Last week, SOAR Academy, a charter school opening next fall in Tacoma, launched its student registartion drive. “I am both humbled and in awe of the warm welcome, excitement and energy that has been committed by so many in the Tacoma community to make this a reality!” founder Kristina Bellamy-McClain enthused in an e-mail missive.
Bellamy-McClain, a local who once served as principal of Seattle’s Emerson Elementary, also called SOAR “the first homegrown charter school in Tacoma.” Thus, she distinguishes herself from two other charter schools also opening in that city next fall, both run by well-known California organizations: Green Dot and Summit Public Schools.
And so the next wave of charter schools gets under way. The state Charter School Commission approved seven charter school applications last year. Only one, Seattle’s First Place, was ready to start this fall. The others—including a Summit school in Seattle– have been gearing up to open in 2015.
So even though the commission received only four applications this year, likely due to the state’s tough standards and the challenges of starting up a school from scratch, charter schools are going to start having more of an impact.
“It’s going to be huge,” Karen Vialle, a former Tacoma mayor who’s now serving on that city’s school board, tells Seattle Weekly. And it’s something she contends was hardly debated in the campaign for charter school Initiative 1240.
According to the initiative, charter schools receive money from the state on a per pupil basis. If Tacoma’s three charter schools get the enrollment they’re hoping for–a combined 1,500 students–their total funding will add up to $10 million a year, says Vialle, citing numbers run by district staff. That’s $10 million that the district won’t get.
“We will be laying teachers off,” Vialle says, adding that larger class sizes will result. That’s not certain, she concedes. It depends on whether Tacoma’s charter schools will, in fact, get an enthusiastic responds from students and their families. Still, she and other board members are concerned enough that they asked several commission members to come to a meeting late last month.
The board members cited the potential impact and asked why the commission green-lighted so many charter schools in one city. Commission members responded that the law does not instruct them to take geographic concentration into account. So that’s something that Tacoma may be pressing its legislators to change, according to Vialle.
This legislative season, two years will have elapsed since the passing of charter school initiative, allowing changes to the law with a simple majority vote.
Will Seattle join in that effort? As blogger Melissa Westbrook has reported, the Seattle Public School District has formed a working group to consider the impacts of charter schools. An August memo about the group predicted a “slowing of enrollment in the district” due to charters, but a modest one. First Place, the memo points out, was a private school with an “existing student population” before it became a charter, and so would not just be siphoning off students from the district.
The memo also said that implications in the years ahead were unknown, however, and the group continues to meet once a month, according to district spokesperson Stacy Howard. A crucial factor is how many new charters open up in Seattle. In the second round of applications this summer, Green Dot sought approval for one such school, adding to the two already approved. So we may soon have just as many charter schools as Tacoma.
