A charter for conflict

Eight-year-old Joe Richardson of Orofino is about to demonstrate his second-grade science experiment on the back porch of his house.

Joe has molded a small mountain out of a lump of clay, placed it in a tray and covered it with dirt.

Under the guidance of his mother, Beth, Joe slowly pours water from a pitcher onto the mound and watches as the soil washes down into the tray.

"What does that show?" Beth Richardson asks.

Joe explains about the water causing soil erosion and then draws a parallel between his science experiment and what happens to real landscapes when the rain pours down.

The simple experiment conducted in the quiet of their home, where flowers bloom and birds chirp nearby, is one of the reasons Richardson chose to enroll Joe in the Idaho Virtual Academy, the state's first online charter school.

A second virtual school, the Idaho Distance Education Academy, recently was chartered by the Whitepine School District at Deary and is scheduled to open this fall.

Joe joins about 1,700 Idaho students enrolled in the Idaho Virtual Academy and a growing army of more than 3,500 statewide whose parents have chosen charter schools over regular public schools.

There are about 248,000 public school students in Idaho.

Richardson says her choice was more about school environment and enrichment than a strong dissatisfaction with the regular public school.

"I was looking at class size," she says. "I was really discouraged by large classes."

Richardson has an early education teaching certificate and conducts family and preschool classes through the public school district. She started Joe in kindergarten and first grade at Orofino Elementary School but switched to the online charter school this year.

"I have a young pupil and his skill level was probably age-appropriate. But his attention span and other things (caused problems), and in a large classroom setting he was just overwhelmed."

The online curriculum offers science beginning in the earliest grades, something the Orofino school did not, Richardson says. Science is a subject Joe is particularly interested in. On the day of the erosion experiment, he was also nursing a row of glass jars holding solutions of various types of kitchen crystals, such as salt and sugar, to enter in the charter school's science fair in northern Idaho.

Richardson and her husband, Brent, looked at a number of options and even considered moving out of the area.

But they wanted to stay in Orofino near family. And when they learned about the virtual academy, which offers online classes through a McLean, Va.-based curriculum company called K12, it seemed a perfect fit.

Beth attended a presentation about the school in Boise and was impressed.

"It was really well done as far as talking about having different choices in education, and that was one thing I felt really strongly about is being able to have a choice that would best fit the student."

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Choice in education, along with small class size and enriched learning environments, are among the top reasons parents opt to enroll their children in charter schools rather than traditional public schools.

But charter schools have become a political hot potato in Idaho as well as the rest of the country. Competition for federal and state education dollars has led to volatile clashes between legislators and lobbyists, including the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, the state's largest business lobby.

Washington's Legislature passed a charter school bill last session, but it's being challenged by the Washington Education Association.

The WEA, which represents public school teachers, mounted a petition drive to force a vote this fall.

Anti-charter school forces turned in petitions with 153,000 signatures Wednesday.

If 100,000 of those signatures are found to be valid, there will be a statewide vote this fall and no possibility any charter schools will open this school year.

Moscow Republican Sen. Gary Schroeder was targeted in the recent primary election by some charter school advocates after he called for financial accountability and questioned the ethics of not allowing charter school boards to be elected by patrons.

Schroeder, who is chairman of the Senate Education Committee, says the charter school lobby is out for nothing less than to bust public education.

"This is part of a larger movement to privatize public education."

That was not the intent of the Legislature when it approved the law creating charter schools in 1998.

Charter schools were meant to be laboratories for innovative teaching methods that eventually could be integrated into the regular public schools.

Schroeder says the majority of the 17 charter schools in the state work just that way -- schools like Mary Lang's Moscow Charter School, where the arts, foreign languages and technology are emphasized at the earliest grade levels.

But Schroeder says other charter schools have been developed by individuals and private corporations that apparently are trying to maximize their profits at the expense of Idaho taxpayers.

He points to Joe Richardson's school, the Idaho Virtual Academy, as an example.

The senator notes Peter Stewart, who was one of the three incorporators of the Idaho Virtual Academy, is also an official with K12 Inc., the company that provides the academy's curriculum. Stewart lists his home address as McLean, Va., where the company is headquartered.

Stewart also acts as a lobbyist on behalf of the online academy.

The academy was allotted $2,500 per student per year for the first 1,000 students. But in 2002, after its first year of operation, the academy found itself about $2.5 million in debt because of miscalculations by the school founders about how much money they would receive from the state.

So the per-student allotment was bumped to about $5,000. There are currently about 1,800 students enrolled in the school.

Stewart also persuaded the Legislature to alter its funding formula so most of the money allotted to each district where virtual students live would follow the students to the online school headquarters in Butte County.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Marilyn Howard was the only member of the State Board of Education who opposed the change in the funding formula. Meanwhile, school superintendents across the state argued the virtual academy was robbing other public schools of money.

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Charter schools are funded the same way traditional public schools are, based on a student-to-teacher ratio and average daily attendance.

It costs the state about $6,800 a year to educate a child in a traditional public schools. That compares with the $5,000 per year for a charter school student.

Unlike traditional schools, charter schools do not receive money for transportation and cannot levy property taxes to pay for buildings and additional costs.

Charter school student-to- teacher allocations, however, are based on a smaller divisor, giving charter schools and other small public schools more units, which brings in a little more money.

And unlike traditional public schools, which get paid only for the teachers they hire, charter schools get paid for their units, whether or not they hire the teachers to fill those units.

