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Responses
Last week, we talked about the officially-released findings of the Ohio Pupil Transportation Workgroup. In short: The current system does not properly serve the needs of tens of thousands of students across the state and numerous changes should be made. This week, the responses rolled in. Columbus City Schools, the largest district in the state, said in a statement that they “appreciate the committee’s recommendations,” but they “continue to be concerned about the state’s lack of full, fair funding to meet the actual costs.” Andy Boy, leader of the Columbus-based United Schools charter network (and workgroup member) said, “I believe the recommendations in the report are a step in the right direction. It highlights where challenges have been in the past and attempts to make changes that specifically address these problems.” Cost is still an issue, he agreed, but throwing more money at the existing system without making some or all of the recommended changes is not an answer.
More choices coming
And those transportation fixes can’t come soon enough, because more choices are on the horizon. Linden Tree Montessori for example, a brand new PreK-2 charter school in Columbus (and the first tuition-free Montessori school here), will open its doors this fall. Leaders plan to add a grade level per year until it reaches PreK-8. Exciting!
How things are supposed to work
Summit Academy charter school network was the successful bidder to purchase a closed Canton City Schools building earlier this week. Canton’s elected school board voted in February to close Belle Stone Elementary as part of district efforts to consolidate buildings; right-size their footprint; and to boost their budget, depleted by a steady decline in student enrollment. The building closed at the end of the school year, and by mid-July Belle Stone was off the books and sold at auction (with multiple charter operators bidding) for a price nearly three times higher than the appraised value. Just like it’s supposed to work.
Don’t charterize me, bro
The public comment period has ended for Ohio’s proposed waiver request to exempt the state from certain requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Cleveland.com’s coverage focuses only on the comments in opposition to various aspects of the request, and most specifically to a provision which would allow persistently low-performing district buildings to be merged with or converted to charter management as part of a turnaround strategy.
A welcome resolution
Back in December, the Ohio Ethics Commission issued a directive that charter school governing board members would have to file annual ethics disclosures similar to those of elected district board members. The change was put on hold, however, after charter leaders objected to the plan which was presented without warning and without input from the charter community. This week, the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review advanced a rule that would require the Ethics Commission to go through them for any future expansion of the list of required financial disclosure filers. This means that charter governing board members will not have to file such declarations for the foreseeable future, and future changes will need to go through a full rulemaking process. The news link above is subscriber-only content, but you can check out the video of the brief hearing for free here.
Union decertification effort in California
Apologies for the heavy anti-union rhetoric in this piece, but this is the only news source we could find about this story and, honestly, it’s probably tamer than it could have been given the source! Teachers at two charter schools in Sacramento, California, trying to get un-represented by their union, are facing pushback from the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. With the help of the National Right to Work Foundation (whose unsurprising rhetoric we are reading), they have escalated their fight to the National Labor Relations Board. An interesting story to watch, especially if some more traditional journalists begin to cover it.
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