Things are happening fast in the dispute over Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School, and the feud between its backers and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District could soon get a glance from the Alaska Supreme Court with the next school year just a couple months out.
So, will students be walking into Pearl Creek in the fall, as its supporters planned? Right now, Bobby Burgess, the district’s board president, doesn’t think so.
“It seems unlikely, based on the timeline,” he said.
Jennifer Redmond, the treasurer for the Pearl Creek’s Academic Policy Committee, has a different answer to that question, though still an uncertain one.
“We still have teachers lined up ready to apply to jobs. We have curriculum vendors. We have, you know, the facility underway,” she said. “We’re proceeding as best we can to make sure we’re open this fall, until we receive news otherwise.”
It’s been a whirlwind of a week in the dispute. A Fairbanks Superior Court judge denied a motion for preliminary injunction Wednesday in a legal setback for the embattled charter school after a lengthy hearing that saw five people provide testimony. The ruling blocked a request that sought to force the school district to move to open Pearl Creek in August, but attorneys for the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development and the academic policy committee are now petitioning the state Supreme Court for emergency review.
The back and forth in court comes after the state board in April overturned the local school board’s denial of the Pearl Creek charter application. The district in May then appealed the state approval in Alaska Superior Court.
In the motion for preliminary injunction, Pearl Creek’s committee had asked the Superior Court judge to order the district to execute a contract with the 350-student school, arguing the district is delaying the process to illegally foil plans to get things up and running by August. The Fairbanks school district disagreed, and its attorneys wrote in their opposition that the proposed relief would “unlawfully direct the District to take action to its detriment.”
At the six-hour evidentiary hearing Tuesday on the preliminary injunction request, Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Kirk Schwalm said it appears the case is the first of its kind in the state. He said that’s bringing new questions to the court system.
“This is not very simple. You’re talking about a completely – a process that has never before been in the courts in the state of Alaska, to the court’s knowledge, with a level of review and deference that four attorneys sitting in this room, ’cause I’m an attorney myself, probably can’t agree on,” he said.
In his order denying Pearl Creek’s motion the next day, Schwalm wrote that the charter school’s argument didn’t meet the standards for a preliminary injunction. He said those injunctions generally preserve the status quo, and sided with the district by saying the status quo is an unopened school, not the steps it would take to carry out the state board’s approval.
The judge also said there wasn’t evidence that demonstrated “irreparable harm” to the charter school if it didn’t get an initial ruling in its favor, and he wrote that Pearl Creek hadn’t shown probable success on the merits of the case more broadly, in which the parties are at odds about agency decisions on the school’s application.
In an apparent stab at the existing legal landscape, Schwalm wrote that it isn’t even clear what constitutes permissible reasons to deny or grant a charter application. He said in a footnote that the applicable statutes and regulations are “void of any command such as ‘may approve’ or ‘shall approve’ and are similarly void of any elements or factors to guide decision making.”
Burgess said the local school board is pleased with the ruling, but that it doesn’t change some of the underlying concerns in the appeal to the court, which is ongoing.
“The issue here goes beyond a single school, goes beyond the opening of a charter school or the closure of neighborhood schools. The issue here is one of whether local governance is actually going to be a thing,” he said, citing the locally elected school board’s unanimous vote last year denying the charter application.
For Pearl Creek’s part, Redmond said the preliminary injunction denial was disappointing, but she also says what the committee sees as the bigger issue remains unresolved.
“The question is really not whether Pearl Creek exists,” she said. “The question is whether it will be treated the same as other approved public charter schools.”
Schwalm’s Wednesday order didn’t go unchallenged for long. Counsel for the state board of education and Pearl Creek quickly filed with the state Supreme Court Thursday, seeking a fast-tracked review of the lower court’s decision on the preliminary injunction. The petition asks for an answer from the state’s top court by Monday, saying staff for the school must be hired by June 30 if it’s to operate come August.
Meanwhile, Deena Bishop, the commissioner for the state education department, last week threatened to withhold funds from Fairbanks public schools if the district doesn’t move to open Pearl Creek.
The June 10 letter, addressed to FNSBSD Superintendent Luke Meinert, cited Alaska statute to say her department could redirect funds for the district if it doesn’t comply with state law. She requested that the district immediately confirm that it will follow a statute that says a district “shall operate the charter school” after state board approval.
“Failure to do so will put the district’s funding at risk. Time is of the essence,” Bishop wrote.
In a response issued Thursday, Meinert said the district has a right to judicial review and that Bishop’s letter misinterprets the law, pointing to a requirement that a charter school have a contract before it can operate.
“This threatened action of withholding funding is difficult to reconcile with DEED’s stated mission of ‘an excellent education for every student every day,’” Meinert also wrote.
Outside the courts and the state correspondence, the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly is also considering whether to authorize borough administration to enter into a lease agreement with the charter school committee for a facility. The committee wants to use the former home of Pearl Creek Elementary, a neighborhood school that the local school board voted to close last year as a cost-saving and downsizing measure.
The Assembly ordinance was introduced and advanced at a special Assembly meeting Thursday night. It’s now set to head to a special Assembly Finance Committee meeting next week, followed by a public hearing and final vote on July 1.
According to the FNSBSD’s academic calendar, the first day of school is Aug. 18.