A large charter school network argues a bid by a South Florida school district to challenge state appeals for charter applications is “entirely political.”
In a legal twist that stems from the Palm Beach County School Board’s attempts to limit the growth of charter schools, Renaissance Charter School Inc. is defending the Florida Board of Education’s authority in legal briefs filed this week.
In Florida, the state board decides appeals from charters if local school boards reject their applications. The school district argues that violates the state constitution, which gives school boards the exclusive power to oversee all public schools in their geographic area.
Courts have rejected laws that allowed a state commission to authorize charter schools. But they have also upheld the state’s charter school appeals system. If a charter school wins an appeal before the state board, it still has to negotiate a charter contract with the local school board that attempted to reject it. The Palm Beach school district, however, argues an earlier appellate court ruling upholding the appeals process was “mistaken in its thinking that the State Board of Education did not usurp control of public (charter) schools.”
Lawyers for Renaissance, a nonprofit network affiliated with the management company Charter Schools USA, counter the state board’s role is simply to make sure school boards follow the law, which requires them to reject charter school applications “with cause.”
The Florida Legislature has made the choice, through the charter appeal process, that it wants the State Board of Education to review school board charter application decisions to maintain uniformity of standards throughout the State and to provide some check on local school boards’ attempts to thwart the rise in competition from charter public schools (as happened here). The Legislature was right, given the openly lawless conduct exhibited by the School Board here, not to let the fox guard that henhouse.
The Palm Beach school district touched off the ongoing legal saga when it created a new requirement. Charter schools that applied to open in the district had to show they were “innovative” and different from existing public schools. Charter school operators argued the term was self-serving and intended to block them from opening new schools.
The district has twice used the rule to block prospective schools backed by Charter Schools USA-affiliated nonprofits. In both cases, the state charter school appeals commission supported the school, finding the school board did not have grounds to reject the charter application, and the state Board of Education agreed.
The district is challenging both of those appeals, and the state process in its entirety, in two cases before the Fourth District Court of Appeal. National charter school groups have weighed in.
The legal fight, meanwhile, has spilled into a series of rule challenges before the state’s Division of Administrative Hearings, where the charter school organizations are fighting a revised version of the district’s “innovative” requirement. The district argues, among other things, that the charter groups don’t have legal standing to challenge the rule.
In the years since the district adopted its rule, there’s been a general slowdown of charter school applications in Florida. In Palm Beach County, district schools are growing faster than charters for the first time in years.
