The Alaska State Board of Education on Wednesday delayed a vote on whether to approve a Fairbanks charter school application that’s been ensnared in controversy.
The item appeared on the agenda carrying the baggage of an appeal process that’s put the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District’s board at odds with the state education commissioner. Now, both supporters and opponents of the Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School must wait longer to find out what’s next for the application. (STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math.)
The move to postpone the decision came at the start of the second day of the state education board’s meeting in Juneau.
“After discussing the matter in executive session yesterday, the board has determined that we need additional time to properly consider the matter of Pearl Creek charter school before voting,” Board Chair Sally Stockhausen said.
Stockhausen said they would hold additional discussions on the topic, vote on it during a confidential meeting and issue a final written decision no later than April 29. The board then removed the vote on the item from the meeting agenda.
Proponents of the charter school say the STEAM model would bring an innovative education option to Fairbanks and attract more students to enroll in the district. The academic policy committee backing the application wants to run Pearl Creek out of a former Fairbanks North Star Borough School District elementary school building. Also called Pearl Creek, the elementary school was recently closed as a downsizing and cost-saving measure.
The governor-appointed state board’s decision will cap off a closely watched appeal process that could buck the locally-elected board’s unanimous vote from last year that rejected the application. Writing in a 52-page decision, the school board for the Fairbanks district concluded after lengthy meetings that the proposed charter school “could fail entirely.” The local board also noted it would cost the district an estimated $2.8 million to open the school.
The academic policy committee appealed the denial in November to Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop. Bishop’s office sided with the committee, with a 28-page letter in January saying the local board expected too much detail in the application and had no legal justification to turn it down.
That left the question as to what state board of education members would do. Their decision counts as the final agency action on the application, though there could be a further appeal to the court system.
The school dominated public comment Wednesday, despite the state board opting to postpone: 17 people spoke on the topic, the majority of whom, like Jennifer Redmond, were in support. Redmond is the treasurer for the Pearl Creek committee.
“At the end of the day, this is about families with children ready to move forward with a truly grassroots, homegrown public school option,” she said.
Some supporters of the school said the district can afford the charter and pointed to an audit that recently showed the district had more than $11 million in savings above a threshold established by borough code. Supporters also accused the board and district of stonewalling and failing to engage in good faith on the charter application.
“As a group of parents that worked hard on this, that did every single thing, that have really, almost desperately, sought collaboration with our district: If we can’t open a charter school, it means that nobody can,” said April Monroe, another member of the academic policy committee.
The comments weren’t entirely in favor of the proposed Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School. Sarah Lewis, a Pearl Creek parent for 10 years, said opening a new school after the board spent so much time and effort deciding on school closures in recent years doesn’t make sense. She also defended the local school board’s work on the application.
“They’re outstanding citizens, dedicated to their role in public service, and they’ve each endured a lot of abuse and ad hominem attacks – and have kept working,” she said.
The appeal process that led up to Wednesday’s meeting is relatively new. It was implemented by an omnibus education bill passed by the legislature and signed into law by then-Gov Sean Parnell in 2014. The bill amended state statute to allow academic policy committees to appeal local denial of charter applications to the commissioner’s office before the applications head to the state board. That option had not been available previously.
At a joint hearing of the Senate and House education committees in 2014, legislators questioned then-state Education Commissioner Mike Hanley about what would lead a commissioner to recommend overturning a local board.
“I think really what it would come down to, and I can speak for myself and I think I would also like to think I’m speaking for future commissioners, in that if a local school board made a decision based on fact and substance of law, and it was a fair decision, that would be upheld,” he said.
In a position statement sent to the state board before Wednesday’s meeting, the district took issue with Bishop’s role in the appeal. The statement says the commissioner “undermined the authority of the locally-elected School Board by rubberstamping an application that the School Board had appropriately found should not be approved.”
Pearl Creek’s Academic Policy Committee sent a letter to the state board arguing the opposite, calling the commissioner’s review “detailed” and saying the appeal process “functioned as intended.”
The committee wants to open Pearl Creek STEAM next school year. At an estimated roughly 350 students, it would be the biggest charter school in the Fairbanks school district.