alvin e. toda

A great educational program and apparantly good
results, but an irresponsible governing board and
financial mismanagement by its administrator have
placed this charter school in jeopardy because it has
vastly overspent it's budget and is asking for a
bailout rather than to be shutdown. In today's
Star-Bulletin...

http://starbulletin.com/2005/02/02/news/story5.html

"While acknowledging that some of the audit's findings
were on target, Waters of Life Administrator Katheryn
Crayton-Shay said corrective steps have been taken,
including a reorganization of the school's governing
board and the addition of staff with more financial
expertise. 'What have we done about it? We've been very
proactive,' she said.

"She also offered the board a check for $40,000 toward
a $257,000 debt owed to the Department of Education."

Although both Democrat and Republican lawmakers support
the chartered school concept, a number of these
glitches have occurred that make lawmakers wonder what
kind of over-sight is necessary to insure that groups
that accept this state money for their chartered school
are more responsible in their spending.

Currently the BOE stands accused of inadequate
over-sight, and even the possibility of scandal and
misconduct of Charter school boards and administrators
happening within the current system of oversight. OTOH,
charter schools do want less oversight and control by
the state school board. In the last session, IIRC the
charter schools were removed from much oversight by
their district superintendent and placed under a
chartered schools administrator who represented their
needs before the state board. IIRC the charters felt
there was a conflict of interest for a district
superintendent who is somewhat divorced from their
instructional program of their school to adequately
represent them before the Board.

Now in this current legislative session, IIRC the
charters want to create their own "virtual school
district". But it would be hard for many administrators
to control chartered schools all over the state. IIRC
there are about 30 now, and there could be a sizable
bureaucracy created that is separate from the district
superintendents now, to do the same job in the future
with many more charters.

I don't think that there is a need to structure charter
school governance so much as to find a way for them to
work together. It can be purely voluntary, and I can
see where a particularly good charter board might want
to have several campuses-- a little like large private
schools like Punahou and Kamehameha with their own
elementary and middle school programs as well. Or they
may want to organize themselves or with other public
schools into complexes with an informal board. They can
do that because they have the right to make up their
own rules. Chartered schools need to have integrated
programs like public schools to have more credibility
in their programs from the public and the legislators.
And like the public schools, charters will need to
comply with the No Child law and special education
requirements.

The DOE has organized its districts into complexes
which follow a natural grouping by schools which feed
into a high school(s). It seems that charter schools
might be more effectively overseen this way, since a
possible superintendent of the complex would know what
skills and knowledge the charter would need to impart
to its students so that they could graduate to the next
level of instruction in a public school. It's a more
tightly integrated style of management with a separate
school board to advise each complex superintendent.

Effectively this would create 15 smaller school
districts vs the 7 large ones now, but the legislators
have shied away from this probably because it would
have probably meant a doubling in size of the school
bureaucracy to meet the needs of double the number of
districts. The Republicans also felt that the plan was
inadequate because it didn't give each complex board
enough power over the bureaucracy in that complex. I
guess it's worked out OK with district superintendents
dealing with several complexes and complex advisory
boards within their large district, and handling the
budgets and boards of a few independent charters within
the same district.

Because of the new "reinventing education" law last
year, about 22 schools this year experimented with a
new style of management with an adviory board for each
school. Republicans opposed having a more powerful
board for each school that would "interfere" with the
principal's job. But IIRC, the advisory boards can
still reccomend firing the principal. So this
compromise makes them more than strictly advisory-- ie
the pricipal should heed their advice. But it makes
them less of a chartered school type of board. This
style of governance will come up for review in this
session. Should be interesting to see what happens when
all 300 schools start doing this in the fall.
Unfortunately, the newspapers haven't been covering
this kind of news at all.

--alvin