Proposed charter leaders vow to push on for approval

   Both proposed charter schools -- rejected by the Avoyelles Parish School Board for the second year in a row -- will present their applications to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education by this Friday.

   Pat Ours, president of the Red River Charter Academy board of directors, and Kelsey Osman, school leader for the Avoyelles Children's Charter School, both said they are optimistic the state will approve their applications when BESE makes a decision in October.

   “We are preparing the final draft to submit to BESE,” Ours said. “It is due June 12. We will get feedback from the state later in June, have an interview with the state’s outside evaluator in August and then have the final vote in October.”

   Ours, along with RRCA Executive Director Stephanie Moreau and Leigh Fryery, who will be the acting principal if the school is approved, all said they are optimistic about their chances for approval to be a BESE-sanctioned junior high charter school.

   “New Millennium, the board’s independent evaluator, told us they are confident we will get a positive recommendation from School Works, the outside evaluator for BESE.”

   New Millennium recommended RRCA’s application be approved by the School Board, but the board decided to reject it despite the recommendation. It did not recommended ACC’s application.

 

   Both proposed schools’ efforts were abruptly derailed last year when School Works presented some reservations about the applications. The schools withdrew their application rather than proceed to BESE with those reservations by the evaluator.

Officials of both schools said those issues were resolved.

   “I am not overconfident, but I feel good about our application,” Ours said.

  Osman said she was disappointed in New Millennium's decision not to recommend the charter to the School Board at the June 1 meeting. She said ACC  directors did not have a fair chance to interview with the evaluator. The evaluator missed the first scheduled interview and then had to reschedule the rescheduled interview.

   “It ended up being a 23-minute interview and a good third of the time was spent on an issue they had not noted in their review,” Osman said. The issue concerned the possibility that ACC might be a one-race school.

   Osman said the school will recruit parishwide and will have safeguards in place to recruit minority students.  

   She said the school organizers are looking at locating the school in the Hessmer or Mansura areas because they are centrally located.

The school would be a K-5 school when it opens and then would add a grade per year up to 8th grade. RRCA would be a grade 6-8 school at first and add a grade per year to eventually become a grade 6-12 high school.

 

   If BESE approves one or both charter applications in October, the school or schools would spend the next several months preparing to open their doors for the 2016-17 school year.

   Ours and Osman both said School Board members’ fears that a charter school will raid good teachers from the school system, take top students from the schools and take money away from the school district were unfounded.

   Had the board approved the charter schools, they would have operated similar to LaSAS. If BESE approves the charter, they will be what is called a Type II charter and be an independent public school operating in the parish. Under current state law, a Type II charter school receives the per-student state funding under the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) that would otherwise go to the school district.

Avoyelles Public Charter School is a BESE-created charter, but is funded solely by the state because it was created before the new funding law was adopted.

  Ours said both proposed charter schools have the potential to attract students back to  public school who are currently either in parochial, private, home school, virtual charter or attending public school in nearby public schools in neighboring parishes.

If the state denies the applications, officials for both schools said they would come back the next year and try again.