The entry of the state's Inspector General's office into the persistent fight over the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education's approval of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School is certainly warranted.
Indeed, the myriad questions that the board has still failed to address regarding the entire charter process as illustrated by the Gloucester fiasco need to be answered, if residents are to have any faith that a deciding board will follow necessary guidelines in the future.
But at the same time, if the existing board is standing by its Gloucester decision — as it did in its latest meeting in Malden on Tuesday — there is also every reason for the board and Gloucester's charter school plans to move forward. For, as we've noted previously, the complaints and questions around the charter school approval center entirely in the board's handling of the Gloucester application, not the application itself.
There are no documented signs those who have been seeking the charter school have misrepresented the goals and perceived need for the independent public school, which would serve some 240 of the city's public school students. And given that, there is no need to consider revoking the charter. So there is every reason for charter officials to firm up a site for the school and name a chief administrator with an eye toward a September 2010 opening.
The same can't be said for the board, of course, and the Inspector General seems to recognize that. Indeed, by its handling of the Gloucester approval process, this board — starting with Gov. Deval Patrick's Education Secretary Paul Reville — has acted with such arrogance and disdain for even its own rules that residents have every reason to question its credibility.
But restoring that credibility need not penalize the Gloucester charter school activists who won approval for a program that stands as an alternative many Gloucester parents will no doubt want for their children. Yes, the state board botched the process, but revoking the new school's charter before the school even opens is wrong — and wrongheaded — as well.
Sadly, while continuing to seek new ways to block the charter school from opening, neither city, school nor state officials are addressing the real issues at hand: the need to find a better funding mechanism to make the charter school work, especially now as the state and federal governments are poised to get an infusion of charter school funding under the feds' developing "Race to the Top" program.
That would be a far better focus than the city and school district's apparent race to maintain the status quo.
