Monticello charter school goes under; another OK’d for LR
Posted on Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The state lost one public charter school in Monticello on Monday but gained the prospect of another to open in Little Rock in the fall.
In an unprecedented move, the Arise Charter School in Monticello closed its doors to its 41 pupils at the end of January — in the midst of the school year — because state funding for the shrinking number of students wasn’t enough to adequately support the school. Most, if not all, of the Arise pupils have been reassigned to schools in the school districts in which they live, Arise and state officials said.
Lorenza Simmons, director of education at the school which targeted fourth- through eighth-graders at risk of failing in school, cited the establishment of an alternative school in the nearby Hamburg School District as one reason for the enrollment drop. The Arise school started with 75 pupils in 2004-05 and reported 62 last year.
The state Board of Education accepted the immediate surrender of the Arise charter at a meeting Monday at which it also conditionally approved the Dreamland Academy of Performing and Communication Arts charter school to open on the campus of Greater Second Baptist Church on Geyer Springs Road in Little Rock. The board rejected the application of the Perkins Academy of Science / Math / Technology in Helena-West Helena.
Dreamland will join the LISA Academy to become the second charter school within the Little Rock School District boundaries. The Little Rock district did not register any opposition to the state board about the establishment of the Dreamland school.
“We want to encourage you to keep your eyes on us,” Carolyn Carter of Gainesville, Fla., the lead applicant for the Dreamland charter, told the state board after its unanimous 6-0 vote. “We are going to give you a good school.” The state board action on the charter schools brings to an end three months of deliberations on 11 proposals for new open-enrollment charter schools for the 2007-08 school year. The 11 proposals were a record high number for one year; had all been ap- proved, they would have more than doubled the state’s existing seven open-enrollment charter schools.
In addition to the Dreamland proposal, the board in December approved the establishment of the Hope Academy Charter School in Pine Bluff and in January approved plans for the Rogers-based Northwest Academy of Fine Arts.
The board turned down a total of eight proposals, several because they had not yet acquired nonprofit status as a 501 (c ) 3 organization from the federal Internal Revenue Service.
The Dreamland Academy will serve kindergarten through fifth grades initially but will add a grade each year through the eighth grade. Proposed enrollment is 300 students. The school will target students who struggle with reading, Carter said after the meeting. “We want to offer hope to those students who have historically not fared well in traditional schools,” Carter said. “We’ll take the language-poor, we’ll take the special education, we’ll take the alternative kids who have difficulty adjusting, and general-education students, too.” The board’s approval of the charter school is contingent on state review and approval of a final lease agreement between the charter sponsors and the property owners.
Despite the location of the school on church property, charter organizers assured the state board that the school will be a nonsectarian operation. In response to earlier board concerns, the charter school organizers said the school’s five-member board of directors will come from the Little Rock area and will include parents, an artist, a community representative and two educators. Recruitment of students will be citywide.
Carter said the process for obtaining a state charter was rigorous and unprecedented in her 32 years in education, which included establishing a public charter school in a juvenile-delinquent facility in Michigan, as well as charter schools for alternative education in that state.
“We are weak, but we are happy,” Carter said, “because we really are good educators and we know this is going to be an opportunity to show that students who don’t fare well in traditional schools will have a home here and they will be at grade level and they will be literate.” The Education Board voted 5-1 against awarding a charter to the Perkins Academy, in part because of questions about the organizer’s pending nonprofit status, as well as concerns about the care and the condition of the proposed site in a bowling alley building, the applicant’s current role as a director of a local preschool and the impact of school-bus transportation on the budget.
Board Chairman Diane Tatum of Pine Bluff urged the applicant, Jacqueline Mills, to not give up. “We aren’t saying, ‘No, never, ’” Tatum said. “ We’re saying, ‘ Not now. ’’’ The Perkins Academy organizers planned to initially serve 120 pupils in kindergarten through fourth grades.
Charter schools are taxpayerfunded public schools that are exempted from some of the laws and rules that govern traditional public schools and, as a result, can be somewhat experimental in their operation and instruction. They operate according to the terms of a contract, or charter, with the state.
Arkansas has both conversion charters, which are operated by a traditional school district, and open-enrollment charters, operated by nonprofit organizations other than school districts. The state has a cap of 24 open-enrollment charter schools, or six per U. S. congressional district.
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