Charter schools on the minds of many

http://blog.scarboroughleader.com/2011/12/15/charter-schools-on-the-minds-of-many.aspx

By David Arenstam

Special contributor

In June, Maine became the 41st state to pass legislation to allow 10 new charter schools to be established over the next decade. Students and teachers will begin to fill those classrooms in September 2012.

With less than one year to go before Maine’s first charter school opens, parents, teachers and administrators are waiting to see how these new campuses will affect public education in one of the most rural and least populated states in the nation. Behind the scenes, educators and administrators are looking at new curriculum, trying to estimate attendance figures and calculating potential budgets.

The law created a seven-member State Charter School Commission to authorize and oversee the new schools. The commission will decide where the new schools will be established, who will run them and which school districts will be affected. 

There is no timetable in the law to complete these tasks and now teachers, administrators, legislators and parents all wait and watch as the law takes effect.

There has been some speculation by educators, administrators, and citizen groups about where the first charter school will be located and what type of need or niche it will fill, but officials at the Maine Department of Education will not name the first charter school or its location.

Deborah Friedman, director of policy and programs for the Maine Department of Education, said the current public school population is nearly 300,000 students. 

According to the language in the new law, as many as 10 percent of existing public school students may transfer to the newly formed charter schools.  However, that 10 percent safeguard exists only for the first three years. After that, there are no transfer limitations. 

“Parents always want what’s best for their kids,” said Donna Buttarazzi, a mother of three from Arundel.  

Buttarazzi lives in a school district where parents choose where to send their children to school. High school students from Arundel may go to Biddeford, Kennebunk or Thornton Academy.

“If charter schools are the best option, that’s where mine will go,” she said.

 When students move, the money associated with them transfers as well, and it is the potential loss of these funds that seems to worry administrators the most.  

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