A Charter School Co-Location Debacle
Armed with a state override of its rejected application, Promise Academy filed a new request. Then came the lawsuits.
For months in San Jose, California, Promise Academy, a new charter school projected to enroll a couple hundred students, had been gearing up to launch for the 2019-2020 school year. But when the school should have been opening its doors, it still didn’t have a building. Promise Academy blamed the false start on the San Jose Unified School District, where it had planned to rent space. The district, which serves more than 30,000 in 41 schools, claimed that Promise Academy knew well in advance the steps needed to secure the space, and that it didn’t follow through. The resulting drawn-out dispute between Promise and SJUSD would come to illustrate the complex balance of power between charters and school districts, how even small charters can leverage outsized litigation power and why these conditions might be changing.
Under Proposition 39, which voters passed in 2000, public school districts are required to provide classrooms and facilities to charter schools operating within their boundaries. However, prospective charters must first prove that they have satisfactory educational platforms and sufficient interest from students and families by gathering signatures and submitting a petition to the district.
School District: “We work with a lot of charter schools and have never had this level of difficulty with an operator before.”
When Promise Academy first submitted a petition in 2017 to establish a K-12 charter school for the 2018-2019 school year, “It was San Jose Unified’s determination that [Promise Academy was] not offering a sound educational program and unlikely to implement it successfully, in large part–but not entirely–because the high school program that they were proposing was inconsistent with many aspects of the education code,” Ben Spielberg, a spokesperson for the district, told Capital & Main.
Instead of revising and resubmitting its petition, Promise appealed its original request’s CONTINUE READING: A Charter School Co-Location Debacle | Capital & Main