That can be a big advantage for online schools, because they don't need to hire as many teachers. That extra money is where the profits can be made, according to Schroeder and other online school critics.

Online schools also do not have the costs associated with brick-and-mortar schools. But their administrators argue there are costs involved in transporting computers and other equipment to their students all over the state.

Schroeder has long complained about the way charter schools, particularly the virtual academy, are administered. Last year, the Idaho Virtual Academy was audited by an independent Idaho Falls accounting firm that noted weaknesses in the way the academy reports its finances.

These include lack of adequate documentation of transactions and failure of the academy to employ financial personnel. Instead, the academy contracts that service with K12.

Schroeder says these practices would be illegal in a regular public school. But when he asked the academy officials to answer some of his questions about finances, they refused.

"I suspect that the reason that some of the business lobby were so intensely involved in this issue during the last (legislative) session," he says, "is because there is a lot more money to be made in this arena than we now suspect."

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Schroeder is not the only one wary of some of the promoters of charter schools.

"Any time that a pool of state money is available, people go after it," says retiring Sen. Laird Noh, R-Kimberly.

"I think one of the areas where we're seeing particular activity ... are the for-profit companies that are after that money. That, I think, was clearly the case with the virtual academy in Butte County."

The charter school lobbyists have been successful in getting favorable legislation passed by the Legislature, say Noh and Schroeder, but neither can explain why.

But in a recent letter to newspapers around the state supporting Schroeder's candidacy, Noh was critical of former Sen. Darrel Deide, R-Caldwell, who raised money to prevent Schroeder's re-election.

Deide, Noh says in his letter, "is working with a group of political insiders in Idaho and Washington, D.C., with access to millions of dollars of U.S. Department of Education funds which they use to try to undercut and privatize the public schools of America."

Noh says he is not opposed to charter schools and notes charter school parents are often the ones most interested and involved in their children's education.

But he is opposed to charter schools "that don't follow the law, waste taxpayers' money and are in it for reasons other than the benefit of the education of our students."

He adds that some charter school proponents, such as Deide, see charter schools as a way to get back at teachers unions that have successfully opposed the candidacies of some Republican lawmakers.

"I think it's clear," Noh says, "that nationally one of the long-term components of the Republican agenda to undercut Democrats is to remove that base of support of Democratic candidates at the state and federal level.

"While that may be a perfectly legitimate political goal, I break away from that when it seriously undercuts our public school system in the process."

Rep. Mike Mitchell, D-Lewiston, who sits on the joint legislative budget committee, questions the motives of the State Board of Education in appointing a charter commission that can approve charter schools, even after they have been turned down by local school boards.

School boards and State Superintendent Howard, duly elected by voters, should be the only players in this equation, Mitchell says. And yet they are being circumvented by appointed boards.

"What's the point of a school board if you put a commission between them and the use of the property tax dollars they have to use in their districts?"

Most charter school founders are sincere in their dedication to quality education for children, Mitchell says, but others, "I believe are out to destroy the public schools."

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Charter schools are part of the education reform movement that originated in the late 1970s and '80s.

The first was started in the late 1980s in Philadelphia and in 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school law.

By 1995, 19 states had signed such laws. The Idaho Legislature passed its charter school law in 1998 and the Moscow Charter School and Renaissance Charter School in Moscow were the first in the state to be approved by the local school board.

Now there are 17 charter schools operating in the state, including the Idaho Virtual Academy. The Whitepine online school will be the second virtual academy and the 18th charter school.

Although Washington voters twice turned down charter school proposals in the recent past, this year the state Legislature passed a law approving them. It became the 41st state to approve charter school legislation in the country.

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Politics aside, parents say they are only concerned about their children's education when they choose charter schools.

Rhonda Leonhardy of Moscow has three children enrolled in the Renaissance Charter School and says it's the richness of the education there, with a wider range of study topics and attention to the students, that drew her there.

"Class sizes are at the top of my list," Leonhardy says. "The smaller, more intimate setting, I think, is especially good for younger elementary-age kids, because they can really have a lot of growth at that time."

The Moscow School Board recently revoked the Renaissance charter, citing financial problems and a failure to meet all the terms of its charter.

But the school's directors plan to appeal their case to the State Board of Education during its meeting this week in Moscow.

If that appeal fails, Leonhardy says she probably will enroll her children in the regular public school next year.

Tammy Coleman of Lewiston has a 16-year-old son she plans to enroll in the Whitepine online charter school this fall.

She has been home schooling her son this year but likes what the virtual academy has to offer.

"I think it's a plus because it's a charter school and with the charter school it seems there is more of a variety of curriculum than a public school," Coleman says.

"But my main reason is because not only will I get that benefit, but we will get to choose a curriculum and get an allotment for it and it will still allow my son to graduate from a local school district."

John Rubino of Moscow has three children enrolled at the Moscow Charter School and says school choice is one of the main reasons he and his wife chose to go that route.

"We think that competition improved the product," Rubino says, "and in education that is absolutely true.

"Excellence comes from competition. It's important that schools compete, because that's what leads them to improve years after year."

Julie Ketchum of Moscow, who has two children in the Moscow Charter School, thinks people who are critical of charter schools are not looking at the whole picture.

"Obviously (charter schools) are fulfilling a need or they would not have grown," Ketchum says.

"I would like to see us all work together to provide a menu of different options that meets as many needs of as many kids as possible, so the kids don't have to go to private school.

"If we all put our money into public education and making it the best it can be, then we'll solve some of the problems that we're facing in education."

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Hedberg may be contacted at khedberg@lmtribune.com