its campus will be serving as the pit and inspections areas of the prestigious North Central Ohio Soap Box Derby this summer. You love to see it!
Missing the point
We end with an atypical legislative update from Indiana. In case you missed it, most Indianapolis Public Schools buildings (the district schools, not the partnering charter schools) closed for in-person instruction and switched to a virtual day this past Monday. Why? Because leaders were anticipating a mass absence of teachers. They were all planning to converge on the Indiana Statehouse that day in a last-ditch effort to stall a number of bills to which they objected; especially Senate Bill 1, which would, among other things, expand the sharing of local tax revenues between charters and districts…as we have followed in the Charter News for weeks. Among other salient points missed by the rallying teachers: The revenue sharing would be in proportion to student enrollment, meaning that the more students who leave districts (because, say, they often have short-notice virtual days) the more money will follow them to their new schools; and everyone (including themselves) will have to make up the virtual day by losing a day of summer break because the district has called too many virtual days already this year. Classic. Adding insult to injury: SB 1 and several other bills objectionable to district teachers were passed by the Senate and signed by the governor even before the they returned to their classrooms the next morning…assuming most of them did so.
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