tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6534665086749553287.post6664128650589814886..comments2024-03-28T11:57:21.902-04:00Comments on CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Charter Transparency FailPeter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6534665086749553287.post-19868422487644511842017-07-01T20:24:40.606-04:002017-07-01T20:24:40.606-04:0012 years ago, we were unschooling our kindergarten...12 years ago, we were unschooling our kindergarten aged son when some parents from the local home-school group told my wife about a new charter school our local district had just chartered that was designed for "individualized learning". But nobody in the community seemed to know about it except the few families whose children "attended" the school. They offered violin rental and lessons for kids who were signed up, which was unheard of in our little town, so my wife went to check it out. <br />The "school" was in an elaborately furnished office space in the back of a furniture store rented from the founder's husband, who owned the store. (Wanna guess where the furnishings were bought?) My wife wanted to know more about the school, so she asked for information, but was side-stepped. She asked to see the charter, but was told she could not. She asked to attend a board meeting, but was told she could not. Because of Wisconsin charter school law at the time, they were subject to open-records laws, but the handful of insider families kept stonewalling my wife until she forced their hand by getting the state Department of Public Instruction involved.<br />We finally signed our son up to tap into the violin lessons and began a year of enlightenment. The whole operation turned out to be a front for funneling public tax dollars to the home-school operations of 4 or 5 families. The "teacher" was the young 20-something daughter-in-law of the founder, who had never taught and had a El. Ed. degree from a tiny religious school nobody ever heard of. Her entire role was to "provide licensed supervision" of the various moms who were homeschooling their kids using religious home-school curricula purchased with taxpayer dollars. <br />About this time, an atheist family who was also unschooling their family moved into town and got to know us. They expressed an interest in the violin lessons and got involved. Unfortunately for the "school", the mom was an attorney and strongly pushed back on their separation of church and state problem. They established a kind of money-laundering scheme of reciprocal donations with the church they all attended and just kept going as usual. <br />The atheist family sent their kids to public school and lost interest. My son was expelled from the school at the end of the year because my wife turned in his learning portfolio two days late. <br />We received a letter out of the blue from the founder telling us that he had been expelled. We pointed out that, by law, we would have to have been notified and been allowed to bring legal representation to the expulsion hearing. They didn't even know there had to be a hearing. We asked for a copy of the minutes of the meeting at which this expulsion was decided upon. After much hem-hawing around, it turns out that the founder and her daughter had just decided on their own. We asked for an explanation of which school policy had been violated and how we were to have known that the penalty would be expulsion, since there was no mention of this whatsoever in any information we had ever gotten from the "school". About a month later, they drafted a "family handbook" that included specific mention that the penalty for late progress reports "might include penalties up to expulsion, at the discretion of the board". They didn't even bother to back-date it to before my son was expelled, but they applied it to him retroactively.<br /><br />How could this go on in a public charter school that was supposed to be overseen by the school district? Guess whose best buddy was the superintendent of schools? Welcome to small-town life.Dave Eckstromhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13521336850803352134noreply@blogger.com