Public or Private: Are RI Charter Schools Trying to Have it Both Ways?
Their teachers are not unionized. They don’t pay into public pensions. And they are exempted from some of the rules that apply to traditional public schools. But they are funded by taxpayer dollars, are free of charge to students attending, and cannot expel students.
Are charter schools public schools or publicly funded private schools?
Charter advocates say it’s the first.
Officially, charters are considered public schools by the Rhode Island Department of Education, according to spokesman Elliot Krieger. “They are entirely public schools; they are not private or nonpublic schools in any respect. We generally refer to them as ‘charter public schools,’” Krieger said yesterday.
But others say it’s not as black-and-white as that.
State Sen. James Sheehan prefers to call them “quasi-public schools.” “They like to pretend they are a new form of traditional public education. In reality, they are not,” said Sheehan, a North Kingstown Democrat who is a history teacher at Tollgate High School in Warwick.
“I characterize charter schools as privately operated but publicly funded schools,” said Jim Parisi, an organizer for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals.
Woonsocket a flashpoint for statewide debate
The question is coming to a head in a major legal battle brewing over the opening of the RISE Prep Mayoral Academy in Woonsocket. In a complaint filed in Providence County Superior Court yesterday, attorneys for the Woonsocket City Council argue that RISE should not be allowed to open because its proposed location of 1 Social Street is in a commercial zone where nonprofit schools are not allowed.
Katelyn Silva, a spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, said the zoning restriction did not apply because RISE would be considered a ‘municipal use.’
But RISE is also a nonprofit school—at least according to its articles of incorporation, filed with the state Secretary of State on November 14 of last year.
Those articles stipulate that should the school dissolve, its assets would be distributed to Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, a nonprofit association—not the taxpayers of Woonsocket, William M. Dolan, the attorney for the city council, notes in a legal memorandum filed in court.
“Its by-laws do not provide any mechanism by which the people of Woonsocket may control it or its operations, and the school (clearly) has nothing to do with Woonsocket’s municipal government,” Dolan writes.
The fact that RISE has a state charter would, if anything, make it a state use, not a municipal use, he adds. That GoLocalProv | Public or Private: Are RI Charter Schools Trying to Have it Both Ways?: