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State education officials are opposing the opening of two charter schools in a pair of Long Island districts — even though students there are struggling academically.
Education Department staffers have urged the Board of Regents — the state’s education-policy-making board — to reject a bid to open the proposed Academy Charter School in Wyandanch and the South Shore Charter School in Central Islip.
The proposed charters say they are all about offering students and parents a choice in a clearly failing system.
But district administrators and the teachers’ union say financial resources should be kept focused on existing schools — and state Education Department officials are siding with them.
The department’s position “is based on significant community opposition to the proposed schools, and the inability to make the required findings that granting the application is likely to improve student learning and achievement,” wrote Jim Baldwin, its senior deputy chancellor for K-12 education, in his recommendation to the Regent trustees.
Pushed by the department, the Regents’ pre-K-to-grade-12 committee recently voted against both proposed charters, and the full board is not expected to defy the panel’s decision at its meeting Tuesday.
If the board rejects the plans, that would kick the proposals back to the State University of New York’s Charter School Board of Trustees, which has the legal right under state law to authorize new charter schools and recommended approval of the two Long Island schools.
The SUNY board is mulling whether to overrule state education officials and back the charters, one of its trustees said.
The Charter Academy in Wyandach, a proposed K-to-6 school, would offer a longer school day from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and after-school programs until 5 p.m., said founder Barrington Goldson, who operates two other charter schools in Hempstead and Uniondale on the island.
Students would also be offered five weeks of study during the summer as well as instruction during winter break. Goldson said about 75 percent of the students at Charter Academy’s two existing schools attend summer classes.
“We are quite surprised by the opposition. It’s a last-minute attempt to keep the status quo in Wyandanch,” Goldson said, adding, “It would be unfair not to offer students and parents a chance and a choice.”
Students in the Wyandanch Union Free School District have an average math proficiency score of 28 percent and reading proficiency score of 32 percent, both more than 20 percentage points below the statewide average, according to recent state data.
The South Shore Charter School proposed for Central Islip also would offer a longer school day and have a curriculum that would emphasize “character education,” said founder and Executive Director Dermoth Mattison.
Recent data show that only 36 percent of students in the Central Islip Union Free School District are proficient in both math and reading, both well below statewide averages.
“The response from the community was overwhelmingly supportive,” Mattison said.
But the head of the Wyandanch school district, Superintendent Gina Talbert, said she doesn’t want competition from a charter school, which is privately managed and publicly funded.
Her district is currently monitored by a fiscal watchdog appointed by the state because of money issues.
“It cannot be overstated that the district’s financial resources must be reinvested in our school system, rather than siphoned to an education corporation at the expense of our scholars,” she said in a statement.
“If the Wyandanch Free School District is to continue to prosper, the proposed charter school application must be denied.”
Among the opponents to the South Shore Charter School in Central Islip were Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the NAACP and Assemblyman Phil Ramos.
But charter-school advocates said they’re heard these arguments before — and it basically comes down to the fact that the educational establishment doesn’t want to give poor and working-class families who can’t afford private education options outside the traditional public-school system.
Still, more charter-friendly SUNY officials say they might give the two alternative schools the green light to open over the objections of the Board of Regents.
Joseph Belluck, a trustee who is chairman of SUNY’s charter-school committee, said, “The Board of Regents has shown that they don’t care about the law, the facts or providing quality seats to kids in failing school districts.
“The Regents have made clear to parents that they don’t want any more charter schools anywhere in New York State — period,” he said.
“We don’t think the Board of Regents has the authority to reject these charters,” he said.
A state law that imposes a cap on charter-school schools has blocked the growth of the popular alternative schools among parents and kids in New York City.
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