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WE’RE BACK AFTER A TWO-WEEK BREAK, WITH NEWS ITEMS FROM 6/26 – 7/10/26.
Community
We start with some great news from Ravenna, Ohio, where Portage Leadership Academy recently celebrated a community open house. PLA is housed in a closed district elementary school which will continue serving local students when it begins its first school year this fall. Superintendent Darryl Lindsay, who also serves as a regional vice president for Accel Schools, said, “Our team is looking for school buildings to bring opportunities to families and I jumped in when I saw this building. My own kids, my nephews and a lot of friends and family will be enrolling here.” Awesome news for the whole community.
Disunity
Meanwhile, leaders of the City of North Canton and North Canton City Schools are united only with themselves, working together to block any such development in their city. A complicated property swap is underway between the two political bodies there—despite citizens’ ongoing questions about a number of details—all with the publicly-stated goal of making sure that a soon-to-close elementary school doesn’t “end up in the possession of a charter school from outside the community.” Short-sighted, punitive, and wrong.
Earning the grade we deserve
Cleveland.com reported last week that Ohio received a grade of F (38th worst in the nation) in a report by a group called “Network for Public Education”. Reporter Laura Hancock says that the state was “dinged” because of its “charter and private school voucher policies”. As in: Because we have such policies at all, which the group has pre-determined is B-A-D. As Fordham’s Chad Aldis explained it in a separate interview, “It’s not a paper with strong analytics. It’s a paper that gets to an ideological result that is consistent with that organization.”
Support vs. opposition
The same anti-charter spirit is alive and (un)well in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, where there is a huge amount of support—from local families all the way up to the state Department of Education—for re-opening a closed district building as a charter school. However, a few city leaders are continuing to push hard for some other developer to step in and prevent the charter plan from moving forward.
The deets on transportation
The findings of Ohio’s Pupil Transportation Workgroup were finally released last week, confirming preliminary reports that the group would propose an end to the “impractical to transport” loophole that allows districts to avoid transporting up to 22,000 students—mostly charter and private school kids—every year. Fordham’s Aaron Churchill offered his analysis of the report in a blog post, calling the recommendations “sensible” and likely to “help to curtail abuse” of long-held workarounds if enacted into law.
An ounce of prevention?
While this is an opinion piece disguised as news, it’s interesting and relevant nonetheless. University of Connecticut professor Preston C. Green III has what he thinks is a simple—and, apparently, novel—way to prevent the rise of religiously-affiliated charter schools before it starts: put all charters under the control of the elected school board in whatever district they are located. Yep. That’s it.
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