An online charter school travels south Georgia in search of rejection

June 17, 2011, by Maureen Downey, AJC

I spoke this week with Monica Henson, head of Provost Academy Georgia, a virtual public charter high school that ls due to open in the fall with at least 400 students from around the state.

The irrepressible Henson is in the midst of a journey through south Georgia in search of rejection. And as the song goes, ?"What a long, strange trip it's been."

Henson was at one south Georgia board meeting Monday nightm where she could not get on the agenda, and then rushed to another the next day only to discover it had been canceled, but she did get to chat with the superintendent.

But still, nobody has rejected her. And that's a problem.

Backed by EdisonLearning, Provost Academy is one of 16 Georgia charter schools whose futures were cast in doubt by the recent state Supreme Court ruling that a Legislature-created commission to approve charter schools was illegal because the power belongs solely to local boards of education.

So, most of those 16 schools are rushing to their local boards of education for approval and funding. But, of the 15,644 affected students in the 16 charters, 10,000 of them would be taking classes virtually through online schools, most at the already operating Georgia Cyber Academy. But there were two new online schools planning to open, including Provost.

Since virtual schools are statewide and cannot apply to a single school board for approval and funding, their situation is more complicated. Because of their statewide enrollments, they can't ask a single local school system to adopt and fund them, as the Museum School of Avondale and Peachtree Hope Charter successfully did in DeKalb Monday.

Instead, the virtuals have to petition the state Board of Education for a charter. State board approval will allow Provost to open but at reduced funding as state board schools only earn state funding. They get no local dollars for their students.

But here's the catch that sent Henson to south Georgia. Before her school can appeal to the state board, Provost has to be rejected by a local board of education. That rule was created when charter schools were brick and mortar schools in specific communities; the rule is an ill fit for burgeoning online schools with students from dozens of districts.

"The law hasn't caught up to the technology," said Henson, speaking from her car.

Since Provost had to get a rejection quickly, Henson chose south Georgia districts that did not have deadlines precluding charter school applications now and applied to them. (Provost was too late to get into the pipeline for rejection by a metro school system, which have strict deadlines.)

But none of the districts will put her and her school on the agenda to be rejected, which frustrated Henson since it was just a matter of a quick board vote and involved no costs to the systems. The problem, she says, is that the school districts eyed her with suspicion and thought she was coming south to recruit their students for her online school.

And Henson says the systems may have been fed that notion by an e-mail sent by the Georgia School Superintendents Association.

So, I called Herb Garrett of the Georgia School Superintendents Association about her concerns. Garrett said the south Georgia systems did call with questions as they were unfamiliar with the charter school process since few of them have charter schools and don't address charter schools in their policies, which is why they didn't have any concrete deadlines on applications.

"They received this petition that asked them to vote on it in a few days," he said. "They had no idea what it was about. It wasn't clear that she was looking for a denial."

Garrett said that a quick denial could have labeled these districts "anti-charter." He told them that if they did nothing with the petition, the state would treat their inaction as a denial after 60 days. So now, Henson is asking the state Board of Education to approve Provost at its meeting next week pending the 60-day waiting period.

So Provost still expects to open in late August, or, at the latest, early September. (As an online school, it has a bit more latitude in its opening date and plans to operate 200-days a year.)

To cope with the decreased funding, Henson said the school has increased the student-teacher ratio and put off hiring an administrator. (She has preserved the student-adviser ratio, says Henson.)

Henson hopes that Provost may be eligible for grants set aside in Georgia for STEM schools. (STEM refers to science, technology, engineering and math.) Provost will offer two dozen STEM electives, and it will require its students to take at least two of those electives ? one top of the Georgia science requirements ? to graduate.

?from Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog