Charter school delay urged during hearing

AUGUSTA – Proposed legislation calling for the development of charter schools should be put on hold for another year, Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, said Tuesday.

She told the Legislature’s Education Committee during a public hearing on LD 1640 that department staff would be hard pressed to find the time to monitor the development of charter schools and to come up with rules governing them. And she said further investigation is needed to understand how charter schools would fit within the new education funding formula and how they would affect the issue of small schools.

“The timing of how we move forward is critical to the department’s capacity to support a new initiative,” she said.

Despite the commissioner’s lukewarm response to the bill, Sen. Carol Weston, R-Montville, who sponsored the bipartisan legislation, was determined to be optimistic about its passage. “The quality of the legislation and the need for it and the public support are there,” she said in an interview.

She pointed out that the legislation was based on a State Board of Education study which recommended that Maine experiment with the alternative education. And she said the bill had been written after garnering input from the department of education. “We worked hard to take care of any of their concerns,” she said.

A work session is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. today in Room 202 of the State Office Building.

Charter schools are tuition-free and not affiliated with any region. Although they fall under the umbrella of the state public school system, they are independently managed facilities for students who don’t fare well in traditional setting. The schools must be open to all students without admission tests.

Weston’s bill would allow the creation of 20 charter schools in 10 years. The schools would have a choice of chartering authorities and could be given a contract either by a local school board or a public college or university which then would provide oversight and monitoring. The charter schools would be subject to the federal No Child Left Behind Act as well as the Maine Learning Results. At least 50 percent of the teaching staff would have to be certified.

Under the proposal, the current average per-pupil allocation for operating funds would follow each child to the public charter school, which means that no additional funds would be required from the state or from a town, according to Judith Jones, chairman of the Maine Association for Public Charter Schools.

She was one of a number of proponents who cited the benefits of charter schools during the hearing. Among other things, they said charter schools are needed to provide more options to meet the individual needs of Maine students, to help those with low aspirations achieve, and to infuse the state’s education system with creativity and innovation. They pointed out that federal funding is available to help the schools get off the ground.

Marilyn Wentworth, principal of The New School, a private school in Kennebunk that was intended to be a charter school, said charter schools are models for regionalization because they cooperate with area school systems. The New School was designed around the Maine Learning Results and could help other schools implement the academic standards, she said.

As part of her written testimony, Gendron spoke neither for nor against the bill, and conceded that the department’s goals for “innovation, flexibility, alternative programs and more efficient regional cooperative arrangements for educational delivery … might be advanced by the charter school pilot envisioned by the State Board of Education study.”

But Rob Walker, president of the Maine Education Association, the state’s teachers’ union, was unequivocal in his opposition. He said the bill would “divert money from the school budget to an unproven system” and that there is no evidence that students at charter schools do better than at regular public schools. He said the state shouldn’t “endorse a project that does not support full certification.” More time is needed to study the implications of the bill, according to Walker who noted that its text had only recently been made available.

Rep. Connie Goldman, D-Cape Elizabeth, also pointed out that she had only recently been able to read the bill. She said she was “fairly sympathetic” to the idea of charter schools.

Judy Powers, former state representative from Rockport who sponsored a similar bill in the late ’90s, was back at the Legislature to champion the idea. The state will continue to lose students to private schools unless it finds ways to meet youngsters’ individual needs, she said.