The Senate Committee on Education heard hours of testimony Wednesday on a bill that would remove limits on the number of publicly funded charter schools allowed in the state of Wisconsin and for the number of students allowed to enroll.
Authored by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, and Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, Burlington, the bill would allow any of the 12 cooperative educational service agencies – public agencies serving as a link between school districts and the state superintendent – to establish a charter school.
“State law has thrown unnecessary roadblocks in the path of some charter school proposals,” Darling, a former teacher, said in a statement. “This bill will help charter schools educate more children.”
But not everyone who testified agreed.
“If we expand charters, we’ll have to pay more money and we’ll lose students,” Pat Schmidt, a 35-year Wautoma music teacher told committee members. “I have 100 students sing in our Christmas program and there are 400 people in the audience. If the school goes away, the town goes away as well.”
John Sheller, who spent 15 years on the Montello school board and served as president for seven of those years, said the 750-student district had done everything it could to deal with state cuts to education.
“It looked like we might survive,” Sheller said. “Then Senate Bill 22 came.”
The bill would also create a Charter School Authorizing Board in which nine politically appointed members would authorize new charter schools. Three members each would be chosen by the governor and Assembly and Senate leaders. But no more than two appointees for each lawmaker could be of the same party and no member could serve more than two terms.
“Independent, politically appointed committee would not have the skills or knowledge to determine the validity of a charter schools application,” Madison school board member Marjorie Passman said.
Some of the testimony heard by the committee came from current charter school administrators who balanced the criticism from teachers of public schools.
Ted Hamm runs two charter schools in the Sheboygan school district that enroll 273 students in total. He said, contrary to testifiers claiming charter schools have no oversight, his schools had many safeguards and is in favor of the standards implemented in the bill.
“I have to present the school board with test results from my two schools. We publicly post school meetings,” Hamm said. “We take public input. Everyone takes a part in this and if they’re not working, we shut them down. There’s a clear process for that.”
Dr. Robert Morelan, superintendent of the 21st Century Preparatory School in Racine, told the committee on education that his charter school’s makeup is 68 percent minority students.
“We are closing the achievement gap for African-American children,” Morelan said. “African-American eighth graders in math are achieving at the proficient and advanced levels and are above state and Racine Unified School District averages.”
Morelan added that 60 percent of his students receive free or reduced lunch and 20 percent of students are challenged either physically or mentally. Earlier, a special education teacher from Middleton questioned whether charter schools could provide for special needs pupils.
The caption for this photo initially stated the cookies were baked by charter school students. In actuality they were baked by a public school teacher. We regret the error.
