Birch Tree: Another charter school in the wings

PALMER — With one charter school going through the approval process and two more hoping to start soon, it’s worth asking the question: How do charter schools work?

John Weetman, the Mat-Su School District’s Assistant Superintendent of Administration, oversees the district’s charter schools.

He said that, essentially, charter schools offer choice. They offer a curriculum not available in the mainstream borough schools. Fronteras Spanish Immersion School, for instance, offers a bilingual education. Academy Charter School uses what’s called a Core Knowledge curriculum. The school currently awaiting approval from the state — Birch Tree Charter School — will be a Waldorf-inspired school.

But, curriculum aside, charter schools differ from mainstream schools in other ways. For instance, since students and parents choose to attend the school, they have to have a different enrollment setup than the system the district uses to assign students to schools based on where they live.

When a charter school is brand new, Weetman said, enrollment isn’t such an issue. The school is just trying to meet its enrollment goal. Birch Tree, for instance, will need 160 students to open its doors.

“What happens is at the very beginning it’s just open because there’s nobody there,” Weetman said.

But as the schools evolve over time and their slots fill up, most have settled on a lottery system. Open spaces in classrooms are filled, essentially, by drawing names out of a hat. Students who don’t get in are put on a wait list.

The district gets an allotment of a certain amount of money per-pupil from the state. Charter schools get that same allowance, but the money comes straight to the schools and doesn’t pass through the district. They also apply for grants and receive funding to augment the state money.

And Weetman said, the district never touches any of that money. Deciding where it goes is up to the individual charter school’s board of directors.

“They’re run by their own board. Our board, the regional school board’s role is to approve them or not,” Weetman said.

The charter school’s board is also empowered to hire the school’s principal, much the same way the school district’s board hires the superintendent.

Charter schools are also set apart by what they don’t offer — none of the borough’s charter schools offer transportation, so parents have to pick up and drop off their children every day. None of them offer food service, either, so students have to bring their own lunches.

Weetman said the charter school draws up its own rules and philosophy. The borough has four such schools — Fronteras, Academy, Midnight Sun Family Learning Center and Twindly Bridge. Weetman said all but Twindly Bridge require parents to volunteer at the school.

He said that requirement is relatively flexible. Parents can offer a number of different services to count for volunteer time, be it volunteering in the classroom or laying carpet or serving on the board or corralling and coordinating the other volunteers.

“They really work hard to help parents do that,” Weetman said. “They just think that parent involvement is important.”

Weetman said it’s rare that a parent won’t contribute the required number of volunteer hours, though sometimes it is a stumbling block. Some parents, he said, might decide to pull their children out of the school if they can’t find enough time to volunteer.

But if a parent absolutely refuses? The charter school can choose to, in Weetman’s words, “dis-enroll” the student.

“That’s a part that’s always been controversial,” he said.

In Anchorage, he recalls, there have been tussles over just that point, with parents protesting having their children dis-enrolled. Weetman said he doesn’t recall it ever being an issue in the Valley.

“I haven’t really heard any challenges with that so far,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.