Most of the contentiousness swirling around the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School has focused on the badly tainted process by which it received state approval.
But community and charter school leaders themselves should be concerned about something else: When the school finally opens — with the starting date now set for next Monday — it will be a school that has drifted far from what was promised.
Yes, the problems with the process are important. And there is no doubt the charter approval was corrupted by politics. State Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester had approved the application of the school last year against the recommendation of his in-house experts — the Charter School Office. And Chester's recommendation came came shortly after he had received an e-mail from state Secretary of Education Paul Reville pressuring him to bless the Gloucester charter, not because it was the best, or even passed state muster, but to satisfy powerful political interest groups — such as the Boston Globe and Boston Foundation, both named in the message — and further Gov. Deval Patrick's education agenda.
A scathing report by Inspector General Gregory Sullivan also found that Chester had ordered or overseen the shredding of Charter School Office documents that outlined members' specific concerns with the Gloucester proposal. And Chester's role in the entire process last month came under fire from a Superior Court judge, who's now weighing a lawsuit filed by 15 local parents who claim the charter school's opening will, by drawing money away from the other schools, harm their own children's education.
That issue, however, is now in the hands of the judge.
A broader concern, as the school gears up for its delayed opening, is that the school has strayed far from the original sales pitch made to both the city and the state.
Initially, the school was to be downtown, where students would be in touch with the community, with the businesses and industry that define it and with the history that made it what it is today. Instead, after an earlier lease deal fell through for a site at Brown's Mall, it is opening in Blackburn Industrial Park, isolated from the downtown, on the campus of a former medical office building.
But a bigger issue is that only about two-thirds of the 93 students who had committed to the charter school as of last week were enrolled in other Gloucester public schools last year. The remaining third are either from other towns, private schools, Gloucester students who had gone elsewhere under school choice, or were home schooled.
That strays even farther from the vision presented to the city. The school was sold as an alternative for Gloucester students whose parents were not happy with the mainstream district schools, not as a magnet for others around the region. To find that only 60 or so Gloucester public school parents are seeking that alternative is jarring, to say the least — especially considering that money city schools will cede to the charter as this program goes forward may not be providing education to Gloucester children at all.
There remains an alternative to all of this, not far afield from the "compromise" floated by city school officials this summer: That could be to provide for an independent school — with independent leadership and an independent teaching staff not bound by union contracts — but operating under the umbrella of the city public schools' budget, and again housed in an existing school building.
But the charter school, as we now know it, seems far more akin to a private school, with leaders who seem to have adopted Commissioner Chester's scorn for transparency — and don't seem at all bothered by the fact they're not offering the type of alternative Gloucester parents and other residents thought they were getting.
Let the Blackburn school open, and let it become private for the next school year.
But, let's also start planning for another alternative — one that, at the very least, steers money pegged for Gloucester schools to local public school students.
