The charter school application regulation sets “an extremely high bar” for the standard charter schools would have to meet be to be approved by the authorizers, Amy Peabody told attendees at KSBA’s Summer Leadership Institute.
Peabody, who is KSBA’s staff attorney/Legal Training Services, was involved with drafting the regulation on charter applications while working for the Kentucky Department of Education. The charter application is more than 50 pages.
“It is extremely involved and demanding, and that is for a reason. We don’t want somebody just getting rubber-stamped,” she said.
Charter application timeline
Charter school authorizers can accept applications only from teachers, parents, school administrators, community residents, public organizations, nonprofit organizations or a combination of those entities. If anyone else is involved in the applicant group, the application must be rejected.
Once a district receives an application, it must be put on the district’s website and sent to the superintendent and any other authorizer for that district within three days. During the first 60 days, the district must take specific steps before approving or rejecting the application. These steps include:
• Hold a public meeting and allow written public comment.
• Allow the superintendent to write a letter supporting or objecting to the application.
• Require the superintendent to provide the authorizer with academic information and evidence about students targeted by the application.
• Obtain certificate of existence/authorization of any group in the application from the Secretary of State’s office.
• Conduct an in-person interview with the applicant and request any additional information.
Charter application contents
The application must contain a school overview, the educational program design and capacity, and the financial plan, among other requirements.
“By law, a charter must utilize the academic standards that the state board has for all schools,” Peabody said. “They have to show how they’re going to implement one or more purposes of the charter law, and they have to tell you what kind of grade levels they’re going to have, what instructional methods, assessment strategies. What are non-negotiables for the school?”
Peabody advised that authorizers would need to monitor the charter’s student enrollment and finances because they are usually tied together: If kids leave the school, the finances will almost certainly drop.
“We don’t have any information about how public funding in Kentucky would work for charter schools, but we do know that everywhere else funding is usually driven by the student enrollment. So keep your eyes on finances and keep your eyes on enrollment,” she said.
When the applicants discuss the charter school’s facilities, Peabody said it is important to question the source of the numbers. “When they say this is what the cost will be, did they dream those numbers up or did they actually go and get estimates?”
She said the applicants will have to show how they will meet the needs of all kids, including students with special needs. Charter schools will have to offer breakfast and lunch to students. “They can either participate in the USDA one or not, but they have to offer free meals to the kids who are eligible for free meals and reduced-price meals to the kids who are eligible for reduced-price meals. They have to tell you how they’re going to provide all of that,” she said.
In addition, Peabody said applicants have to tell authorizers their strategies for encouraging attendance and re-enrollment because “if kids don’t attend or if kids don’t come back, the charter school will close. And you need to know that because it’s so disruptive for your kids if you do allow a charter school to open.”
Applicants must outline the basic learning environment for the charter school, what the curriculum will look like, what kind of professional development their teachers will have and what high-quality instruction will look like.
“Part of the application’s role is to see what have they thought about and what have they not at all thought about,” Peabody said.
That includes how much instruction time the school will have for each grade level and how many days the school will be in session each year. “That’s going to give you an idea of whether or not they’re setting up teachers for burnout, which is going to really affect the student learning, the student culture and the student environment,” Peabody said.
“You’re going to have a lot of information that’s going to provide you a lot of tells, and you’ll be able to spot that in the application.”
Conversion charters
Before a current public school can be eligible for a charter application for conversion to a charter school, state law requires a petition. The petition phase requires either a valid petition with signatures from parents/guardians of 60 percent of resident students who attend the school and/or approval by the school board.
Once the first signature is on the petition, the petitioners have 90 days to submit the signatures. If the petitioners fail to do so in that time, they must start the process over.