What can a charter school do that isn’t already being done in public schools across Monongalia County?
That’s the homework assignment from the county Board of Education for anyone considering the launch of such an academic endeavor here in the future.
The board discussed charters during its regular meeting Tuesday night at its central offices on South University Avenue.
The above Mon BOE rules, Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr., said.
That’s how the state Board of Education wrote the proposal.
“A charter school proposal must be presented to the community with an idea that’s new and different,” Campbell said. “Something the county system is not doing.”
Which, he allowed, could be a tall order in a county lauded for diverse course offerings, teaching innovations and above-average test scores.
Lawmakers voted House Bill 206, and Policy 3300, its charter school statute, into law in special session this summer.
That was after the contentious bill died on the floor during the 2019 Legislative session before.
Gov. Jim Justice called lawmakers back to Charleston to hammer out a final version of the bill, which, they did — in the middle of raging thunderstorms and a tornado that touched down near the capital complex.
A link to Policy 3300, meanwhile, can be found online at wvde.state.wv.us/policies/. That’s where it will stay for a 60-day comment period.
Campbell encourages educators and everyone to read the bill and add to the online conversation.
HB 206 allows for the possibility of three such schools — again, with all coming under control of the respective local board of education — by 2023.
After that, the door is open for the possibility of three more schools every three years.
Ring, ring, goes the bell
Charter schools run separate from county schools.
They mostly aren’t beholden to state-mandated policies or benchmarks.
Charters can have a free-form curriculum and a year-‘round calendar, if that’s what their founders and administrators want.
They can exist solely online, even.
The nation’s first charter school was founded in St. Paul, Minn., in 1992.
Today, around 7,000 such schools operate in 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
More than 3 million students in the U.S. get their education from charters, the center said.
Charter schools are mainly managed by private, nonprofit companies.
In recent years, charters have come under the watchdog microscope after a series of high-profile failures and charges of money mismanagement.
Still, there are success stories found in inner-city Washington, D.C., where charters survive and thrive, and in rural Tidioute, Pa., near the New York state border — in a region that could be a cousin to West Virginia.
Whatever one’s stance on the delivery system, a school is still a school, Andrew Saultz said.
Saultz charts the progress of American schools, charter and public, from his post at Pacific University, in Oregon, where he teaches courses in educational leadership.
That’s when he isn’t authoring studies on equity and accountability issues in the hallways and classrooms of the country’s schools.
He’s a former high school studies teacher who was twice-elected to local school boards on his way to earning his doctorate.
Don’t be tardy, the professor said
Saultz discussed charter schools with The Dominion Post after the passage of HB 206 this summer.
The planners of such schools, he said, would be well-advised to have every accountability measure in place they can think of. One charter in Arizona, didn’t do background checks when it hired its teachers — “You can imagine what happened,” he said.
Stay away from virtual charters, he cautioned. The largest online school in neighboring Ohio went dark last year, causing 12,000 students to be set adrift.
And everyone, he said, needs to watch the amount of money a company wishing to front a charter puts into its advertising and marketing budget for recruitment purposes. There’s also the scourge of “cream-skimming,” he said.
Cream-skimming is the practice of plucking the best and brightest (read, the kids from the more affluent families) for the charter school.
