Do charter schools discriminate against low-income students and students with disabilities?
That was the topic of conversation at Monday’s Kenai Peninsula Borough School District charter school oversight committee meeting while considering whether to renew a local school’s governing document.
Aurora Borealis Charter School in Kenai opened its doors in 1997. It’s a K-8 school that prioritizes a classical education in logic and rhetoric. Students take Latin, follow a dress code and participate in mentorship programs. Like other charter schools, Aurora Borealis Charter — known as ABC — is a public school governed by a charter and an academic policy committee.
On Monday, the school’s principal, Cody McCanna sat before the school district’s charter school oversight committee to explain why the school’s founding document should be renewed.
McCanna presented a mostly status quo school charter to the committee. Other than minor changes to the school’s grading system and incorporation of a new citizenship philosophy, he says the document’s largely unchanged since the last time it was renewed in 2017.
“We are presenting this letter that you guys have,” he said. “Basically for this renewal, there’s no major changes.”
The discussion opened with committee concerns about how ABC serves students with disabilities.
The proportion of ABC students eligible for special education services, about 8.5%, is less than half that of the district as a whole at around 20.3%.
School board and committee member Virginia Morgan said those numbers, plus language in the charter about students with individualized education programs, or IEPs, suggest the school is undeserving students with special needs. That’s even though the school receives just as much state money for special education programs as the district’s other schools.
“The portion that addresses the plan for serving special education students – it says that ABC ‘Identifies and serves special education, gifted and bilingual students,’” she said. “But with this small number of IEPs relative to the district average, it does indicate that that population is underserved at ABC.”
Morgan said the school should pay back money it receives for special education programming in light of the disparity so it could be redistributed to neighboring schools with a larger number of students eligible for special education services. The proportion of students at nearby Mountain View Elementary School and Kaleidoscope School of Arts and Science, also a charter school, is higher than the district average.
McCanna said the section of the charter that talks about accommodations for students with special needs was written by the school district the last time ABC’s charter was renewed. ABC enrollment is determined via lottery, and McCanna said the school works with every family offered enrollment to make sure their child will succeed.
McCanna was also questioned about how the school accommodates low-income students.
Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools aren’t required to provide transportation or meals for students. Some do, but ABC doesn’t. Some committee members, including Soldotna Elementary Principal Dr. Austin Stevenson, said those policies may dissuade low-income students from entering the lottery in the first place, and then work against them if they choose to enroll at ABC.
McCanna says the school does offer a carpooling program. But Stevenson questioned how effective it is.
“It looks like about 10 – from the last report card to the public – 10 of your students are considered low income that took the state assessment,” Stevenson said.
“Yeah,” McCanna responded.
“Would you say that this carpooling is an effective way to bring in low income students to your school?” Stevenson asked.
The committee’s review of charter proposals comes on the heels of a state legislative session where charter schools were put front and center amid calls for more funding for Alaska’s K-12 schools. Gov. Mike Dunleavy was among those who hailed a study out of Harvard University that found Alaska’s charter schools were the most successful in the country.
State assessment data show students at ABC perform higher than the district as a whole.
In response, some public education advocates pointed to what they say are inherent inequities in which students are served by charter schools.
McCanna says the school’s transportation and lunch policies are a product of the philosophy behind the school’s initial charter. The school was started by parents who’d previously home-schooled, but wanted a community for their kids.
“They said, ‘We do not want our kids on buses because we think it's the parents responsibility to bring their kids to school,’” McCanna said. “The second thing was, they said, ‘We want our parents to be involved in their kids. We want parents sending their kids with a lunch.’ So those two things from the very start were a foundational piece from the parents that started the school.”
According to the most recent round of state testing data, just over a third of KPBSD’s third- through ninth-grade students were considered proficient or advanced in English Language Arts. That rate was double among ABC students in the same grades. Ninety percent of ABC students were proficient or advanced in math, compared to about 36% of students districtwide.
Beyond voting Aurora’s renewal application up or down, committee member Virginia Morgan said the process is an opportunity to review where charter schools may be falling short.
“I feel like this is a really good time for us to bring to light the inequities that – because we're hearing a lot about the charter schools and the test scores for charter schools being so much higher than our neighborhood schools, or the parent involvement being higher and I think it's important for the public to understand why that is, and that there are some inequities,” she said.
On Tuesday, McCanna told KDLL he felt like his school was “on trial” during Monday’s meeting. He says the school’s had a clean record with the district since it opened and their charter complies with all state laws and district policies. Further, he says ABC students are high-performing and there’s a waitlist of families who want to enroll their kids.
McCanna pushed back on suggestions that ABC discriminates against low-income students and students with special needs.
He estimates less than half of ABC students live within the area that would be served by a district bus, and says it’d be just as discriminatory to introduce transportation services that could only serve certain students. The current school building also can’t accommodate lunch services, he said.
The district’s director of planning and operations Kevin Lyon said Tuesday bus routes for charter schools must work within the district’s existing route network.
During the same charter oversight committee meeting on Monday, board members also heard a proposal from the Kenaitze Indian Tribe. The group is also proposing to open a new charter school in Kenai. The school would be hosted at the tribe’s educational campus and emphasize Dena’ina language and culture through learning.
Two other groups who’d planned to submit charter applications ultimately didn’t. One came from a group wanting to add a high school to ABC. The other came from community members in Nikolaevsk, who’ve tried for years to open a charter school for their students.
McCanna said Tuesday the ABC high school group is holding off on applying until at least next year. That’s to make sure their work isn’t rushed, and so they can explore incorporating high school programming into the existing ABC charter.
Mariah Kerrone, a Nikolaevsk parent who helped spearhead charter efforts, said their group was offered meetings with the district on short notice. The community has clashed with the district in recent years over the charter school proposal.
“Honestly, if the past 3 years is any kind of indicator of the people that we would have to work with to run a charter school, we decided we would rather start some thing of our own and be completely unaffiliated with our school district due to their incompetence and negligent care of our children,” Kerrone said via text message.
Committee members will meet with charter groups again on Monday.
