Will Monongalia County be home to West Virginia’s first charter school after all?
That’s a definite maybe, John Treu said.
Or even a solid, most likely.
Treu, a WVU accounting professor and dean, is president of the school, christened the West Virginia Academy.
Charter schools are those public institutions of learning that run separately from public schools.
They aren’t beholden to state-mandated policies or benchmarks. They can have a free-form curriculum and a year-‘round calendar, if their leaders want. They can exist solely online, even.
More than 3 million students are enrolled in 7,500 such schools operating in the U.S., according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Here at home, the still-proposed West Virginia Academy has endured three denials in the effort to open its doors.
Monongalia County’s Board of Education was the first to say no, contending the academy failed to reach seven-of-10 state-sanctioned benchmarks in its application.
Preston’s BOE followed with the same vote. It was called in, since the academy wanted to recruit from the Bruceton Mills area, which already sends students across the county line to University High School.
The academy’s board said neither district acted in good faith, but the state Supreme Court rejected that appeal this summer.
A final word in favor of the school, however, could come by way of the Hope Scholarship bill, Treu said.
The legislation, signed into law this spring by Gov. Jim Justice, will kick in for the 2022 school year.
It’s an educational savings account, based on the state School Aid formula.
The scholarship carries an allotment up to $4,600 per student, while allowing parents to direct the money to private school tuition, or other alternatives to the offerings of the public school district.
Call it Hope and more hope, Treu said.
In the months after the academy submitted its application to Mon and Preston, state lawmakers created a Professional Charter School Board, which takes public districts altogether out of the approval process in the counties where they want to open.
So now, the academy is making another run, first through the charter school board.
“We plan to submit our application this fall,” Treu wrote in an email to The Dominion Post.
“In the unlikely event that our charter is not approved in this cycle, we plan to open as a nonprofit school that will be funded primarily through Hope Scholarship funds.”
In the meantime, there are now concrete particulars mixed in with the books and the bricks and mortar.
The tuition-free academy will be based in the Cheat Lake area, Treu said, and plans to start holding class in the autumn of 2022 for pre-k through grade 9 with with more grades added each year. For more details, visit online at https://www.westvirginiaacademy.org/.
“Our preferred structure would be a charter school,” Treu said.
“But there is sufficient demand for our school that we can, and will be opening — irrespective of the outcome on our charter application.”
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