Supporters try again for charter school for MacDill Air Force Base

A group that backed an earlier effort to open a charter school at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base is back – this time with a retooled application intended to address an issue at the heart of its rejection by the Hillsborough County School Board late last year.

The new application, submitted Thursday afternoon, calls for a school of up to 875 students in grades K-8. It would be aimed at the thousands of students whose parents work on the base but may live in school zones farther away. Its programs would be tailored to the needs of military families, who have to cope with combat deployments and frequent moves.

Under the revised plan, the proposed MacDill Charter Academy would be overseen by a local organization of the same name. The previous proposal, which the school board rejected, called for a local advisory board, but the school would have been governed by an organization based in Fort Lauderdale.

“Our local board was an advisory board and they had some concern about that, so we have corrected that,” said Stephen Mitchell, chairman of the MacDill Charter Academy. “Our local board is no longer the advisory board. It is the board.”

After supporters withdrew their initial application, the Hillsborough school district began raising questions about the governance of three other schools that, like the proposed MacDill charter, are run by Charter Schools USA.

This week, around the same time the new application was being submitted, the district again began raising questions about the schools’ governing boards in letters obtained by a local TV station and later the Tampa Bay Times.

Perhaps the timing is purely a coincidence. District officials have not responded to a request for comment.

The district is threatening to terminate the three schools’ charters, citing a provision of the state charter school law that reads, simply, “The governing body of the charter school shall exercise continuing oversight over charter school operations.”

The schools contend they have met those obligations, and they could challenge the charter terminations in a formal hearing if the district tries to follow through. But spokeswoman Colleen Reynolds said the schools had not received the letters and only saw them because they were published in the media.

The district will vet the new MacDill application in a separate process. If the new school is allowed to open next year, Mitchell said the children of military families would be given a preference in school admissions, which state law allows.

If it’s approved, the MacDilll charter would be the eighth located at an American Air Force Base.

Supporters of the new school point to studies that show the typical millitary student changes schools six to nine times before finishing high school.

Mitchell said that, along with the difficulty of seeing their parents deployed oversees, helps explain the support for the proposal among families at the base. It also suggests there should be more schools designed to meet the needs of military children.

“There aren’t that many charter schools on bases,” he said, “but actually I think there should be.”