State: No 'second guess' on charter

There will be no charter school do-over.

Flawed, weak and confusing, the process leading to the approval of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School should not be taken out of the hands of the state education officials who administered it, lawmakers in the Joint Committee on Education have decided.

Likely dashing the already faint hopes of Gloucester parents and politicians who called for a measure to stop the charter, education committee chairmen Rep. Martha Walz, D-Boston, and Sen. Robert O'Leary, D-Barnstable, last week offered an unflattering critique of the charter approval process, but issues no to reverse it.

"While we recognize the weaknesses in the process that have led to calls to re-open the process and thereby re-evaluate the school's application," Walz and O'Leary wrote in a letter to Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester and Board of Education Chairwoman Maura Banta, "it is not a legislative committee's role to second guess the board's decision to grant the charter."

With legislative action now extremely remote, Gloucester's Statehouse delegation — which in the wake of the June 8 oversight hearing into procedural irregularities suggested special legislation to restart the approval process — this week asked Gov. Deval Patrick to step in.

But half of that delegation, state Sen. Bruce Tarr, said yesterday the legion of charter opponents in the city should begin to expect that the charter would not be revoked, and the school would soon become a reality.

"I think the process is nearing its end and I wouldn't want to raise any false expectations," Tarr said yesterday. "The opposition to this going forward is at two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. The number of options are becoming narrower."

In their letter, written to Patrick on Wednesday, Tarr and state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante asked for "action" from the governor in defense of the ideals of transparency and accountability, but they also did not suggest anything more specific.

In summarizing their findings from the June oversight hearing, Walz and O'Leary essentially validate the objection from charter opponents to neither the commissioner, nor any member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education attending a public hearing on the Gloucester charter.

The findings also take a dim view of the education board retroactively waiving the attendance requirement and Chester's suggestion at that having someone attend a meeting in Waltham or Worcester sufficed — while not directly challenging the legality of that move.

"Putting aside the legal question of whether such a waiver was necessary, the board's view that it had the authority to waive this regulation is problematic," Walz and O'Leary wrote. "We know you consider the requirement that a board member be present at a public hearing to be a purely procedural regulation. We take a more positive view of the board's role and consider the presence of a board member to be substantively important to the process."

"The waiver of a regulation, particularly after it may have been violated, creates the impression — if not the reality — that an approval process is unfair," they added.

O'Leary and Walz offer a series of proposed changes to the charter regulations to improve the process in future years including:

Specifying that the latest U.S. Census figures to be used to determine the population of potential host districts.

Making board attendance at charter school public hearings mandatory.

Clarifying regulations to require a public hearing in each of the potential charter host districts.

Detailing in the regulations exactly what financial data and what proof of community support is required in charter applications.

They also suggest the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education consider re-doing the public hearing in Gloucester.

But Chester and Banta, in a written response called "tepid" and "ironic" by Tarr, suggest that the oversight hearing in which they were excoriated for not showing up at the first hearing could be considered a stand-in for that meeting, negating any obligation to come back to Gloucester again.

"With respect to the comment in your letter that the board has the option of re-visiting whether to hold a public hearing in Gloucester with a board member present, we believe the June 8 public hearing that your committee convened amply fulfilled that purpose," Chester and Banta wrote.

As for the other suggestions, the Chester-Banta response says the proposed changes will be reviewed and discussed at a board meeting Sept. 22.

Yesterday, Ferrante rejected the notion that the oversight hearing could stand in for a hearing on the substance of the charter application and said she would like to see the governor order Chester to hold another hearing in Gloucester.

"The Joint Committee hearing had specific boundaries that had to do with process and I don't think serves as an equivalent for the hearing on the application's merits," Ferrante said.

While stopping short of saying she was disappointed with the extent of action by the Joint Education Committee, Ferrante said she would have liked to have seen "stronger recommendations on this particular application."

She asked Gloucester residents still upset about the issue to write the governor and demand another hearing.

Tarr said because the approval of charter schools is an executive branch function, it would have been precedent setting if the Education Committee had tried to stop or reverse it.

With attempts to invalidate the charter now waning, the focus of the group running the fledgling institution is now turning to the condition on opening, or "fiscal trigger" attached to the approval by Chester.

The condition said commissioner must determine that sufficient funding of the Gloucester public schools is available before the charter school can open.

Peter Van Ness, chairman of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School Board, said yesterday he had received no word from Chester yet on the status of the fiscal trigger and his group was waiting to take further action until the status was determined.

Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com.

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