By Anonymous
Filed Monday, January 30 at 10:04 PM
by Peter Downs
January 25, 2006 -- The audience at Tuesday's St. Louis Board of Education meeting were treated to two shows in one: posturing from school board members desperately trying to show that they are not in love with charter schools; and a shadow play from a private company looking for a contract, but willing to settle for a charter school.
The backdrop for the first school is an election campaign. Two incumbent board members are running for reelection. They had already backpedaled on charter schools once. Facing stiff public opposition to an earlier proposal to set-up a structure for sponsoring charter schools, they had withdrawn the proposal, for now.
A request for sponsorship of a new charter school put the unpopular charter school issue back on the agenda in the middle of election season. Under state law, the group requesting sponsorship was owed an answer within a certain number of day. This particular request got a thumbs down from the staff and the superintendent. The board could have let the superintendent handle it but this was too perfect to avoid playing politics. Here was a chance to show the public that incumbents, who had spoken in favor of charter schools, weren't going to accept just anything.
Here was a chance to say "No" to a charter school group and support the superintendent at the same time. And that is just what they did. After a short meeting, the board voted unanimously to accept the superintendent's recommendation and reject the application to sponsor the self-styled "Centers for Academic Success."
There was another show within the school board's show, however. The charter school application was itself a show, an effort to use the charter school law to coerce a contract out of the school district.
David Camden, president of the board of the Centers for Academic Success and former director of the Charter School Information Center, said he and his colleagues were only applying for the charter because the superintendent had ended the district's contract with ACE Learning System in June 2005. "We would not be here if that contract were still in force," he said.
Camden's group included Gene Reynolds, founder of ACE Learning System.
ACE had a small contract with the school district that started in 2001. When the school board hired non-educator William Roberti to run the district in 2003, however, he canceled the school district's own alternative programs and sent many more students, and many more dollars, to ACE.
Camden and Reynolds repeatedly said it would be better for the district to resurrect the contract with ACE than to sponsor the charter school.
As a private school under contract to the St. Louis Public Schools, "you decide which students to send us," Camden said. But as a charter school, "we have to take whoever comes to us."
Left unsaid, but certainly implied, was that the school board can control the size of the contract, but it cannot control how much money it has to funnel to a charter schools. ACE had gotten paid less per student than charter schools get.
And, as a private school under contract to the school board, "we can graduate students with 18 credit hours, and that helps your graduation rate," Reynolds said. "As a charter school we'll have to follow the district's requirements," which are 24 credit hours. Some students "will be in your schools until they are 21," if they are required to get 24 credits to graduate, he added.
Camden's and Reynolds' presentation was probably the first episode in a continuing story. In future episodes look for them to negotiate with other potential sponsors, such as Mayor Slay or one of any number of colleges. Expect them to keep the school board informed as those talks progress, for that will increase the pressure for what they said they are really after, a contract.
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