State Hears Lake Worth Classical Academy Appeal

State Hears Case for

Lake Worth Classical Academy

Overrules School District on Curriculum – Affirms Phonics, Classical Curriculum

School District Sends Team of 5 to Tallahassee to Fight

The Lake Worth Tribune                 March 20, 2015

The state’s Charter School Appeal Commission met in Tallahassee on Monday, March 16, for a hearing on the appeal of the Lake Worth Classical Academy, proposed to open in Lake Worth in August of this year with 72 children in Kindergarten through third grade.

The appeal was presented by Margaret Menge, editor and publisher of The Lake Worth Tribune, on behalf of the school founders, accompanied by accountant Gary Scott of School Financial Services.

Appeal Commission members present included two charter school representatives and two representatives of school districts. The board was chaired by Lois Tepper, assistant general counsel for the Florida Department of Education, representing the state’s Commissioner of Education, Pam Stewart.

Menge began by telling the board of the 74 percent of 10^th graders not reading at grade level at Lake Worth High School, and the need for a model of academic excellence in the city of Lake Worth. She went on to describe the city as a historic, seaside town where families know one another, but where, when children reach school age, they are scattered, with many middle class families commuting to schools in other cities and children building their lives in other communities.

She pointed out the case of two new classical charter schools – Mason Classical Academy in Naples, Fla. and Savannah Classical Academy in Savannah, Ga., which use the same curriculum proposed for the Lake Worth Classical Academy – with intensive phonics used to teach reading, a focus on classic literature and history, and the teaching of Latin. Both schools have long waiting lists for limited available spaces for the 2015-2016 school year.

The School District of Palm Beach County, in its defense of the denial of the application for the Lake Worth Classical Academy, talked of recent closures of charter schools that had been turned down by the school district, but that had appealed and whose appeals were successful.

The application for the Lake Worth Classical Academy, submitted in August of 2014, was 158 pages in length with more than 30 additional pages of budget spreadsheets and 40 pages of other attachments, including letters of support from Charter School Capital, promising to provide working capital, and School Financial Services, agreeing to provide accounting services pro bono during the entire start-up period and through the school’s first year. Also included was a letter from the First Congregational United Church of Christ at 1415 North K Street, expressing support for leasing the church’s educational building to the school, with a credit given for half the capital improvements to the building.

At its November 2014 meeting, the Palm Beach County School Board voted to deny all new charter schools for 2015. The district had received 22 applications for new schools: All but six withdrew after receiving notice that district staff would recommend denial of their applications. The six applications that were submitted to the School Board were together under one listing on the consent agenda for the board’s Nov. 5 meeting. The board voted unanimously, with one vote, to reject all of them.

The state’s charter school law requires that school districts approve all charter applications that meet the requirements of the law.

Menge filed the appeal in mid December. The school district had 30 days to file a response.

Representing the school district in Tallahassee on Monday was Laura Pincus, the district’s deputy counsel; Bruce Harris, the district’s senior counsel; Jim Pegg, the director of the charter schools office for the district; Heather Knust, the district’s budget director; and a second budget staffer.

The first vote was to determine whether the applicant was denied due process under the law. The Charter School Appeal Commission voted that the applicant was not denied due process. The next vote was on the issue of whether the school district erred in denying the school based on the curriculum section of the application. The commission sided with the school, voting 3-2 after hearing an impassioned defense of the language arts program proposed to be used, The Riggs Institute’s “The Writing and Spelling Road to Reading and Thinking” and a strong argument for using intensive phonics to teach reading, as recommended by the 1985 federal synthesis of reading research, “Becoming a Nation of Readers.”

The third vote was on the issue of whether the district erred in denying the application based on the management section, where the district had said the applicant underestimated the percentage of ESE (special needs) students and the staffing that would be required to serve them. Again, the commission sided with the school, this time unanimously, saying the school had correctly estimated the percentage of ESE students and had budgeted sufficient staff.

On the last issue, the budget, the applicant explained that because of the district’s denial of the application, the school had not been able to apply for the Charter School Growth Fund grant identified as the seed money needed to open. She said that with a denial, it had not been possible to raise capital. The commission voted unanimously with the district, thus deciding to affirm the district’s denial of the school based on the budget section alone and to recommend to the State Board of Education that the district’s denial of the school’s application be upheld.

The school founders have the option to resubmit the application this year to open the school in 2016.

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