Charter school applications may not meet district muster

PALMER — Three charter schools have applications pending with the Mat-Su Borough School Board, and so far it doesn’t look like any of them will become a school in the near future.

First is Mat-Su Central School, the school that the legion of homeschoolers in the Valley attend.

District superintendent Ken Burnley said at Wednesday’s school board meeting that when he showed up in the Valley — this school year is his first at the helm — he found the district was not doing a very good job serving its homeschoolers. A good indication of that, he said, is the number of homeschoolers who choose to do their homeschooling with other districts.

Burnley said he toured the school’s facility and found it severely lacking.

“We are planning now to expand the facility from 8,000 square feet to over 22,000,” Burnley said. “We intend to make Mat-Su Central School the premier correspondence school in the state of Alaska and No. 1 in the country. Now that’s a lot, but that’s the kind of standard that the board has set for us.”

With the district setting that as its goal, the school has decided not to go ahead with its charter application just yet.

“To allow the time necessary to develop the new program, our charter has been temporarily suspended at the request of Dr. Burnley and the school board,” said Sharon Aubrey, president of the school’s advisory board in a notice posted to the school’s website.

At Wednesday’s meeting, she thanked the school board for hiring Burnley.

“We have seen more support from our school district this year than we have during all the combined (years under previous) administrations,” she said.

The second charter school mentioned at Wednesday’s board meeting was mentioned only briefly as going a similar route.

Dubbed Thunderbird Early College Charter School, the idea is to provide students with “an early college experience focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” according to the school’s website.

Burnley said that school is looking at becoming part of an existing school as maybe a school-within-a-school, or as a new curriculum morphing the school it is a part of into something like a mission or magnet school. He said organizers were excited not to have to go about the arduous process of putting together a brand-new school.

And then there’s the third school. Burnley said the idea of morphing the proposal for the Boreal Academy of Science and Art into some kind of a magnet school is also on the table.

Organizer Laura Wick, who teaches at Cottonwood Creek Elementary and said the curriculum for the new school is based on her experience as a teacher, said she is open to that.

“But we do want to keep the charter application on the table,” she said.

For his part, Burnley said he did not recommend Boreal become a charter school. He said the application was not fully developed and it was not clear what the organizers were trying to create.

“That doesn’t mean that it might not be ready in the future and be more greatly fleshed out,” he said.

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