Charter school seeks waiver

MAT-SU -- Midnight Sun Family Learning Center has earned a name for itself through staff who approach education in a different direction. Now they're asking the assembly to think in new ways about school construction.

In its seventh year of operation, Midnight Sun has 108 students in its kindergarten through 12th-grade school. It's a Socratic-method program in which classes are multi-age, parental involvement is encouraged and the education program is rigorous. The school has, since its inception, been housed at the B&J Rainbow Center near Pittman Road off the Parks Highway -- a site school officials say they are outgrowing. The community around it is growing as well, and school officials say safety concerns and traffic issues at the mall make the location less than desirable for students.

"It's not built to be a school," Midnight Sun teacher Jeanne Troshynsky said. In previous borough meetings, she has testified to some of the problems at the school -- area residents speeding through the parking lot, a few instances in which vagrants were sleeping near the school entrance and several others. Many people simply don't realize there's a school at the mall, she said at a recent Mat-Su Borough meeting.

Funding for a new school was included in the list of bond projects voters considered in October. But the package that included funding for the charter schools was not approved and, in a Nov. 6 e-mail update of the ongoing site selection projects, a school district employee said the project to expand the school "may be dead altogether," adding that the failed bond may mean the school must continue in the B&J Rainbow Center indefinitely.

But school officials think otherwise. The bond package, Troshynsky said, was a route prescribed by the Mat-Su Borough School District administration when Midnight Sun officials brought up an idea to build the school privately, using a design/build mechanism that would allow them to lease the facility.

When the bond package didn't pass, the center's governing board vowed to establish a permanent site and set about finding how to best build it, and Troshynsky said they didn't take the vote personally.

"Four thousand people voted for us," Troshynsky said. In calling people to encourage a favorable vote, she said she was shocked at how many voters didn't know what charter schools were or thought they were private schools. While the bond money may have been nice, she said, it'll be a good exercise to see if charter schools can stand on their own without added support. "Maybe in the end, it's a better way anyway, because we can show we can be viable without having to tap into that."

A building committee was set up, and members recently visited Chinook Montessori Charter School in Fairbanks -- a design/build project currently funded by lease payments through the school's per-student state allocation. School officials returned energized about the project and set about a similar plan. They came up with a list of criteria that would give the school a 16,500-square-foot facility on a five-acre site.

The lease -- estimated at about $250,000 a year -- would be paid as the rest of the charter school's costs are paid, directly from the state per-student allocation. Their goal is to have a new school by September and, true to Midnight Sun's history, they've got a rigorous schedule to help them reach it.

The problem is, that rigorous schedule doesn't fit in existing Mat-Su Borough Code, and would require a waiver to move forward. And, although the matter was discussed at Tuesday's Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting, assembly members weren't ready to approve a waiver just yet.

"Maybe I'm the only one at the table who thinks it requires a more involved fix," Assembly Member Jody Simpson said. "I'm not so sure it's just a simple waiver from the lease process."

As the assembly spiraled into discussion, their initial intent was to hold a special meeting to introduce an ordinance that would allow an exemption. The more the topic was discussed, however, the more other assembly members felt the legal aspects of the proposal merited more than a rushed consideration.

"I don't understand the urgency of time," Assembly Member Bill Allen said. "They want to be in the position to put students in their school and advertise the school this fall, but I'd caution against hurrying this up without due diligence. I don't like to make exceptions in the first place. I'm not going to be in any support of any shortcuts."

Assembly Member Jim Colver suggested that the charter school may have waited long enough for a resolution to their problem.

"Let's look at the track record and how we've performed so far," Colver said. "They asked for a site selection committee, and it's been months and months … now they have one, but it still hasn't been appointed. That'll be another month. We've been dragging our feet in getting this site selection going -- I'm afraid if we delay this much longer, they're going to end up in that strip mall again next year."

"But you guys keep forgetting that we do have an obligation to do this openly and publicly," Anderson interjected. "And all of this is happening because the bonds failed -- the people spoke."

Mat-Su Borough Clerk Sandra Dillon explained what would be needed to meet the borough's advertising deadline -- an introduction would have had to be filed by Wednesday, with a complete ordinance ready by Friday. When assembly members discussed the matter further and agreed that was too little time to come up with a well-thought-out proposal, Mat-Su Borough Manager John Duffy suggested suspending any further decisions until he had time to discuss the matter further with charter school officials to iron out exactly what they were requesting.

Troshynsky said a meeting took place Thursday, and she believes the process is headed in the right direction, although she believes the project won't likely be wrapped up until December, instead of the hoped-for September opening.

"It is [delayed], but that's okay," Troshynsky said. "We probably won't get into a new facility until Dec. 1, but maybe we'll start the fall with double-shifting classes … We can do that, if the end is in sight, but the hard part is, right now, we really don't know."

The charter school is in a quandry, Troshynsky said. With 108 students and, as of last year, a reduced per-student allocation, they have as many students as the site can hold, but they're not bringing in as much money as they would like. The school's target goal is about 160 students -- the number at which the per-student allocation for a school jumps slightly.

"We, as a school, stated we wanted to be a small school. Part of our success is due to being a small school," Troshynsky told the assembly Tuesday. "We want to get to 166 to have financial success, to make the school financially feasible, but we don't want to get too big."