Parents turn to charter schools for all kinds of reasons, and it’s not always because they want something different. Witness what’s happening right now in Broward County, Fla.
As highlighted by this fascinating story from the Miami Herald, a group of parents in Broward, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, are pushing for a charter school conversion as a way to save their district-run school, which they fear will be closed in the coming years.
In Broward, the district last year announced the closure of Wingate Oaks and another special-needs school — in the name of efficiency. The district had six specialized learning centers and argued that consolidating them into four would allow students to get expanded services and, in the end, a better education.
One center, Sunset school, was indeed shut down. But the district postponed closing Wingate Oaks after parents made impassioned arguments against the relocations, which in some cases would force medically fragile children to endure bus rides of more than an hour to get to school. Some students are in wheelchairs; others need help going to the bathroom. Parent David Martinez’s daughter gets her nourishment through a feeding tube.
“When you’re a parent of a child with a disability, it takes a while to earn trust,” Martinez said. The staff at Wingate had done that, he said, and then all of the sudden the district pulled the rug out.
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Postponing the closure did not placate the Wingate parents because Broward set the condition that no additional students would be allowed to enroll there. That set the stage for what parents call the school’s “slow death,” with a steady decline in resources and enrollment.
So the parents brainstormed and came up with the charter school proposal.
The article notes that charter school conversions are still rare. They’ve actually become increasingly rare as charter schools have proliferated around the state.
A database maintained by the state Department of Education lists 21 public schools that have been converted to charters over the years. But the vast majority of those happened more than nine years ago. The biggest wave of conversion charters opened during the 2004-05 school year, when five schools in Lake Wales converted to charters. At the time, Florida had about half as many charter schools overall as it does now.
The most recent charter conversion in the DOE database happened in 2006. But last year, a new charter conversion in Manatee County got a lot of attention, and was eventually overwhelmingly supported by parents and teachers alike.
In many ways, that effort mirrors the situation developing at the Broward special education center. Both cases involve parents seeking a charter conversion not because they are dissatisfied with the public school their children attend, or because they think the schools are “failing.” They’re seeking greater autonomy for their schools because they’re happy with them, and worried that troubled school district finances or impending budget cuts could threaten programs they hope to preserve.
The Herald flags what it calls the “irony” here. In some ways, these two recent charter conversion efforts turn some of the caricatures that emerged during the “parent trigger” debate of 2012 and 2013 on their heads.
That’s one reason the situation in Broward is worth following. The parents must submit their final proposal to the school board by Aug. 1.
