District battles charter school plan

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District has launched a campaign against a proposed charter school within its boundaries, asking district employees and parents to send letters to the county calling for the plan’s rejection.

In January, the Newport-Mesa school board turned down a proposal for the Orange County Academy, a charter campus that would have been the first in the district’s history, citing problems with the curriculum. The founders submitted a plan for a school that would involve home-schooling and classroom instruction every week, with parents teaching much of the state-standards curriculum to their children.

Following the school board’s rejection, the academy founders appealed their case to the Orange County Department of Education, which plans to rule on the matter on April 17. In the meantime, Newport-Mesa officials are seeing to it that the county hears their side of the story. On Wednesday, the district began sending e-mails to parents, teachers and other school employees urging them to give the appeal a thumbs-down.

“It is our responsibility to inform people about the challenges we’re facing,” said Susan Astarita, Newport-Mesa’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We believe that it’s not a sound petition, that it’s not a match for Newport-Mesa. We’re not anti-charter at all, but we believe this program is not a match.”

Astarita estimated that about 75 people had heeded the district’s call and written to the county. Supt. Robert Barbot, school board president David Brooks, the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers and the District English Learner Advisory Committee are among those who have sent letters.

Petitioners for the academy expressed dismay at the district’s campaign, saying that Newport-Mesa was wrongly rejecting their school’s plan because it didn’t want to pay for an extra campus.

“It’s so disingenuous,” said Dan Adelseck, vice president of the academy board. “They’re trying to make up issues when there’s only one issue out there, and that’s the financial issue. It’s a disinformation campaign in a lot of ways.”

Since Newport-Mesa is a basic-aid district ? one funded largely by taxpayer money rather than state funds ? local residents would have to foot part of the bill for a charter school. In a letter to district staffers on Wednesday, administrative assistant Laura Boss claimed that the academy would cost Newport-Mesa’s general fund $13 million over the first three years.

Of the nearly 200 signatures that the academy listed on its petition, only around half a dozen were from Newport-Mesa residents.

The California Education Code lists a number of grounds on which a district can reject a charter school proposal, but cost is not one of them.

When the Newport-Mesa board turned down the Orange County Academy in January, it cited a number of shortcomings in the proposal, saying the plan did not specify how the school would combine home and on-site instruction or how parents would be trained to teach state standards.

“The whole structure of the curriculum is one major concern because nothing was given to us that would reflect what we would have expected of our own programs in the last six, seven years,” Barbot said. “Our community, which is very conservative, has demanded that accountability.”

The Orange County Academy, which the petitioners presented to Newport-Mesa in December, has a number of prominent supporters. The state awarded the founders a $180,000 start-up grant for an earlier version of their proposal, while Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor, U.S. Rep. John Campbell, state Sens. Bill Morrow and Dick Ackerman and others have vowed support for an Orange County charter school.

How much support the charter school has in the local education community, though, is unclear. Michele Graham, the president of the Harbor Council Parent Teacher Assn., said she had written to all Newport-Mesa PTA presidents asking them to fight the appeal. So far, she said, the responses she had gotten had sided with the district.

“There are a lot of parents out there, and I can’t speak to them all,” she said.

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