Calvert County’s denial of a charter to the Bay Arts & Sciences Public Charter School is a great loss to our community. The county’s first proposed charter school, the Bay Arts & Sciences Public Charter School would emphasize the natural history, social history, cultures and ecology of the Chesapeake Bay region.
The school has generated a great deal of excitement in the Calvert County community and beyond. Partnerships are already in place with local cultural institutions such as the Calvert Marine Museum and Jefferson Patterson Park, both of which agreed to host charter school students for extended teaching units. The curriculum, which features hands-on, discovery-based learning, has been hailed as “outstanding” by a team of educators and academic advisors. According to Princeton University’s William Westerman, “The genius of the Bay Arts & Sciences Public Charter School is that it employs the local as a textbook to be read, whether the history, the science, or the culture. By learning to see what is meaningful in the world around them, students will draw connections to the larger world. The campus will become a living laboratory for knowledge and discovery.”
The School Board’s decision suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how and
why charter schools are developed. First, one of the main concerns cited
by school officials was the lack of full financing for the charter school
facility, and the lack of a site. In fact, we do have a site – a 15-acre
property in Prince Frederick, Maryland – and we provided the School Board with
a copy of our contract to purchase this land. We also have completed schematic
design drawings for the school facility. Like most charter schools, however, we
must be granted a charter before we can secure financing. A national
charter financing company has agreed to work with us to arrange the $3 million
loan required to fund construction – with a significant portion loaned to us at below market
rates because they believe that our school has the potential for
excellence. Funds to outfit the school (charters are eligible for up to
$550,000 in start-up funds) are, similarly, contingent upon the charter.
Advisors from the Maryland Charter School Network who reviewed our application remarked that we have the most thorough and detailed budget they have ever seen. The school’s five-year budget projections and business plan were firm enough to convince a national charter school financing company that we could realistically secure a $3 million loan. Requiring us to have this financing in place – or to purchase land without the promise of a charter - is simply unrealistic.
Second, county school officials were concerned that the charter school’s emphasis on hands-on learning and student inquiry would not deliver the “core learning that must occur” to meet state standards. Here, we are baffled. Every aspect of our school’s curriculum is carefully matched to state learning goals, and our application provided detailed examples of individual teaching units and lesson plans keyed to specific state curriculum standards.
In its discussion of the proposed curriculum, the School Board document asserts that “One test of a curricular document is whether the classroom teacher can pick up that document and know what must be taught on Monday….” This, in a nutshell, may be the problem school officials have with our curriculum. In our school, the principal and interdisciplinary teams of teachers will have the freedom to decide what will be taught on a given Monday. We know that – like any public school - we must prepare our students to perform well on the state’s standardized tests (the MSA and HSA). But our road map for getting students there may be unfamiliar to public school officials.
The purpose of charter schools is to allow room for alternative road maps for education – to allow for innovation in how we approach our children’s schooling, because we know that one style of learning does not fit all young minds. The Bay Arts & Sciences Public Charter School offers a vision of a school where education is rigorous and yet flexible, and where creativity and self-directed learning are encouraged. There is ample research telling us that this is the way students learn best. Perhaps most important, Calvert County parents have told us that this is the kind of public school they want for their children. We remain deeply committed to bringing this opportunity to the students and families of Calvert County, and we will be appealing the School Board’s decision.
Karen S. Mittelman
Chair
Friends of the Bay Arts & Sciences Public Charter School